How Depeche Mode performed at the Primavera Sound Festival

The Primavera Sound music festival has ended in Barcelona. In addition to the grand concert of Depeche Mode and the sets of their colleagues of various calibers Igor Gavrilov appreciated its phenomenal interaction with the urban environment at the largest European festival.

Stretching two kilometers along the sea, the Primavera Sound festival town has venues ideally suited for all concert formats. There is a huge artificial grass festival field for stadium artists: Blur, Depeche Mode, Skrillex and Kendrick Lamar have performed here at the current festival. There is a large concert hall located in the same Barcelona’s Forum district of the Museum of Natural Sciences, Swans, John Cale and Laurie Anderson performed there. There are flat paved venues that house a food court, sponsorship pavilions, and two large stages that have hosted Ghost, Maneskin, and K-pop band Red Velvet, among others. There are industrial architectural style venues located in the yacht club area, under a huge solar panel, alternative intellectuals like Built To Spill and Shellac have performed here, and there is also a huge Boiler Room octagon. Several modest stages were located by the sea, and there was a solid lounge, disco and soft rock.

Thus, within three days, the viewer could get into several constructively different environments, into several different worlds – a traditional open-air, a futuristic industrial facility, a beach disco and a “sit-down” concert hall. And all for the price of one ticket. There was only a tent city – it is replaced by an extensive urban network of hotels and hostels.

It is also important that Primavera Sound is not only a lot of concerts of international stars. This is a huge number of Spanish and, in particular, Catalan artists. Chief among them was, of course, Rosalia, a global star who, a couple of years ago, could be found on the streets of Barcelona’s gangster Raval district. Today she is perhaps the most famous native of the city. But at the same time, on the territory of the festival town, in the trade and exhibition area, one could find pavilions of small Catalan record labels. The festival generally willingly provides space for independent local show business, and this makes it something more than a “millionaire star parade”. From the same row – the preface to the festival in the form of a free concert by Pet Shop Boys in the same area and concerts in clubs around the city.

Plus a rich music conference Primavera Pro, where, for example, you could listen to a lecture by Sparks band members Ron and Russell Mael, who had just released a new album. But then the viewer was guaranteed not to get to the concert of the most fashionable English band Black Country, New Road. Perhaps this is the main problem of such festivals: you will definitely miss someone great.

For example, those who went to a Depeche Mode concert were guaranteed to miss the industrial classics Swans, electronic legend Four Tet, and The Moldy Peaches, whose music helped New Yorkers cope with the trauma of 9/11 in the early 2000s.

But the Depeche Mode concert was not just a popular band’s festival concert. It was a concert in support of the first album recorded after the death of Andy Fletcher, as part of the first tour without Andy Fletcher. The first festival show of this tour. Depeche Mode is not very willing to perform at festivals. This is a group that forms a closed emotional field together with its fans. The British do not like to share these emotions with strangers, and on the large Primavera Sound field they also got a slot between rappers Baby Kim and Kendrick Lamar. But the energy radiated by the group was not affected in any way. 50 thousand spectators gathered on the field, who sang every song from beginning to end.

Depeche Mode guitarist and songwriter Martin Gore and frontman Dave Gan are 61 years old. But they worked out the entire standard set of fan-favorite figures, poses and techniques one hundred percent. Dave Gun twirled his fouettes like he did thirty years ago, and on “Never Let Me Down Again” signaled the fans to wave their arms in exactly the same decades-old ritual. Martin Gore, as expected, entered the solo number (this time it was the song “Home”) with a First Act guitar in the shape of a star. For the festival set, Depeche Mode reduced the standard program of the current tour by six songs, but did not touch the new songs released on the album “Memento Mori” (see “Kommersant” on March 24).

The song “World in My Eyes”, which the musicians dedicate to the memory of their deceased comrade Andy Fletcher, is also inviolable. The illustration for her performance was created, like all the video accompaniment of the tour, by a reliable partner of Depeche Mode, Anton Corbijn. On the screens – the face of Andy Fletcher, slowly, almost imperceptibly to the eye, changing during the song.

The most important, painful and, perhaps, not entirely ethical question: what has the band’s show lost with Fletcher’s death? The musicians lost a friend, but the group as a concert unit in the process of preparing the tour in support of “Memento Mori” at first glance became even stronger. Long-term session accompanists – drummer Christian Einer and keyboardist Peter Gordeno – work hard, and cameramen broadcasting the picture from the stage to the screens do not spare close-ups to emphasize their performing passion. Depeche Mode became even more like a car. It wasn’t that she didn’t have a soul at all. Not at all. However, earlier there was a participant in it who not so much “played parties” as personified the very idea of ​​a long-term, almost musketeer partnership. Andy Fletcher looked less like a rock star than his colleagues, he stood behind their backs and smiled, shading his friends with his not at all stellar charm. With his departure, the group lost a significant amount of humanity.

But nothing really happened to the songs. And when David Gan improvises with Peter Gordeno during “Enjoy the Silence” and when Martin Gore brings the instrument to ever more majestic sounds during “Personal Jesus”, there is no doubt that these songs will last forever.