Useless: the Depeche Mode song that disappeared for 19 years

Some songs never leave a band's set. Some are retired for good. And a few do something stranger: they become a nightly fixture, disappear for the best part of two decades, return for a single tour, and vanish again. “Useless” by Depeche Mode is one of those. setlist.fm, the fan-built archive of concert setlists, has logged it 122 times by the band. Almost all of those come from just three years.

The song

“Useless” was written by Martin Gore for Ultra, Depeche Mode's ninth studio album, released in April 1997 and produced by Tim Simenon. It was one of the first demos written for the record, and the album version features Doug Wimbish on bass and Keith LeBlanc on drums.

It came out as the fourth and final single from Ultra on 20 October 1997, in a version remixed by Alan Moulder that was shorter, slightly faster and harsher than the album take. It reached No. 28 in the UK. In the US it was released as a double A-side with “Home”, because American radio stations had started playing “Useless” before “Home” had even been announced. Its video was the last Depeche Mode video directed by Anton Corbijn for more than eight years, and a remix by the Austrian duo Kruder & Dorfmeister later turned up in a Victoria's Secret TV advert.

There were no real B-sides, only remixes and live versions. The UK CD singles carried a Cosmic Blues mix, a mix called Escape from Wherever, a CJ Bolland Ultrasonar mix, the Kruder + Dorfmeister Session and the live recording from London, and the 12-inch added an Air 20 mix. In the US, the double A-side swapped the single remix for CJ Bolland's Ultrasonar Edit.

1997: no tour, two parties

Depeche Mode didn't tour Ultra. After the strain of their previous world tour, the Devotional Tour, they chose to promote the album with a handful of one-off shows instead, the "Ultra Parties". The first was in London on 10 April 1997, at Adrenalin Village, where they played five songs including “Useless”. That night is the first live performance of the song in setlist.fm's archive, and a live recording from it appeared on the single. A second release party followed in Los Angeles on 16 May.

1998: almost every night

When the band went back on the road in 1998 for The Singles Tour, built around the compilation The Singles 86>98, “Useless” was in the set almost every night. setlist.fm logs 65 Depeche Mode setlists for 1998 and “Useless” appears 64 times, level with “Somebody”. For a song that had only been out for a year, it was a remarkable vote of confidence.

Four tours without it

Then it stopped. From 1999 to 2016 setlist.fm has no Depeche Mode performance of “Useless” at all, and those weren't quiet years. The band toured four new albums: the Exciter Tour (85 setlists logged), Touring the Angel (124), the Tour of the Universe (102) and The Delta Machine Tour (106). That's more than 400 logged shows without a single “Useless”. No source we found says why it was dropped; it simply wasn't there.

2017: the return

The Global Spirit Tour, for the album Spirit, ran from 5 May 2017 to 25 July 2018: 130 shows, 85 of them in Europe, 40 in North America and 5 in Latin America, grossing $202 million. Partway through it, “Useless” came back. setlist.fm logs 16 performances in 2017 and 40 in 2018: 56 in all, nineteen years after the last ones.

25 July 2018: the last one

The tour ended in Berlin, with two nights at the Waldbühne. The final show was on 25 July 2018, and “Useless” was in the set. It is the most recent performance of the song by Depeche Mode on setlist.fm.

The band's next tour, Memento Mori, ran from 23 March 2023 to 8 April 2024: 112 shows, and no “Useless” at any of them. As of October 2026 the song has gone more than eight years without a Depeche Mode performance.

Who else plays it

The song hasn't been silent, though. setlist.fm logs 273 performances of “Useless” by 15 different artists. Dave Gahan, the band's singer, has played it 22 times on his own, all of them in the autumn of 2003 on the Paper Monsters Tour for his first solo album, from the Manchester Apollo on 27 October to the last on 30 November. So even in the 19-year gap, the song was heard live for five weeks, just not from Depeche Mode. Tribute acts keep it going too: STRANGELOVE, The Depeche Mode Experience, accounts for 62 performances. And Kruder & Dorfmeister, whose remix of the song was licensed for that Victoria's Secret advert, have played it 15 times, most recently at the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver on 29 September 2026.

Tour by tour

1. 1997
   Ultra Parties: 7 setlists logged, “Useless” 2 times.
2. 1998
   The Singles Tour 86>98: 65 setlists, “Useless” 64 times.
3. 2001
   Exciter Tour: 85 setlists, none.
4. 2005–06
   Touring the Angel: 124 setlists, none.
5. 2009–10
   Tour of the Universe: 102 setlists, none.
6. 2013–14
   The Delta Machine Tour: 106 setlists, none.
7. 2017–18
   Global Spirit Tour: 130 setlists, “Useless” 56 times, the last on 25 July 2018.
8. 2023–24
   Memento Mori: 112 setlists, none.

One tour in six

Put the tours side by side and the numbers are stark. Since The Singles Tour ended in 1998, Depeche Mode have played six more world tours, 659 logged shows in all, and “Useless” was played on just one of them. In 1998 it was played at all but one logged show; across those six tours it turned up at fewer than one show in ten. Whether it returns on the next tour is, for now, a question only the setlist can answer.

If you were at one of the 122, at an Ultra Party in 1997, on The Singles Tour in 1998, or on one of the Global Spirit Tour nights that included it, you saw something that has turned out to be much rarer than it looked at the time. At the 1998 shows it was simply part of the night. Since then, the band has played it only in 2017 and 2018, and not at all for the last eight years.

How we counted

Every number here comes from setlist.fm, read on 20 October 2026. It is built by fans, who enter the setlists of shows they went to, so it is a very good record of a touring band like Depeche Mode but not an official one: a missing setlist means a missing performance. We counted only the band itself, not the tribute acts that appear in a search for the song, and we used setlist.fm's own totals of setlists per year and per tour for the comparison. setlist.fm counts performances setlist by setlist. We couldn't check every date one by one, so we call them performances rather than nights; in every year here, though, the plays are no higher than the number of setlists logged.

“Useless” isn't the only song a band has left on the shelf. Radiohead haven't played “Creep” since April 2018, three months before Depeche Mode's last “Useless”. Oasis went the other way: both Gallagher brothers kept playing “Wonderwall” through the years they didn't speak. And Robert Plant spent most of four decades keeping his distance from “Stairway to Heaven”, the song that had closed almost every Led Zeppelin show.