Depeche Mode, Wembley Arena, London

Basildon's bond

Basildon, the Essex town where Depeche Mode began 20 years ago, doesn't seem to exist for them now. The only synth-pop band to be truly embraced by the US, they've physically and musically toughened in response, adding electric guitars and living infamous lives of LA excess.

The songwriter Martin Gore has left behind lyrics of small-town romance and escape for sadomasochistic confessionals and addiction chronicles, while the band's scrawny singer, Dave Gahan, has recovered after almost killing himself through drug abuse. All this may convince in Hollywood. But here, it's impossible to look at the still-spindly Gahan without imagining him as a sulky teenager at an Essex bus stop. And one look at the white, suburban, working-class, sussed crowd that fills Wembley tonight, and their roots seem within touching distance. You can take the boys out of Basildon. But Basildon has come to them.

For the first few seconds, as Depeche Mode pick out electro-ambient notes, the stadium-rock years seem musically erased. Then, in a flash of light and slash of drumbeats, Gahan slinks on to the stage with camp machismo, and a battle between parodic pomp and imaginative grace begins.

Depeche Mode are helped by having a genuinely fresh new album, Exciter, to draw on; produced by Björk's Mark Bell, it's replaced their recent, increasingly tiresome drug tales with a feeling of dreamy transcendence. Gahan sings with unusual restraint on it, which he manages, too, when he and Gore share the spotlight tonight for the string-washed "When the Body Speaks". But it's Gore who seems most comfortable with Exciter's spiritual calm, taking lead vocals himself for three of its songs mid-set with his quavering, exposed voice embodying its feminised mood.

Gahan, meanwhile, has stripped off his shirt, and proceeds to spin across the stage with comical, sweaty abandon, shouting "Hello London!" as if he's never been here before. His sheer happiness in his work is hard to resist, as he leads crowd-clapping so synchronised it gives fresh life to the old comparison between stadium shows and Nuremberg rallies. He won't rest until we're singing the new single "Freelove" as if we've loved it all our lives. Soon, "Enjoy the Silence", "I Feel You" and "Personal Jesus" return him to his roaring, rocking element.

But throughout, there are touches that unite the two men's approaches, and the two Depeche Modes: the sensitive Essex boys they began as and are becoming again, and the rock stars they play at being. Dazzling video images and acoustic flourishes undercut the strutting, keeping these stadium gods Basildon-sized.