On June 1st, 2000, Deftones played a record release show for their game-changing third album, White Pony, in Santa Monica, California. The band's seven-song set opened with "Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)" and concluded with "Around the Fur," but its centerpiece was a noisy, shambolic cover of Depeche Mode's "To Have and to Hold."
Two years before, Deftones had released a much more polished studio version of their rendition on the Depeche Mode tribute compilation, For the Masses, which also included the Cure, the Smashing Pumpkins, Rammstein, Failure, the Locust and more.
Deftones singer Chino Moreno has long cited Depeche Mode as one of his favorite bands, if not his very favorite. "It's darker-themed and there is a lot of love- and relationship-type things, but it's not happy music," Moreno told Rolling Stone of why their songs resonate so deeply with him. "You never really know what they're singing about, they're never really just so open and out front about it. When you listened to them, you sort of ran with the mood of it and you connected it to wherever you were in your life at the time."
Deftones have also covered Depeche Mode's "Sweetest Perfection," and Moreno would later cover DM again in 2013, singing "Behind the Wheel" with the Dillinger Escape Plan. Watch that bloody and fiery performance here.
