1980-10-30 Bridge House, London, England, UK/Source 1

Notes

A decent audience recording with distorted bass throughout. Notably, this is the earliest genuine recording of Depeche Mode performing live, and is also the earliest of two recordings currently circulating from the 1980 Tour. The other recording is from two weeks later at 1980-11-14 Essex.

The core of this recording is sourced from a mono cassette, contributed by Ronny. The last two tracks, The Price Of Love and Dreaming Of Me, are sourced from the bootleg vinyl 'Bridgehouse' to provide a complete recording. Interestingly, Tora! Tora! Tora! is present on the mono version, which is missing on all vinyl copies. The vinyl also has the track order incorrect, unnecessary fades between tracks, and misses a few seconds of the beginning of New Life.

This rework creates the most complete and consistently sounding version available. As for the performance, the music is radically different from later live versions, undoubtedly due to the extensive use of drum machines. You will often hear the band performing quick equipment checks as they switch between tracks.

In the setlist, two tracks that were exclusively performed during Depeche Mode's 1980 tour are included: Tomorrow's Dance and Reason Man. It is presumed that Vince wrote these tracks, although this has not been confirmed. DM Live reached out to Deb Danahay, Vince Clarke's former girlfriend, to inquire about any details regarding these songs, but she is not familiar with them.

Lyrics for Tomorrow's Dance and Reason Man can be found by clicking on their respective song titles.

The track Television Set was written by Jason Knott (a friend of Vince Clarke), and was a part of Depeche Mode's live setlist between 1980 until the US leg of the 1982 See You Tour.

For this song, we have provided lyrics, examples of live performances, and a short snippet of Vince's original demo. These are available on the main page for this song. Deb Danahay has confirmed that the track does not appear on "Speak & Spell" or any single release, as it was not written by Vince or Martin. Despite this, I share the sentiment that it is a great song and would have appreciated its inclusion, even if only as a B-side.

The song The Price Of Love was also featured during the 1980 and 1981 tours. This track was written by The Everly Brothers. For more information and live examples, click on the song title.

Dave introduces the final song of the setlist, Dreaming Of Me, as "Dreams Of Me," as early setlist photos also referred to it. This song later became Depeche Mode's first single, released on February 20, 1981.

The only other recording circulating from the 1980 Tour is from 1980-11-14 Technical College, Southend-On-Sea, Essex, England, UK, and it is a very good quality audience recording. That night's performance includes another rare early live-only track, “Addiction”, and that recording is currently the sole source of the song.

When comparing this Bridge House recording to the Essex recording, you can hear how radically the live sound changes. Pay attention to Television Set, Tora! Tora! Tora!, and Big Muff between the recordings—the difference is significant. You can find more details and download the entire recording here.

Depeche Mode's final performance at the Bridge House was a secret gig under the alias "Modepeche", during their 1982 See You Tour. More details, along with a stream and download of a very good audience recording from that night, can be found here.

For further information about this gig, you can find it on the main page for this concert.

Many thanks to Ronny for the providing the core used for this rework, darkdevoted for his transfer of the common 'Bridgehouse' vinyl bootleg, Fage for his excellent remastering work as always, Vince DOME for his final reworking, and to Stumm101 for providing additional information about the early shows of the band.

Listen

You can listen to this entire recording below.

Track list

1. [3:35] Play New Life
2. [3:47] Play Television Set
3. [3:11] Play Tomorrow's Dance
4. [3:06] Play Reason Man
5. [3:57] Play Photographic
6. [3:23] Play Tora! Tora! Tora!
7. [4:12] Play Big Muff
8. [4:38] Play Ice Machine
9. [4:19] Play The Price Of Love
10. [3:52] Play Dreaming Of Me

• Total time: 37:59

Lineage

• Complete audience recording
• unknown taper and equipment -> unknown generation cassette -> unknown transfer -> FLAC -> in Adobe Audition CC 2014.1: normalized to -3.0dB and DC bias removed, automatic phase correction applied (most accurate settings), low-pass filter at 12khz (mirrored spectrogram, very strange), and The Price Of Love and Dreaming Of Me were added from the common 'Bridgehouse' vinyl bootleg -> tracks split using Audacity 2.0.6 -> further remastering and reworking by Fage and Vince DOME -> FLAC level 8
• auCDTectTaskManager log included

Download

• Download ZIP - FLAC 16-bit 44.1khz 177MB