The World Violation Tour was a 1990 concert tour by English electronic group Depeche Mode in support of the act's seventh studio album, Violator. The tour started in May 1990 and ran through the end of that year, and was the first Depeche Mode tour to see the band regularly play stadium-sized venues.
Buoyed by their most successful album (Violator), and on the heels of their Music for the Masses (1987) and 101 (1989) albums, by the end of the tour, Depeche Mode had toured to over one million fans.
Background
Depeche Mode's previous tour, the Music for the Masses Tour, had run from late 1987 to the middle of 1988, and was supported by the live video and record release of 101 in early 1989.[1] These two albums had brought Depeche Mode a level of popularity internationally that was, until that point, unknown to them.[2]Violator was released in March 1990[3] and had already seen two successful singles to support it, "Personal Jesus"[4] and "Enjoy the Silence" by the time the tour started.[5] In March 1990, the day before Violator was released, the band attended a record-signing event in Los Angeles at a record store, but the event drew so many fans that the band had to be escorted out, and LA riot police had to be called in to control the large crowds who had come to see the band.[6]
Tour details
The tour ran from May to November 1990[7] over 88 shows.[8] Due to the popularity the band had cultivated over the past few years, and the success of Violator and its singles, the band played mostly stadiums for the first time.[9] The band rehearsed for the tour in Pensacola, Florida, the same city where the tour kicked off.[10] It was the first time the band has performed live in the state, and the band received some flak from locals who didn't understand their appearance; Alan Wilder was quoted to Rolling Stone saying "I've been called a faggot about twenty times today, mostly from guys leaning out of trucks. This is sort of a backward place, isn't it?"[10]
The tour kicked off with a North American leg in late May, finishing up in early August in Los Angeles at Dodger Stadium. The North American dates were met with high demand with sellouts in Dallas, Chicago, Orlando, Tampa and Miami;[10] 42,000 tickets for the concert at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey had reportedly been sold within four hours of going on sale, while the Dodger Stadium shows had sold out on the first day of sale.[11] Later in the month, the group played a sole date in Australia, in Sydney, prior to a six-date tour of Japan in September. Following the Japanese dates, the band commenced a European tour, beginning in Brussels in late September. The leg included three dates at the Palais Omnisports Bercy in Paris, where the group performed to approximately 50,000 people.[12] The leg lasted two months and concluded with the final show of the tour in Birmingham, England, in late November.
The stage and projections for the tour was designed by frequent collaborator Anton Corbijn.[8] The tour required approximately 100 stage crew and 11 trucks to transport the set and equipment.[11]
Industrial band Nitzer Ebb opened for the band in North America[13] and Europe.[14]
The band felt they had successfully crossed over from a synth band to a rock band who happened to use synthesisers.[9] Said Wilder of the scale of the tour, "We've been building to this over the last ten years."[9] By the completion of the tour, Pulse! magazine estimated that over 1.2 million fans had attended the tour.[15]
Tour incidents and cancelled shows
A show in Salt Lake City, Utah, had to be postponed a day and required a venue change after a thunderstorm forced a cancellation of the original outdoor venue.[9] Despite this, Wilder remembered it as one of the best shows the band played on that tour.[9] The show in Ottawa, Canada had to be cancelled when asbestos was discovered at the venue.[16] A show in Melbourne, Australia had to be cancelled when singer Dave Gahan was told by a doctor he needed to give his voice a rest; the show could not be rescheduled due to the impending Asian leg of the tour.[16] Tennis star Steffi Graf was in attendance of the show in Frankfurt, Germany.[17]
Equipment
The band used an EMax II Turbo sampler to play back sounds and songs during the tour.[18] Wilder, songwriter Martin Gore and Andy Fletcher each had two keyboards in front on them on stage, but one was a backup in case the first failed.[18] The two keyboards were linked so that in the event of a switch, the backup keyboard was ready to play the right sounds.[18] Both Fletcher and Gore played electronic percussion pads on stage, which triggered samples on the E-Max II, which was kept out of site under the stage to avoid visual clutter.[18] Wilder played a special set of electronic tom-toms, which can play sampled sounds controlled by his keyboard, or could work as drums themselves.[18] The band used two TASCAM MR16 tape machines for their shows, one of which was a backup synched by computer in case the primary one failed.[18]
Reviews
Rolling Stone called out the tour as one of the highlights of the 1990 summer music scene, saying "These British synth poppers offer post-industrial melancholy you can dance to. And their misery certainly loves company – on their last tour, they sold out the Rose Bowl."[13] The tour was nominated for "Best Tour of the Year" at the 1991 International Rock Awards.[19]
Recordings
Depeche Mode did not release any official live album or video from the World Violation Tour, which Wilder attributed to their label, Mute Records, who felt that there was too little time lapsed since their previous live album, 101, had been released the previous year.[20]. All the three shows in Paris were officially audio recorded for publishing purposes, but they remain so far unreleased. [21][bettersourceneeded]
Two concerts of the American leg of the tour, one in San Francisco and one in LA, were recorded by the staff of the stadium; the band issued 90-second snippets of each song from the LA show on their website in 2012.[22]
Legacy
Mute label owner and producer Daniel Miller said of that tour, "A lot of things happened to the individuals in the band during and after the Violator tour. They never changed as people, they were always very down to earth, but they'd been elevated into superstars and that does have an effect on people."[23]
During the tour, Gahan's father died, and after the tour, he split from his wife Joanne Fox Gahan and young son and moved to Los Angeles to live with his new girlfriend, Teresa Conroy.[24] This began the slide into heroine addiction for Gahan, which almost led to the break-up of the band a few years later.[25] After Gahan's recovery in the late 1990s, he said of his time on the World Violation Tour, "I had everything that I could possibly want but I was really lost. I didn't feel like I even knew myself anymore. And I felt like shit because I constantly cheated on my wife and I went back home and lied."[26]
At the end of the tour, the band agreed to take a year-long break, although that break was interrupted in mid-1991 when the band returned to the studio to record a new track titled "Death's Door" for Wim Wenders' film, Until the End of the World (1991).[27] In February 1992, the band reconvened in Madrid to start work on their follow-up album, Songs of Faith and Devotion (1993).[28]
↑"Q&A: Archives: Depeche Mode: Live – part 2". oldsite.recoil.co.uk. Archived from the original on 27 September 2021. Retrieved 7 November 2025. The 'World Violation' tour was too soon after the 'MFTM' tour to warrant a live LP. By the time 'Devotional' came along it was felt that enough time had passed to release another one.
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