1984-11-28 Teatro Tenda, Milan, Italy
Notes
According to an unspecified magazine interview with Martin Gore in the late '80s (translated by Sabry Meggiato):
"All of our synths were suddenly not working due to the massive heat and rain with condensation. We thought we were going to have to postpone the show. Luckily all of a sudden they started working again and they worked for the whole evening. All this was just 5 minutes before the beginning of the show. We were therefore very very nervous, although I think we managed to hide it very well."
Matt Fretton was the support act. Matt revealed to HOME in 2007:
"[On the last tour with DM] my use of backing tapes was incomprehensible to the audience and I was booed and had things thrown at me every night. The European tour and having coins thrown at me in Italy [was the worst part of opening for DM], they hurt both physically and emotionally (someone in the road crew picked them all up and I used them to make calls to home). I hated it and thought seriously about quitting, but realized that would have been inexcusable, so I went to a studio in Germany (Hansa in fact) halfway through the tour, and edited the backing tapes down to a set of about 15 minutes. That helped, but the tour manager was really not pleased that it was such a short set."
Fansite Depechemode-funny.de echoes Matt's experience:
"Matt Fretton [...] had gained quite a bad reputation as a opening act in Italy. During his appearance there, he was thrown food, cans, and anything in reach. When he reached his one and only slow song, Matt thought this song was appropriate for the romantic Italians and announced it as "Song for All Italians". If he had known that Italians love "ram-ram" disco songs as well, he would have easily guessed this song to be a failure. The whistles and "booooos" from this song alone were so embarrassingly loud and inescapably audible, that Matt had to cry out his soul just to be heard over the audience. In addition, it was even more embarrassing that Matt thanked the audience after each song for their good behaviour (what good behaviour?) with an amusing word, which sounded something like "Griese" (it probably should have been "Grazie")."
Set list
- Intro (Master And Servant Voxless)
- Something To Do
- Two Minute Warning
- Puppets
- If You Want
- People Are People
- Leave In Silence
- New Life
- Shame
- Somebody (*)
- Ice Machine
- Lie To Me
- Blasphemous Rumours
- Told You So
- Master And Servant
- Photographic
- Everything Counts
- See You
- Shout
- Just Can't Get Enough
