Strangelove: The Depeche Mode Experience, courtesy.

Brent Meyer plays keyboard, guitar and sings in Strangelove: the Depeche Mode Experience. Strangelove recently appeared on the E! Network’s “Clash of the Cover Bands,” where they defeated the competition and now have a chance to be selected to perform on “Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.” Fallon is the producer of the reality TV show, which is judged by Meghan Trainor, Adam Lambert and songwriter Ester Dean.

Until the band knows if it’ll win the grand prize, Bay Area fans can catch Strangelove: the Depeche Mode Experience, with Meyer performing the role of Martin Gore as “Counterfeit Martin,” Friday at the Ritz in San Jose.

Meyer started the band in 2006, way before it was was possible for most cover acts to make a career of their work.

“There were definitely no TV shows featuring tribute bands back then!” said Meyer, an acquaintance of this story’s writer. “There was a rarefied tier of shows like “Rain” or “Beatlemania,” but just a handful of things like that; there were maybe 10 commercially viable tribute bands in the world.

RIFF: Why do you think your tribute to Depeche Mode is so successful?

Meyer: I take very little credit for that success. I owe all of the credit to Depeche Mode’s incredibly rabid fan base. I started the group just because I love the music, and I thought I could do the material justice. I thought vocally I could do something comparable to what Martin Gore does. Naturally, my voice leans in that direction.

We present a full member-to-member analog with everybody resembling the character they portray on stage. I think that’s very important because different Depeche Mode fans have a favorite Depeche Mode member. Like with the Beatles, there are plenty of people whose favorite Beatle is Ringo. And there are plenty of people whose favorite Depeche Mode member is Alan Wilder; it’s not the obvious lead singer/front-person that one would expect. I think we are trying to honor that and represent that person and personality onstage. We’re always trying to do bigger and better productions and presentations.

Does the real Depeche Mode know about your band?

Yes. In fact, Depeche Mode have spoken on camera about us once when they were doing a symposium in New York about five or six years ago, when the album Spirit came out. Martin was speaking about us and how much he loved going through all of our videos on YouTube and how he would get lost going down that rabbit hole. Martin has also spoken about us in print very favorably, which was really nice to see.

Recently, you posted that you woke up and found out you were on a No.-1-selling album.

Yes, it’s a three-disc tribute album to Depeche Mode called Music for Constructions. It was No. 1 on Amazon Germany in indie & Lo-Fi [categories]. We contributed a cover of the song “Sisters of the Night.”

Do you and the other members have original music?

Yes. For all three of us, Depeche Mode is a common element to what we all like. There is some Venn diagram overlap, but there’s a lot that doesn’t overlap. Our singer, Leo [Luganskiy], has a band called FOIRMODA. Some of his favorite music is early-aughts nu-metal; he’s a huge Linkin Park fan, so that’s mostly what he tends toward. Julian [Shah-Tayler] has probably had the most prosperous solo musical career. He was in a signed band in the late ’90s that had songs placed in major TV shows. He now records as The Singularity, and he’s released several albums of solo material. He also plays David Bowie in a tribute called Electric Duke.

I myself was in a signed band in the ’90s. Like so many other people, I had nothing to do these past 18 months. So I wrote and recorded a full-length solo album, playing everything myself. I haven’t even begun to shop for a label for it yet, though. With my stuff, I would say there’s a really pronounced Tears for Fears, Radiohead, David Sylvian vibe, with a little bit of Jeff Buckley. It’s a little bit more organic, so people expecting blippy electronic music from me will likely be disappointed.

What was it like being on a reality show?

I had previously worked with Katie Darryl, the executive producer of AXIS TV’s “The World’s Greatest Tribute Bands,” which ran for seven seasons. I picked a lot of the talent that performed on that show. But the format for that was very different; that was a straight hourlong performance filmed live, in realtime.

This experience was pretty much the polar opposite of that in every way. They did a background segment on us, so we had to send them pictures of us as kids and of the bands we were in in high school! We even had some audition video for Leo from 2018 that they used. It was fun rounding up some history for them. As for the show itself, it was great, but it was all kind of a blur as we were shepherded from place to place around the CBS lot for about two weeks.

Do you have a favorite venue to play in the Bay Area?

I have a long history with … the Ritz in San Jose, where we will be playing Friday, Dec. 17. The Ritz is an outgrowth of a venue called the Blank Club, which I think had existed since the ’90s, and it used to be a punk club of note. Later they moved into a larger venue, called the Ritz. We have roots going back since 2007 playing at the Blank Club. We used to play San Francisco quite a bit more before COVID. We would play the Great American Music Hall and The Chapel—we’ve played each of those venues maybe five or 10 times each.

Do ever get requests that people are surprised you can play?

We have a lot of hits to choose from, which is a good problem to have. There are big obvious songs that we miss out on playing because we can’t cover them all in one two-hour span in the Bay Area, which is a place where we would typically be coming back every six months. I save our setlists, and I’ll look back at what we played the last time we were in town; I’ll try to flip it and play substantially different material the next time we come around.

Follow Rachel Alm at Twitter.com/thouzenfold and Instagram.com/thousandfold.