It's been something like 14 years since I last went to see a really big name in concert, that being Deep Purple on Summum stadium in Grenoble, France. Although I fully enjoyed that, somehow I've missed the big events since. Hmm. Anyway, Depeche Mode is one of my absolutely favorite bands, so it was high time to end the silence.
Some time ago I suddenly remembered that Depeche Mode is gonna play on Hartwall Areena in Helsinki. Once I had finally confirmed my arrival to Finland, it was time to see if I can still land a ticket to this particular event. To my delight there was quite bunch of them on sale in Huuto.net (sort of national Ebay in Finland), so I could even choose.
I got a seat pretty close to the stage -so, with bit of imagination, I could reach out and try to touch Dave =)
The Act
So, how it was in the end...? It was cool. Having never seen the guys live before, it struck me as a quite energetic act, although you can sense that Gahan is not youngest of men anymore. But he gave it his best effort and the audience really bought his show. That was probably the best part of the whole show to see how all of the audience was singing along, clapping and waving their hands to the music. It gave me somehow strange sense of community even though a was sitting in the middle of total strangers.
The sea of raised hands - Personal Jesus.The tunes were mostly the old faithful ones and included more or less all my favorites also. The band played pretty exactly two hours. The general mixing levels left me wanting bit more precision and the sync was also bit wavering time to time, but then again, it's supposed to be live act and not brain-surgery-level-perfection. Couple of the feed-backs I could have lived without, though. All in all, it was very entertaining experience and some of the melodies really rocked, like "Wrong" and "I Feel You". Some of the slower tempo ballads didn't fit so perfectly into the mix, but they gave nice breathers in between.
Wrong.It also looked good, albeit not really revolutionary new. The highlight of the set was humongous LED-screen with a half-sphere extension "bubble" in the top-middle. Both live-stream from 7 cameras and pre-designed videos (by Anton Corbijn) were projected to this surface during the show. Read the whole concept on manufacturer XL Video's press release.
They also had four movable trusses, which were sort of arc-shaped and hinged, so with chain-hoists they can be moved both vertically and bent in various angles within one unit. These trusses were equipped with six moving heads each. This you can see from the video clip below. (I'm so sorry about the dreadfully bad sound quality.) I was sitting on the side, so the stereo sound was probably far from perfect for me, but I imagine that the movement of the trusses looked cooler from this angle than from straight front =)
A little sampler of "I feel You"
-just for technical aspects, of course =)
Set list
In Chains
Wrong
Hole To Feed
Walking In My Shoes
It's No Good
A Question Of Time
Precious
World In My Eyes
Insight (sung by Martin)
Home
Miles Away / The Truth Is
Policy Of Truth
In Your Room
I Feel You
Enjoy The Silence
Never Let Me Down Again
Encore #1
Dressed In Black
Stripped
Behind The Wheel
Personal Jesus
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