I was a fan of DM in their early, Vince Clark and a little later days, but lost interest as they veered into the leather and studs period.
Sadly, the first hour of The Devout's set was mostly dirgey leather period songs that, especially with the singer's habit of shouting "Guildford!" and letting the crowd do far more than their fair share of the singing, merged into a mostly dull wall of morose music.
There were 3 people on the stage, two at the back behind synthesizers and a singer in a vest.
Musically, they sounded OK, although mostly the sound was coming from synthesizers, so one wonders how much they were actually doing live, but the 'singer' really wasn't that great. Even to my untrained ear, I could hear him clearly missing notes plenty of times, which might explain why he was so keen to shout at the audience and hold his mike out to them.
When I got home, I put on "A Broken Frame" and the difference in vocal quality between The Devout's front man and DM's was night and day. A stark contrast, for example, to the Cure tribute I'd seen a couple of months earlier.
For a couple of songs, one of the synthesizer players took the vocal lead and he had a far more tuneful voice to my ear.
I'll be honest, an hour in and I was seriously considering cutting my losses and heading home for an early night and a Bovril.
The performance wasn't great, the venue packed and oppressively hot for a November evening (There was a brief pause at one point as a young man had to be helped out after passing out, although it still didn't compare to the Summer night I'd seen Dave Wakeling's version of The Beat).
However, the last ten songs almost redeemed the evening for me.
Starting with DM's first single, "New Life", they rattled through a number of the livelier early songs, along with later hits such as "Everything Counts" and "Personal Jesus", which clearly enlivened the audience, rounding out with the iconic, but not universally loved by DM fans, "Just Can't Get Enough" (which went down a storm) and then the downbeat "Never Let Me Down Again" to finish off at which point I made my way to the welcome coolness of the evening.
It was apparent from walking in that The Devout have a strong following, but I didn't feel they lived up to the hype.
The main thing that I took from the evening, though, was that I have a narrow window of favourite DM songs and the later material, on the whole, is just not for me. If it is, you may well enjoy The Devout more than I did, plenty of people seemed to.
No photos or videos, it was far too crowded to get a decent line of sight - The one at the top is taken from The Devout's website
Setlist:
Black Celebration
Policy of Truth
World in My Eyes
A Question of Time
Sacred
Stripped
Blasphemous Rumours
Leave in Silence
Photographic
Something to Do
Somebody
A Question of Lust
In Your Room
Told You So
Walking in My Shoes
New Life
See You
People Are People
Shake the Disease
Home
Personal Jesus
But Not Tonight
Everything Counts
Enjoy the Silence
Just Can't Get Enough
Never Let Me Down Again
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