Forced To Mode

Sandersleben, 2011

Christian Schottstädt, born in 1977, began playing in a school covers band in 1992 and by 2006 had recorded his own demo versions of Depeche Mode songs at home. The public step came in 2008, when his band Forced Movement played three Depeche Mode covers at a festival billed as Depeche Mode Goes Rock. The response was strong enough that in 2011, during an EBM concert in Sandersleben, Schottstädt and his bandmates launched Forced To Mode as a side project. The side project outlasted the parent band.

The line-up has been stable and small: Schottstädt on lead vocals and keyboards, Thomas Schernikau on keyboards and backing vocals, Matthias Kahra on guitar and backing vocals. Three men, no drummer on most nights, and a rig that has to carry the sequenced backbone of forty years of records. Berlin is the base, and it shows in the circuit they work — the German dark-electronic festival network took them early, and they have played Wave-Gotik-Treffen, E-Tropolis and Nocturnal Culture Night among others.

Breadth as the selling point

What separates Forced To Mode from the field is not costume or mimicry but catalogue depth. The band's working repertoire runs past 130 Depeche Mode songs, which is more than the originals tend to have available on any given tour, and the setlist rotates hard from night to night. B-sides that were never performed by the band that wrote them, album tracks that fell out of rotation in the 1980s, and the quieter Martin Gore material all get stage time alongside the songs everybody came for.

That breadth has been spun into formats. There have been dedicated B-side concerts, whole-album nights, three tours built around acoustic and string arrangements, and collaborations with string quartets and symphony orchestras. The 2024 run was the acoustic One Caress Tour; the 2026 shows are a deliberate return to full electric playing. The band's own count stands at more than 500 concerts across 18 European countries, and their YouTube channel — a serious part of the operation, not an afterthought — has passed four million views on professionally shot live footage.

Records that arrived with a magazine

The discography is unusual in shape because almost all of it was published as covermount CDs with the German alternative-music magazine Sonic Seducer, through Thomas Vogel Media. The sequence ran 35 Years of Construction Time Again in 2018, 35 Years of Some Great Reward — live and acoustic versions — in 2019, 30 Years of Violator in 2020, 40 Years of Speak & Spell paired with 10 Years of Forced to Mode in 2021, and 30 Years of Songs of Faith and Devotion in 2023, the last of these pressed in a limited run of 999 copies and padded out with the 1993 B-sides My Joy and Death's Door.

Two further releases, Acoustic Lounge Session in 2021 and Acoustic Collection in 2022, came out through Last Recordings and document the stripped-back side of the band. There has been no new studio release since 2023; the anniversary logic that drove the record series has simply migrated to the tours.

Forty years of Black Celebration

The current campaign was announced in the summer of 2025 and takes its name from the Depeche Mode album released in March 1986. Trailed as 40 Years of Black Celebration, the Black Celebration Tour 2026 opened with a spring run through ten German cities between 2 and 20 April — Stuttgart's Im Wizemann on 2 April, then Munich, Magdeburg, Frankfurt (Oder), Leipzig's Haus Auensee on 11 April, Dresden, Berlin, Oberhausen and Cologne's Carlswerk Victoria on 18 April. Summer took the band onto open-air stages and into festival slots across Germany, including dates in Jena, Chemnitz, Querfurt, Rathenow, Schwarzenberg, Heidelberg, Goslar and Schwerin.

September 2026 has been dense. The band played the Freilichtbühne at Burg Wilhelmstein in Würselen on 8 September, Park der Gärten in Bad Zwischenahn on 9 September, the Alando Palais in Osnabrück on 10 September and the Congresshalle in Bad Sooden-Allendorf on 11 September. A Polish run follows immediately: Hype Park in Kraków on 30 September, then Cavatina Hall in Bielsko-Biała, Progresja in Warsaw, B90 in Gdańsk and Klub Muzyczny B17 in Poznań across 1 to 4 October.

The tour's proper arena-scale conclusion comes in November, with the Inselpark Arena in Hamburg on 20 November, Pier 2 in Bremen on 21 November and westand in Braunschweig on 22 November. As of mid-September 2026 the band had 28 announced concerts on the books across three countries, running through to August 2027.

The album nobody toured

The more interesting piece of news came on 29 May 2026, when Forced To Mode announced the Ultra Tour, subtitled The Missing Piece, for February to April 2027. The premise is a genuine gap in the record: Depeche Mode released Ultra in April 1997 and never took it on the road, the tour having been shelved in the aftermath of the band's troubles at the time. Forced To Mode intend to perform every vocal track from the album on stage, which would make it the first time the material has been staged as a body of work by anyone.

The production is being scaled to the material rather than the demand. The band have chosen club-sized rooms deliberately, and they are adding a drummer, Marius Lürig, plus a stage design built specifically for the album. The Berlin dark-electro and synth-pop duo KY open the shows throughout.

The run starts at the Uckermärkische Bühnen in Schwedt/Oder on 12 February 2027 and takes in Kiel, Rostock, Berlin's Kesselhaus on 18 February — already sold out — Dresden, Erfurt, Leipzig, Bielefeld, Krefeld, Langen and Braunschweig, before crossing into Stuttgart, Nuremberg and Munich in early March, SIMM City in Vienna on 6 March and SaSaZu in Prague on 7 March. Two nights at the Stadthalle Cottbus on 9 and 10 April close it. Summer 2027 open airs in Kamenz, Potsdam, Eberswalde, Dinslaken and Gera are already listed.