The World We Live In and Live In Hamburg

The World We Live In and Live In Hamburg is a concert film of Depeche Mode's performance at 1984-12-09 Alsterdorf Sporthalle, Hamburg, Germany which occurred during the 1984-1985 Some Great Reward Tour. The video was initially released on April 1, 1985 on VHS, Betamax, and LaserDisc formats. The release is currently out-of-print, and has not been reissued on more modern formats such as DVD or Blu-ray Disc.

Track list

Worldwide releases

The most complete releases of the concert contain 17 tracks (the full concert, with a shortened concert introduction and lacking the songs Puppets and Ice Machine), and were released in most countries except the United States. The track list is:

1. Something To Do
2. Two Minute Warning
3. If You Want
4. People Are People
5. Leave In Silence
6. New Life
7. Shame
8. Somebody
9. Lie To Me
10. Blasphemous Rumours
11. Told You So
12. Master And Servant
13. Photographic
14. Everything Counts
15. See You
16. Shout
17. Just Can't Get Enough

Missing tracks

Only assumptions can be made as to why Puppets and Ice Machine were not included on the video release. It is possible that they were omitted as they were songs written by Vince Clarke, cut out due to time constraints of the video formats of the time, or perhaps it was felt that the songs did not visually mesh as well, as suggested on Shunt Q&A regarding tracks omitted from the later "Devotional" video release:

Why did the 'Devotional' video not include 'Policy Of truth' and 'Halo' considering you played them almost every show?

It was probably necessary to tighten up the compilation to fit within a particular time frame, so some tracks had to be omitted. These tracks were felt to be older and didn't work as well visually as some of the others.

United States releases

The US releases are notably cut down to 11 tracks, further missing "Two Minute Warning", "Leave In Silence", "New Life", "Shame", "Ice Machine", "See You", and "Shout" compared to the other releases worldwide. The track list for the US releases is:

1. Something To Do
2. If You Want
3. People Are People
4. Somebody
5. Lie To Me
6. Blasphemous Rumours
7. Told You So
8. Master And Servant
9. Photographic
10. Everything Counts
11. Just Can't Get Enough

Quality

The VHS and Betamax formats are not known for their stellar video quality. The LaserDisc format arguably provides the best video quality, though its audio seems to be somewhat lacking in bass compared to the VHS and Betamax formats and the audio is analog-only, despite the LaserDisc format’s support for digital audio. Because this video has not been reissued on a more modern format such as DVD, a fan-made amalgamation of the Japanese LaserDisc video combined with VHS HiFi audio is currently the best available experience for this release. Unfortunately, even though this is an out-of-print commercial release, DM Live Wiki cannot provide a stream, download, or links to obtain this fan-made version of this release, or any digital capture of any variant of this release.

Dave Gahan's vocals tend to have a sort of "buzzy" sounding characteristic to them on most songs, across all formats of the video release. It is not known whether this was due to an improperly functioning microphone, or some other issue with the recording process of the concert that causes this characteristic. Other professionally recorded concerts such as the 1984-11-30 Basel pre-FM recording do not exhibit this flaw.

Radio broadcast

Notably, 11 songs were chosen to be broadcast over FM radio in the United States. Surprisingly, the prepared broadcast material includes the song Ice Machine, which has not been represented on any of the video releases to-date. Both a pre-FM reel-to-reel tape of the broadcast, and a cassette tape recording of an on-air broadcast are available at 1984-12-09 Alsterdorf Sporthalle, Hamburg, Germany/Source 1 and 1984-12-09 Alsterdorf Sporthalle, Hamburg, Germany/Source 2, respectively.