A serialised reflection on four decades
of music, memory and devotion
Liverpool - 2026
Not a biography. Not quite a fan memoir. Something in between - about how devotion takes root, drifts, and refuses to let go.
Oberkorn, Luxembourg
30 March 1982
Before most of us had heard of them.
Depeche Mode
In March 1982, they played the Rainbow Club in Oberkorn - a steel town in Luxembourg nobody had heard of. The PA blew when a television crew connected their cameras. The band wanted to cancel. That night, Martin Gore named a B-side after the village: Oberkorn (It's a Small Town).
I wasn't there. I hadn't heard of them yet. A year later I bought Get the Balance Right in Lancashire, and something took root that has not let go in forty years. Stay Listening is the attempt to understand how that happens - the drift, the distance, the years when other things mattered more, and the concerts in Moscow and Bremen and Cluj that felt like returning to something essential.
30 days · Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Germany
30 March 1982
Oberkorn
Rainbow Club, Luxembourg
The blown fuses, the RTL cameras, the B-side named after a steel town. The founding date - before most fans existed.
28 March 1982
Rotterdam
De Lantaren
Two days before Oberkorn. The same coach, the same circuit, the same four young men from Basildon.
Dec 1982 · Dec 1983 · Dec 1984
Hamburg
Musichalle · Alsterdorf Sporthalle
Three consecutive nights in December 1983. Six confirmed shows across five tours. The most loyal city on the circuit.
4 December 1982
Goslar
Odeon
A medieval UNESCO town. Depeche Mode, somewhere in the middle of it. Nobody writes about this one.
18 December 1984
Deinze
Brielpoort
Final night of the Some Great Reward European leg. A small Belgian town. Why here, twice?
19 June 1993
Leipzig
Festwiese
Four years after the Monday demonstrations. One of the first major Western shows on this site post-reunification. The same outdoor ground, thirty years on.
Not the super-fan story. The ordinary version: drifting in and out of connection across four decades, shaped by geography and life stage and accident as much as by the music itself. The drift is as important as the intensity.
Behind every stadium show is a decade of municipal halls, student venues and small-city promoters. Oberkorn, Borken, Goslar, Minden. The invisible circuit that made everything else possible. This book goes looking for it.
A story about music becoming devotion, and devotion becoming something you share - with strangers in Moscow, Berlin and Manchester - years after the first one. How it takes root differently in each person who receives it.
The early German and Belgian circuit is the least documented part of Depeche Mode's history. The people who were in those rooms in 1982, 1983, 1984 - the audiences in Borken and Goslar and Deinze - are the primary sources nobody has spoken to yet.
If you attended any of the early European shows, I'd genuinely like to hear what you remember. A ticket stub, a photograph, a single clear memory.
What was the venue like? How did you hear about the show?
What do you remember about the audience around you?
Did anything happen that night you've never forgotten?
How did your relationship with the band begin?