It was only natural that the genre of new wave came to life in the 1980s.
This type of music, which mostly originated in British hole-in-the-wall dancehalls, was a collision of everything the decade had offered so far. Care-free danceability, punk aesthetics and an onslaught of synthesizers.
That last part was arguably the most prominent. As bands toyed more and more with electronic instrumentation — especially in the poppier Billboard hits of the time — you could hear synths everywhere. But to hear them on carefully crafted gothic rock tunes was a particularly niche phenomenon.
Local papers didn't quite have the words for "new wave" yet when they described the Depeche Mode concert at Augustana College on March 23, 1985.
The Moline Dispatch simply called the group — who had just released one of the 100 best-performing albums in the U.S. in 1984 — an "English synthesizer band."
The Depeche Mode show was held at Augustana College's Centennial Hall, as the kick-off event for the school's "humanities fest." The band was booked by student activities organization CUBOM, and tickets sold for just $8.
Bill Roderick was the co-chair of CUBOM's concert committee, and says he still vividly remembers the moment on the phone when he realized he'd booked Depeche Mode.
Roderick said that the college allotted around $40,000 to the committee to book shows throughout the school year. That decade, Augustana brought acts like Warren Zevon, Huey Lewis & The News and The Psychedelic Furs to town.
It took $10,000 to get Depeche Mode, Roderick said, thanks to a connection they'd made with a booking agent based in New York. It was one of only 10 shows in the United States that the British band played in 1985.
For a while, Roderick said he held onto the contract with his signature on it as a memento.
The show sold out almost instantly, with around 2,000 people buying tickets. Many of the attendees were college kids from the University of Iowa who made the drive down to the Q-C.
On the day of the show, Roderick said he sat and ate a catered dinner with members of the band, including Dave Gahan and Martin Gore.
The fact Depeche Mode was in town at all was mind-blowing. Roderick said he remembers the tour T-shirt having nothing but big cities on it: Chicago, Detroit, Dallas, etc. And then, there it was: Rock Island, Illinois.
"There's no way Rock Island, Illinois, should've been on that concert tee, so everybody thought that was pretty cool," he said.
Not one, but two encores
It was good timing for a small college to get such a major band.
Depeche Mode was still five years away from their best-charting single "Enjoy The Silence," but their song "People are People" was on its way up the charts that year. By August of '85, it peaked at No. 13.
The concert started at 8 p.m. on a Saturday night, and a setlist for the show available through crowd-sourced concert tracker Setlist.FM indicates that Depeche Mode played seven songs from "Some Great Reward," including "Something to Do," "Lie to Me" and "Somebody."
They also played not one, but two encores, with the second one including two songs: "Shout" and "Just Can't Get Enough."
Rock Island's Thomas Benson said he attended the show with a friend while he was in school.
"The sound guys got 'the balance right' to the point where I just could not get enough," he said via email.
Roderick said his younger brother got to sit on stage for the entire show, controlling the band's manual hydraulic system.
In the years that followed, Depeche Mode garnered five Grammy Award nominations and, eventually, a 2020 induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Just three years after their show in Rock Island, Depeche Mode played to a sold-out Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, with 60,000-plus in attendance.
Book of Love was Depeche Mode's opener for the Augustana show, and even they went on to do great things.
In their short career that followed this show, Book of Love continued to open for Depeche Mode on future tours and released a total of four records, two of which charted on the Billboard 200.
Benson said he was impressed enough by Book of Love's performance at Augustana that he bought their debut album the next year.
Farm Aid down the road
While Depeche Mode and new wave as a genre were certainly part of a youth renaissance in 1985, they were still polarizing among teens.
Take, for example, a comedic column published in the Moline Dispatch in Dec. 1985, that listed Christmas wishes from students at Port Byron's Riverdale High School.
One student named Mary wished for Depeche Mode to play a concert at her house. Another student, a few paragraphs later, wished for nuclear warheads, for the simple purpose of unleashing fury on Mary's house for the hypothetical Depeche Mode show.
So clearly, while the Beatles and Stones debates of old had gone out the door, there was still plenty of room for musical in-fighting.
Within British new wave and indie rock, there was animosity between The Cure lead singer Robert Smith and The Smiths lead singer Morrissey. Of course, there were also the chart feuds between Michael Jackson and Prince, which Jackson amplified in his 1988 autobiography "Moonwalk."
There was also the rising genre of hip-hop, which birthed some of the earliest rap beefs, including a 1987 back-and-forth between young emcees Kool Moe Dee and LL Cool J.
Sometimes, though, when artists and fans from different spaces came together, they could be a force for good. Just a few hours down the road from the Quad-Cities, the first ever Farm Aid was held in Champaign, Illinois, on September 22, 1985, to raise money for family farmers in the U.S.
It came months after Live Aid, a benefit show in London, was held to raise money to combat famine in Ethiopia.
The lineup at Farm Aid was absurd, to say the least: Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, Billy Joel, Johnny Cash, The Beach Boys, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Bon Jovi all appeared, and that was just the tip of the iceberg.
An estimated 80,000 attended, including many fans from the Q-C. Though some locals had qualms about the concept, according to a piece published in the Dispatch in Nov. 1985.
"I think the lineups were terrific. But I think Farm Aid helped the performers more than it did the farmers," one Rock Island resident told the paper.
Others were more supportive, citing the fact that it addressed concerns about inflation putting strain on local farmers.
"I'm from a farming community. I can relate to it. A lot of farmers put themselves on the line," wrote a Rock Island reader.
Farm Aid reported that it raised around $8 million for American farmers in that first festival.
In the years since, the show has continued as a yearly tradition, rotating cities around the Midwest. Just last year, it was held in Noblesville, Indiana. Aledo native country songwriter Margo Price serves as one of the organization's board members, and total funds raised in the 40 years of Farm Aid amount to nearly $80 million.
This story is part of a series called "Timeless Tickets," where we're aiming to find the most notable concert in the Quad-Cities, every year from 1960 to today. Do you have a story or photo to share from an iconic local show? Send it to entertainment reporter Gannon Hanevold at ghanevold@qctimes.com.
To read more "Timeless Tickets" stories, click here.
Photos: Here are the 2020 inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
British pop group Depeche Mode pose for the cameras during a photo call in the LTU-Arena in Dusseldorf, western Germany, Thursday, June 16, 2005. David Gahan, Martin Gore and Andrew Fletcher, from right to left, announced their 2005-2006 world tour and promoted their new album.
Andy “Fletch” Fletcher, the unassuming, bespectacled, red-headed keyboardist who for more than 40 years added his synth sounds to Depeche Mode hits like “Just Can’t Get Enough” and “Personal Jesus,” died May 26, 2022, at age 60.
Martin Gore, left, and Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode perform during a concert for the TV show "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" in the Hollywood section of Los Angeles, Thursday, April 23, 2009.