Andrew Pulver 

The Posters Came from the Walls review – Depeche Mode fans tell it like it is

In this music documentary ostensibly about Depeche Mode, it’s the obsessive fans from around the world who are the real subjects
  
  

The Posters Came From the Walls
Happy Dave Day … The Posters Came From the Walls Photograph: PR

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/

 

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