Depeche Mode's transformation from electro teeny-bop pin-ups to doom
laden goth gods drowning in drink and drugs may have resulted in
platinum sales and stadium tours, but it also nearly destroyed them.
Now the Essex boys have cleaned up and surfaced with a new album...
and a new sense of optimism. Paul Connolly reports
It's 2am in a pub in Maida Vale. The rather eccentric landlord is
presiding over a prodigious lock-in. In the corner is a blond,
blue-eyed man playing a guitar. He's belting out a classic Patsy
Cline track, She's Got You. It's Martin Gore, Depeche Mode's sole
songwriter, and he's had a few beers. The song finishes to a
smattering of applause from the ten people still standing, and Gore
asks for requests. Andy Fletcher, Depeche Mode's
multi-instrumentalist and father figure, walks up to me and says, "He
can play absolutely anything; he knows every bloody song ever
written." I shout out, "Name of the Game, by Abba."
Gore looks perplexed. "Nah, don't know the words to that one but I
can do this," and he starts to strum furiously while mumbling some
approximate lyrics before he reaches the chorus and cries, "...and
when you get the chance, you are the dancing queen, young and sweet
only 17, dancing queen, feel the beat of the tambourine, oh yeah!" So
much for the Depeche Mode of yore; dark, melancholy and troubled
precursors of American doom merchants such as Nine Inch Nails and
Marilyn Manson; a band who nearly imploded five years ago when their
drug and drink-addicted lead singer Dave Gahan overdosed on heroin
and cocaine and almost died. Depeche Mode are, whisper it, happy.
True, Dave Gahan isn't with us tonight, out instead having dinner
with a fellow recovering friend, but there's a real sense of a
rebirth about the Essex boys made good.
Finally, after years of trying to prove themselves to the sceptical
critical establishment, they've realised that they no longer need to
impress anyone. Depeche Mode, after all, are one of the most
influential bands of the past 20 years, and have been prime movers in
movements as diverse as techno and goth. They have nothing left to
prove and with their most turbulent years behind them have produced,
in their new album Exciter, a suitably relaxed, confident, positive
record.
Earlier in the day, in London's Home House, before it all got a
little blurred around the edges for his two colleagues, Gahan
concurred. "Yeah, it is a really optimistic record. But we've all got
reason to be optimistic now."
The singer, 39 next month, has recovered his saturnine pretty-boy
looks. But it's been a long haul. He suffered his near-fatal overdose
(his heart stopped beating for two minutes) in Los Angeles on May 28,
1996. He was revived by paramedics, but was promptly arrested for
possession and spent two days in prison. As soon as he was released
he scored more heroin. "I didn't know how I was going to get myself
out of this one, and there weren't a lot of people around me at the
time who were interested in getting me out of it either. If it wasn't
for our manager, Jonathan Kessler, I probably wouldn't have made it.
He saw me messed up yet again and said, 'I can't deal with this any
more, I can't do this, I'm not going to watch you doing this to
yourself.' And he went off in tears.
"That hit me hard. And then it was a struggle. I wanted to change,
but I didn't realise how hard it was going to be." Gahan, with
considerable pressure from Gore and Fletcher, booked into rehab on
June 6, and after five days of seizures so bad he had to be tied
down, he went clean. He's been clean ever since, but the singer has
always had the seeds of self-destruction lurking beneath the surface.
Born, according to fellow Basildonian Gore, "on the wrong side of the
tracks in Basildon", Gahan's father left his mother when he was a
toddler. His mother married again, but Gahan's stepfather died when
he was nine. Gahan smiles. "From the age of about 12 I was getting
into trouble. I was a proper tearaway. I was nicking cars,
joy-riding, writing graffiti. I wasn't such a bright graffiti artist,
either. Used my surname as my graffiti tag. There weren't too many
Gahans in the whole of England never mind Basildon. I was arrested a
fair few times. Not a very good villain."
But he doesn't take the easy way out when it comes to apportioning
blame for his behaviour either then, or later when he developed his
drug habit. "It was in my genes," he says. "I would have been the way
I was whether or not my dad left when I was young. My dad died in
1990 and after that I got a bit curious about him and asked my mum
about him. I think he liked a drink. She only had a couple of
pictures of him, but one of them was of him in a pub. I thought,
'Yeah, that's my old man all right'."
The Depeche Mode story is an odd one. Formed in 1979, the group's
early line-up featured Vince Clarke (who left to form Yazoo with
Alison Moyet in 1981 after writing Depeche Mode's debut album, Speak
and Spell), and their music was bright, melodic electronic pop, with
singles such as Just Can't Get Enough and New Life. They enjoyed
commercial success, but the critics slaughtered them for being too
lightweight. When the extravagantly tonsured Gore assumed the
songwriting mantle, the dynamics shifted. The songs became darker,
the imagery decidedly gothic and the beats heavier. Along with New
Order's bass-heavy electronica, Depeche Mode's music, heavily reliant
on clattering drum machines and monumental synthscapes, was a major
influence on the techno/house explosion in Detroit in the late
Eighties. But still the UK wouldn't take them seriously.
In a rather garish suite in Home House, the hugely amiable but slight
Martin Gore, still looking impossibly youthful, remains a little
bitter about the British press. "We were hated over here in the
Eighties because we were electronic pop," he says, "so we made a
concerted effort to play everywhere else to prove to ourselves that
we were a proper band."
It was in America that they really made their mark. After years of
solid touring in the US, 1990's Violator was their breakthrough
album, selling 6 million copies. They were suddenly a stadium band,
and it wasn't long before the concomitant excess set in. The mammoth
1993-1994 world tour promoting Songs of Faith and Devotion, the
follow-up to Violator, saw the band employing a full-time drug dealer
and a full-time psychiatrist. Andy Fletcher, 39, and these days
called The General by Gore because of his good-natured bossiness,
allegedly suffered a nervous breakdown and left the tour early. The
band were travelling in separate limos. The electro-pop moppets from
Basildon who had spent much of the Eighties telling Smash Hits
readers their favourite colours, were now subsumed by full-on Spinal
Tap lunacy.
Gahan looks back at that period with something approaching fondness.
"Well, I enjoyed that aspect of it to be honest. At that point in our
career, everything had got so cartoonish anyway. We played something
like 180 shows, 25,000 people a night or something, it was kind of
insane. And it was easier for me to get through it all by becoming a
character. But the character kind of took over, and I got myself in
trouble. But, yeah, everything we did was Spinal Tap, down to the
details of the backstage snacks. You know, sex and drugs and canapes.
"For me there was definitely an element of 'Let's turn it upside
down. Let's be just what you wouldn't expect of Depeche Mode.' That's
where I was going with it in the beginning, but somewhere along the
line I got lost."
In truth Gahan's descent had begun in 1990 after the Violator tour.
"I was really bored and really safe," he admits. "I felt really safe
in my life in England in lots of ways, and I didn't like it. There I
was with a loving, caring wife (Joanne), a new baby (Jack, now 13), a
big house in the country, a couple of cars in the drive, and it just
didn't feel right. I wanted to move to California but Joanne didn't
want to."
So off he went, mirroring his own father's desertion of him, and
before long he'd married Teresa Conway, an American promoter, who
introduced him to the Los Angeles drug scene. Gahan, who'd never been
happy with himself, embraced heroin with the ardour of a lover. "It
was an escape; heroin meant that I didn't have to deal with my
feelings of being an outsider, an oddball. With heroin I didn't have
to deal with anything."
After that hellish 1994-95 tour Gahan's drugs tailspin quickened. By
1995 Conway had left him and he was living by himself in a house in
Santa Monica. In August of that year, on the phone to his mother and
befuddled with wine and Valium, he excused himself, went to the
bathroom and slashed his wrists. He bandaged them with towels and
resumed the conversation. "I just didn't like who I was or what I'd
become," Gahan grimaces.
Gore (who lives in California) and Fletcher (still a London boy)
weren't happy with Gahan either. During the recording of Ultra, their
last studio album, it did seem at one stage as though it was going to
be physically impossible to finish the record. "We spent six weeks in
a studio in New York and we only got one vocal track out of Dave -he
was so sick at the time that he could barely get a croak out," Gore
says. "The band was a mess." (At this point Fletcher interjects
jovially, "And of course you were really fit -'Oh, the rest of the
band are so out of it, I'll finish it by myself!'") The relationship
between Gore and Fletcher is relaxed but spiky (Fletcher hates being
called The General). They're clearly very good friends, and as the
evening unfolds evidently great drinking buddies, too. There's also
very little rock-star nonsense about them -when Fletcher's asked if
he resents Gore writing all the songs he responds with: "I would be
if I could write songs but I'm rubbish -I can't get beyond the first
line, 'I woke up this morning'."
Gahan, though, is still the outsider, his being interviewed apart
from Gore and Fletcher an illustration of this. "From the start of
Depeche Mode, Fletch and Martin were obviously real friends," Gahan
says with no discernible resentment. "They went to school together
and I was the odd one out, and basically I've continued to be the odd
one out throughout the whole life of Depeche Mode. We're very
different personalities and I know Fletch and Martin hang out, but I
don't think we'd ever hang out as a band. We do occasionally go to
the pub and have a drink together, but that's it really. But that's
all right, I'm OK with that now."
Depeche Mode didn't tour Ultra. Both Fletcher and Gore felt it unfair
on Gahan to submit him to the temptations of being on the road after
he had so recently forsworn drugs and alcohol. They did however, tour
in 1998, a 60-plus date greatest hits world tour. It was a massive
success with every gig selling out. More importantly, the band
enjoyed it. "It was great," says Fletcher, "a real buzz. We felt like
a band again, no stupid arguments, no ego-ridden rubbish. We couldn't
wait to get back into the studio."
It may have taken Depeche Mode a year and a half to complete Exciter
-Gore suffered six months of writer's block -but it's a terrific
record; warm and emotional. Gore, displaying a rare flash of
annoyance, is adamant that it's no more open or relaxed than previous
Depeche Mode albums. "I've always written open, emotional songs;
that's why we connect with so many people."
What is in no doubt is that it features one of the best songs Gore
has written, Freelove. Underpinned by a bubbling synthesizer, the
languid melody is handled effortlessly by Gahan. Where, previously,
his voice was a monochromatic drone or a scorched growl, Freelove,
like most of the the album, sees him employ a gorgeous, easy croon.
Maybe Gore's lyrics for Freelove inspired Gahan, because they must
have been written specifically with his travails in mind. The first
line encapsulates the theme: "If you've been hiding from life, I can
understand where you're coming from/If you're suffering tonight, I
can understand what you're thinking of, I can understand the pain
that you're frightened of/But I'm only here to bring you free love."
Gahan, married for a third time -to Jennifer -and living in New York,
is certain of the reason for his renaissance. "It'd got to a stage
where I couldn't function in the world as I knew it," he says. "And
the world I knew was pretty twisted and messed up, so I didn't really
want to function in it. Nothing was doing it for me any more. But now
I'm clean I have a real enthusiasm for life and music. In New York, I
have a musician friend who I write songs with. So I get up, go to
work, come home and have my family. It's a normal life. Now I can
focus -the reason my voice sounds better on this record is because I
gave part of myself to it. I was pretty damn naked. I don't need to
hide behind a persona or drugs. It's just me, and Dave Gahan's OK,
he's good enough. He never was good enough before."
laden goth gods drowning in drink and drugs may have resulted in
platinum sales and stadium tours, but it also nearly destroyed them.
Now the Essex boys have cleaned up and surfaced with a new album...
and a new sense of optimism. Paul Connolly reports
It's 2am in a pub in Maida Vale. The rather eccentric landlord is
presiding over a prodigious lock-in. In the corner is a blond,
blue-eyed man playing a guitar. He's belting out a classic Patsy
Cline track, She's Got You. It's Martin Gore, Depeche Mode's sole
songwriter, and he's had a few beers. The song finishes to a
smattering of applause from the ten people still standing, and Gore
asks for requests. Andy Fletcher, Depeche Mode's
multi-instrumentalist and father figure, walks up to me and says, "He
can play absolutely anything; he knows every bloody song ever
written." I shout out, "Name of the Game, by Abba."
Gore looks perplexed. "Nah, don't know the words to that one but I
can do this," and he starts to strum furiously while mumbling some
approximate lyrics before he reaches the chorus and cries, "...and
when you get the chance, you are the dancing queen, young and sweet
only 17, dancing queen, feel the beat of the tambourine, oh yeah!" So
much for the Depeche Mode of yore; dark, melancholy and troubled
precursors of American doom merchants such as Nine Inch Nails and
Marilyn Manson; a band who nearly imploded five years ago when their
drug and drink-addicted lead singer Dave Gahan overdosed on heroin
and cocaine and almost died. Depeche Mode are, whisper it, happy.
True, Dave Gahan isn't with us tonight, out instead having dinner
with a fellow recovering friend, but there's a real sense of a
rebirth about the Essex boys made good.
Finally, after years of trying to prove themselves to the sceptical
critical establishment, they've realised that they no longer need to
impress anyone. Depeche Mode, after all, are one of the most
influential bands of the past 20 years, and have been prime movers in
movements as diverse as techno and goth. They have nothing left to
prove and with their most turbulent years behind them have produced,
in their new album Exciter, a suitably relaxed, confident, positive
record.
Earlier in the day, in London's Home House, before it all got a
little blurred around the edges for his two colleagues, Gahan
concurred. "Yeah, it is a really optimistic record. But we've all got
reason to be optimistic now."
The singer, 39 next month, has recovered his saturnine pretty-boy
looks. But it's been a long haul. He suffered his near-fatal overdose
(his heart stopped beating for two minutes) in Los Angeles on May 28,
1996. He was revived by paramedics, but was promptly arrested for
possession and spent two days in prison. As soon as he was released
he scored more heroin. "I didn't know how I was going to get myself
out of this one, and there weren't a lot of people around me at the
time who were interested in getting me out of it either. If it wasn't
for our manager, Jonathan Kessler, I probably wouldn't have made it.
He saw me messed up yet again and said, 'I can't deal with this any
more, I can't do this, I'm not going to watch you doing this to
yourself.' And he went off in tears.
"That hit me hard. And then it was a struggle. I wanted to change,
but I didn't realise how hard it was going to be." Gahan, with
considerable pressure from Gore and Fletcher, booked into rehab on
June 6, and after five days of seizures so bad he had to be tied
down, he went clean. He's been clean ever since, but the singer has
always had the seeds of self-destruction lurking beneath the surface.
Born, according to fellow Basildonian Gore, "on the wrong side of the
tracks in Basildon", Gahan's father left his mother when he was a
toddler. His mother married again, but Gahan's stepfather died when
he was nine. Gahan smiles. "From the age of about 12 I was getting
into trouble. I was a proper tearaway. I was nicking cars,
joy-riding, writing graffiti. I wasn't such a bright graffiti artist,
either. Used my surname as my graffiti tag. There weren't too many
Gahans in the whole of England never mind Basildon. I was arrested a
fair few times. Not a very good villain."
But he doesn't take the easy way out when it comes to apportioning
blame for his behaviour either then, or later when he developed his
drug habit. "It was in my genes," he says. "I would have been the way
I was whether or not my dad left when I was young. My dad died in
1990 and after that I got a bit curious about him and asked my mum
about him. I think he liked a drink. She only had a couple of
pictures of him, but one of them was of him in a pub. I thought,
'Yeah, that's my old man all right'."
The Depeche Mode story is an odd one. Formed in 1979, the group's
early line-up featured Vince Clarke (who left to form Yazoo with
Alison Moyet in 1981 after writing Depeche Mode's debut album, Speak
and Spell), and their music was bright, melodic electronic pop, with
singles such as Just Can't Get Enough and New Life. They enjoyed
commercial success, but the critics slaughtered them for being too
lightweight. When the extravagantly tonsured Gore assumed the
songwriting mantle, the dynamics shifted. The songs became darker,
the imagery decidedly gothic and the beats heavier. Along with New
Order's bass-heavy electronica, Depeche Mode's music, heavily reliant
on clattering drum machines and monumental synthscapes, was a major
influence on the techno/house explosion in Detroit in the late
Eighties. But still the UK wouldn't take them seriously.
In a rather garish suite in Home House, the hugely amiable but slight
Martin Gore, still looking impossibly youthful, remains a little
bitter about the British press. "We were hated over here in the
Eighties because we were electronic pop," he says, "so we made a
concerted effort to play everywhere else to prove to ourselves that
we were a proper band."
It was in America that they really made their mark. After years of
solid touring in the US, 1990's Violator was their breakthrough
album, selling 6 million copies. They were suddenly a stadium band,
and it wasn't long before the concomitant excess set in. The mammoth
1993-1994 world tour promoting Songs of Faith and Devotion, the
follow-up to Violator, saw the band employing a full-time drug dealer
and a full-time psychiatrist. Andy Fletcher, 39, and these days
called The General by Gore because of his good-natured bossiness,
allegedly suffered a nervous breakdown and left the tour early. The
band were travelling in separate limos. The electro-pop moppets from
Basildon who had spent much of the Eighties telling Smash Hits
readers their favourite colours, were now subsumed by full-on Spinal
Tap lunacy.
Gahan looks back at that period with something approaching fondness.
"Well, I enjoyed that aspect of it to be honest. At that point in our
career, everything had got so cartoonish anyway. We played something
like 180 shows, 25,000 people a night or something, it was kind of
insane. And it was easier for me to get through it all by becoming a
character. But the character kind of took over, and I got myself in
trouble. But, yeah, everything we did was Spinal Tap, down to the
details of the backstage snacks. You know, sex and drugs and canapes.
"For me there was definitely an element of 'Let's turn it upside
down. Let's be just what you wouldn't expect of Depeche Mode.' That's
where I was going with it in the beginning, but somewhere along the
line I got lost."
In truth Gahan's descent had begun in 1990 after the Violator tour.
"I was really bored and really safe," he admits. "I felt really safe
in my life in England in lots of ways, and I didn't like it. There I
was with a loving, caring wife (Joanne), a new baby (Jack, now 13), a
big house in the country, a couple of cars in the drive, and it just
didn't feel right. I wanted to move to California but Joanne didn't
want to."
So off he went, mirroring his own father's desertion of him, and
before long he'd married Teresa Conway, an American promoter, who
introduced him to the Los Angeles drug scene. Gahan, who'd never been
happy with himself, embraced heroin with the ardour of a lover. "It
was an escape; heroin meant that I didn't have to deal with my
feelings of being an outsider, an oddball. With heroin I didn't have
to deal with anything."
After that hellish 1994-95 tour Gahan's drugs tailspin quickened. By
1995 Conway had left him and he was living by himself in a house in
Santa Monica. In August of that year, on the phone to his mother and
befuddled with wine and Valium, he excused himself, went to the
bathroom and slashed his wrists. He bandaged them with towels and
resumed the conversation. "I just didn't like who I was or what I'd
become," Gahan grimaces.
Gore (who lives in California) and Fletcher (still a London boy)
weren't happy with Gahan either. During the recording of Ultra, their
last studio album, it did seem at one stage as though it was going to
be physically impossible to finish the record. "We spent six weeks in
a studio in New York and we only got one vocal track out of Dave -he
was so sick at the time that he could barely get a croak out," Gore
says. "The band was a mess." (At this point Fletcher interjects
jovially, "And of course you were really fit -'Oh, the rest of the
band are so out of it, I'll finish it by myself!'") The relationship
between Gore and Fletcher is relaxed but spiky (Fletcher hates being
called The General). They're clearly very good friends, and as the
evening unfolds evidently great drinking buddies, too. There's also
very little rock-star nonsense about them -when Fletcher's asked if
he resents Gore writing all the songs he responds with: "I would be
if I could write songs but I'm rubbish -I can't get beyond the first
line, 'I woke up this morning'."
Gahan, though, is still the outsider, his being interviewed apart
from Gore and Fletcher an illustration of this. "From the start of
Depeche Mode, Fletch and Martin were obviously real friends," Gahan
says with no discernible resentment. "They went to school together
and I was the odd one out, and basically I've continued to be the odd
one out throughout the whole life of Depeche Mode. We're very
different personalities and I know Fletch and Martin hang out, but I
don't think we'd ever hang out as a band. We do occasionally go to
the pub and have a drink together, but that's it really. But that's
all right, I'm OK with that now."
Depeche Mode didn't tour Ultra. Both Fletcher and Gore felt it unfair
on Gahan to submit him to the temptations of being on the road after
he had so recently forsworn drugs and alcohol. They did however, tour
in 1998, a 60-plus date greatest hits world tour. It was a massive
success with every gig selling out. More importantly, the band
enjoyed it. "It was great," says Fletcher, "a real buzz. We felt like
a band again, no stupid arguments, no ego-ridden rubbish. We couldn't
wait to get back into the studio."
It may have taken Depeche Mode a year and a half to complete Exciter
-Gore suffered six months of writer's block -but it's a terrific
record; warm and emotional. Gore, displaying a rare flash of
annoyance, is adamant that it's no more open or relaxed than previous
Depeche Mode albums. "I've always written open, emotional songs;
that's why we connect with so many people."
What is in no doubt is that it features one of the best songs Gore
has written, Freelove. Underpinned by a bubbling synthesizer, the
languid melody is handled effortlessly by Gahan. Where, previously,
his voice was a monochromatic drone or a scorched growl, Freelove,
like most of the the album, sees him employ a gorgeous, easy croon.
Maybe Gore's lyrics for Freelove inspired Gahan, because they must
have been written specifically with his travails in mind. The first
line encapsulates the theme: "If you've been hiding from life, I can
understand where you're coming from/If you're suffering tonight, I
can understand what you're thinking of, I can understand the pain
that you're frightened of/But I'm only here to bring you free love."
Gahan, married for a third time -to Jennifer -and living in New York,
is certain of the reason for his renaissance. "It'd got to a stage
where I couldn't function in the world as I knew it," he says. "And
the world I knew was pretty twisted and messed up, so I didn't really
want to function in it. Nothing was doing it for me any more. But now
I'm clean I have a real enthusiasm for life and music. In New York, I
have a musician friend who I write songs with. So I get up, go to
work, come home and have my family. It's a normal life. Now I can
focus -the reason my voice sounds better on this record is because I
gave part of myself to it. I was pretty damn naked. I don't need to
hide behind a persona or drugs. It's just me, and Dave Gahan's OK,
he's good enough. He never was good enough before."