Our Hobby is Depeche Mode by Jeremy Deller and Nicholas Abrahams
The day after watching Anton Corbijn’s Spirits in the Forest - A Depeche Mode Film at the cinema, I found out there’s an older film about Depeche Mode which wasn’t widely seen called Our Hobby is Depeche Mode, a documentary from 2007 made by Jeremy Deller and Nicholas Abrahams.
There’s an interview with Jeremy Deller and Nicholas Abrahams in Dangerous Minds from early October where they explains how the film was made and thoughts on why it disappeared.
Here’s an extract, but please do read the complete interview here.
How did ‘Our Hobby is Depeche Mode’ come about?
Nicholas Abrahams: We were commissioned by Mute Records. They wanted to commission a film about Depeche Mode.
Jeremy Deller: They wanted a film to be made to celebrate some anniversary. They wanted a documentary about the band. We suggested this film about the fans and this way you don’t have to have the band involved.
NA: We pitched it as not about the band but what if it’s about the fans and how important the music can be to people in ways the band could never imagine. That was our pitch basically.
We knew if you made a film about the band, it maybe what a lot of Depeche Mode fans wanted but it’s boring people talking their music. We knew fans wouldn’t realise how interesting they are. And they were interesting.
JD: I was aware the band had this huge following in Eastern Europe and Russia. It was something I’d heard about but didn’t really know much about. I thought that would be quite fertile territory for the film.
NA: Daniel Miller [Head of Mute Records] knew Depeche Mode were huge in Russia but he didn’t know the story. He said, “It would be great to know about that.” We were discovering all that as we went along.
The film is now on Nicholas Abrahams’s Vimeo website, and although I really enjoyed Spirits in the Forest and was quite moved by parts of it, Our Hobby is Depeche Mode to me is the better film.
Both films are about the band, but from the perspective of their fans, but Our Hobby is Depeche Mode has a raw energy to it, and the fans are a lot more eccentric. But most importantly, it’s a slice of cultural, social and political history from the mid 2000s.
The film is no longer lost and hope more people watch and appreciate it.
“In Russia, May 9 is Victory Day, a national holiday. It’s also the birthday of Dave Gahan, lead singer with Depeche Mode, and a group of Muscovite fans have declared it Dave Day, gathering together to celebrate the group with homemade banners, mass sing-alongs and club nights.
In Russia and countries of the former Soviet Union, the band’s music has been treasured since it was only available on illegal bootlegged cassettes in the 1980s, and it formed the soundtrack of the march toward freedom those countries embarked upon following the fall of the Berlin Wall.
This situation is mirrored in Tehran, where fans take huge risks in listening to their music in a country that has banned all Western music since the Islamic Revolution. In the UK, the church of St Edward King and Martyr in Cambridge holds services for goths where they play Depeche Mode records.
Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller and filmmaker Nicholas Abrahams tell these and other stories of faith and devotion from around the world in this fascinating and inspired documentary about fandom, which is at turns bizarre, funny, sad and often touching.”