This is not your standard music documentary. For a start, the ostensible subjects, Depeche Mode, are ignored by the film-makers; glimpsed only on videotapes of concerts or on magazine pages tacked to bedroom walls. This is about the fans: co-directors Jeremy Deller and Nick Abrahams travelled the globe to hear from a variety of Depeche Mode obsessives.
In Russia, "Dave Day" – lead singer Dave Gahan's birthday – coincides with the country's national military day, providing a ready-made excuse for a parade. In Germany, a couple explain how recreating Depeche Mode videos is their hobby. A veteran of Los Angeles's 1990 "Depeche Mode riot" explains how she never even got an autograph despite spending a night on the pavement.
For east Berliners in the late 1980s starved of access to western music, DM were a sudden blast of colour. One attendee of the band's 1988 performance behind the iron curtain tells us: "You could never see your posters alive, but suddenly, they were there on the stage, singing for you." Being a Depeche Mode fan during perestroika, it seems, was an instinctively radical political act.
Deller, a Turner prize-winning artist, and Abrahams, a music doc and promo specialist, have intelligently combined their skills, most clearly in an inspired opening sequence where non-Brits are asked to describe what they imagine Basildon, Depeche Mode's home town, to be. It's easy to snigger: "big parties and parades"; "quiet streets"; "small houses"; "mountains". But when we get to the Essex town, we get a sniff of what the band and their fans may have in common: people desperate to abolish quotidian dullness by any means. Even if it's just by waving their arms metronomically from side to side.
Screening tonight at various venues. Details: theposterscamefromthewalls.com/screenings/
