Their own personal Jesuses

It's mind-boggling to me that a music documentary as good as Our Hobby Is Depeche Mode could have been denied a proper audience for so long (for reasons that its creators Jeremy Deller and Nick Abrahams struggle to understand or explain - as this 2019 interview with Paul Gallagher of Dangerous Minds reveals). But let's be thankful that the Beeb have helped to rescue the 2007 Mute-commissioned film from what seemed like a sorry fate by screening it under the Storyville banner and making it available on iPlayer.

To be clear, it's not a film about Depeche Mode themselves; rather, it focuses on their fans. What becomes obvious is the sheer rabid enthusiasm of audiences in many countries around the world for a band who are - perhaps perversely - often overlooked at home. That much is underlined by the fact that Basildon does little to mark itself as the birthplace of the band, whereas in Russia "Depechists" celebrate Dave Day in honour of Dave Gahan's birthday.

For so many young people coming to terms with their own identities, Depeche Mode seem to have had a profoundly positive influence. In the US, recalling her experience of the record store signing riot in West Hollywood in 1990, Jennie says "the music was so meaningful for us", while Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor describes it as "music for someone who felt like they didn't fit in"; in Russia, Elena declares (with no sense of exaggeration) that "they help us to live ... they help us to be ourselves"; in the UK, Mark talks of countless nights spent sleeping rough underneath Hammersmith Bridge with only a tape player and live album 101 for company, and how attending the 1993 Crystal Palace show helped him to turn his life around. Songs of faith and devotion inspiring faith and devotion, you might say.

But Our Hobby Is Depeche Mode goes beyond the band's immediate impact on the lives of individuals to consider the bigger cultural and political picture (as you might expect, given Deller's subsequent film on rave culture, Everybody In The Place). Interviewees from the former East Germany talk about the enormous significance of a Western band playing on their side of the Berlin Wall ("The posters came from the walls"), and for Romanian fans too Depeche Mode are inextricably associated with the freedom and hope that came with the fall of the Iron Curtain. In Iran, meanwhile, openly being a fan remains a dangerous business, often resulting in punishment and persecution - and yet it is a risk that some people are still prepared to take.

As Abrahams told Dangerous Minds' Gallagher, "None of this is what the band is aiming to do. People take something and use it in their own way. I suppose that's part of what the film's about." Perhaps that explains why Our Hobby Is Depeche Mode was left languishing in obscurity. Maybe Depeche Mode saw it - the Dave Day parade, the homemade videos, the dance routines in the car park of the Pasadena Rose Bowl, the detailed and creative fan art - and got freaked out at how everything had spiralled so far out of their control. Hero worship can no doubt feel discomforting and disconcerting to those who find themselves unwittingly cast in the role of heroes.