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THEY
JUST COULDN'T GET ENOUGH
[Q,
March 1997. Words: Phil Sutcliffe. Pictures: Andy Earl.]
" Gahan wangled a support spot for his presumed narcotic soulmates, Primal Scream. But, insiders allege, the Scream were so shaken by Depeche Mode's level of excess that, thenceforth, they fervently forswore sin, and the next Primal Scream album was recorded with zero input of powder, pill or spliff. Behold, then, Depeche Mode: the band who frightened Primal Scream into temperance."
Summary:
Detailed all-purpose article on the band's history with especial focus on their
problems in the mid-nineties. The article stays at a sensible enough length not
to get too heavy and is often humourous in discussing the insanities of the
Devotional Tour. This article is the first section of three in a large feature;
the other parts are a grilling of Dave and an album
discography. [2831 words]
View pages: page 1 page 2 page 3 page 4 page 5 page 6
Try
also: "The
Highs And Lows And Rise Of Depeche Mode" [FHM, June 1993]
"Dave Gahan Slashes Wrists In
L.A." [NME, 2nd September 1995]
"I'm Hanging On By My Teeth"
[Melody Maker, 27th July 1996]
Pavement, 16th April 1997
Their last tour was one of rock's great nightmares. The singer was a junkie, the songwriter was having seizures, the sturdy keyboardist had a nervous breakdown, while The Other One (and his gallstones) left the group. Now, on the eve of Ultra, the album few thought would be made, Depeche Mode tell Phil Sutcliffe they're clean, healthy and full of strictly metaphorical Vim.
"I heard it on the radio. Dave had overdosed, nearly died, then been arrested for drugs offences. That's when I thought Depeche Mode were over," reflects songwriter Martin Gore. "We'd given him so many chances..." Recollected frustration and anger glint through the rather remote tones of his oddly Mr Bean-ish speaking voice.
Gahan's latest chance - six years into a heroin addiction which had defied two stints in rehabilitation clinics, overdoses and a suicide attempt - began last spring when he joined Depeche Mode at Electric Lady, New York, to record the vocals for Ultra, their ninth studio album. Gore had written the songs and sketched in backing tracks with producer Tim Simenon. All Gahan had to do was turn up and supply the vocals.
"But he was hiding his habit from us again - lying to us" sighs Gore, with a creak of black leather trouser on black leather sofa. "Saying things like, 'Alice In Chains are in town next week, but they won't want to hang around with me any more, now I'm clean.' We got one usable vocal out of him in four weeks and we told him, 'Go home to L.A. and sort yourself out. We'll record you later in the year.' Dave seemed quite happy to go along with it."
Gore and Andrew "Fletch" Fletcher, the band's keyboard-prodding business head and strategist, flew back to London. But, not long after, came the dread newsflash.
"Of course, I felt sympathy," Gore allows. "But I also thought, How seriously is he taking this? We're slogging away and he's so (pulls back from something harsh)...ill that he's never going to be fit to carry on."
Quite a relief, then, that just along the sofa at Abbey Road, where Ultra is reaching a civilised conclusion, sits David Gahan, sound in wind and limb. Clean - and, like every recovered addict, bare-armed to prove it - he's a proper friend once more. He listens attentively to Gore and Fletcher's criticisms and shows due concern when they describe their own crises of recent years: the cerebral seizures, the nervous breakdowns and, inevitably, gallstones, which finally prompted the collective realisation that life in Depeche Mode was killing them.
"For nearly 10 years we never put a foot wrong, we made practically perfect progress," opines Fletcher, now 36. Starting in 1980, the minute they traded guitars for dinky synthesizers, they commenced a brisk development. Where once they'd covered Lieutenant Pigeon's Mouldy Old Dough, they were alchemising the inspiration of Can, David Bowie and Einsturzende Neubaten into an airy, clever, semi-industrial bip-pop. They charted as relentlessly as Sir Cliff.
The potentially terminal departure of debut album songwriter Vince Clarke (to Yazoo, and later Erasure, replaced long-term by the musicianly and studio-wise Alan Wilder) only gave Gore the cue to whip out his songbook of ambivalent ruminations on relationships, religion and politics, illuminated by distinctive S&M domination and enslavement imagery (he claims to have used the word 'knees' more often than any other lyricist). [1]
Ever whistlesome, yet dark as death at times, they made the cover of Smash Hits repeatedly while their adventures with found-sound industrial beats would influence house and techno playmakers like Todd Terry in New York and Derrick May in Detroit.
Then, in 1990, they released Violator, a career-best Number 2 in the UK and 7 in America. Worldwide sales of six million trebled those of the foregoing Music For The Masses.
"We'd been ticking along nicely, never an unbearable level of attention paid to us," Gore, 36, reminisces. "Then Violator took off and it went over the edge."
So did Dave Gahan ("Ger-haan", though he's given up trying to standardise the Irish pronunciation) [2]. Conscious that he was nearing 30, always a recreational drug user and drinker, on the World Violation tour he deliberately set about transforming himself into the rock god-cum-monster of his more garish fantasies. Introduced to Jane's Addiction circles by Teresa Conway, previously the publicist on Depeche Mode's 1988 American tour, Gahan lost touch with the shiny-faced boy of old. He acquired long hair, a goatee and loads of tattoos; ten hours of pain went into the showpiece pair of wings that illustrate his shoulder blades.
To complete the picture, he took up heroin and left his wife, childhood sweetheart Joanne, and 5-year-old son Jack. Achingly aware that he emulated his own father's desertion when he too was 5, Gahan, now 34, contrives no excuses.
"My vision got cloudier and cloudier because of what I was putting into my body."
Feeling the pressure themselves, after the tour Gore and Fletcher went home to restore their resources with 'sane domestic life'. Their first children were born. Gore withdrew to the Hertfordshire countryside with his Texan-born wife, Suzanne, and, in due course, wrote Songs Of Faith And Devotion. With his wife, Grainne, the entrepreneurial Fletch opened a restaurant, Gascoigne's, in St John's Wood.
Gahan moved to Los Angeles and married Teresa Conway in a ceremony at the Graceland Chapel, Las Vegas, serenaded by the resident fake Elvis. Smitten with grunge, enraptured by Rage Against The Machine's metal/hip hop fusion, he thought about leaving Depeche Mode. Then Gore sent him a tape of the new songs. He loved them.
So he flew to Madrid to start recording. But when he met the band for the first time in several months, they just and stared at him. He remembers the moment.
"I'd changed, but I didn't really understand it until I came face to face with Al and Mart and Fletch. The looks on their faces battered me."
Deeply disorientated by Gahan's deliberate metamorphosis, for the very first time the four found that they couldn't work together. They took a break, then reconvened at the Chateau Du Pape, a residential studio in Hamburg. The shock that greeted the new Gahan had worn off. They adjusted and progressed.
"Dave would come forward on a real burst of energy, do a vocal, then disappear to his room for a couple of days. It was a bit odd," Fletcher notes with phlegmatic understatement.
Gahan thinks it was Wilder who eventually confronted him. "He used to do quite a bit of snooping around and he found some works in my room."
"Then we had our first ultimatum-meeting with Dave," continues Gore. "We said to him, You've got to sort yourself out. You're putting yourself in danger."
"They were genuinely concerned about my health," acknowledges Gahan. "Of course, I couldn't see that. I said to Mart, Fuck off! You drink fifteen pints of beer a night and take your clothes off and cause a scene. How can you be so fucking hypocritical?"
He stormed off to immerse himself in the pleasures of his addiction's honeymoon period.
But it was Fletcher, the commonsensical 'backbone' of the band, who came apart first. He had a nervous breakdown. Hospitalised for running repairs, he discharged himself too soon. The Songs Of Faith And Devotion tour, one of rock's great nightmares, was about to begin.
They took a therapist on the road with them. It didn't really work because, although Fletch saw him occasionally, the rest of us never did," chortles Gore. "After six weeks, we knocked it on the head." [3]
Songs Of Faith And Devotion was an instant Number 1 in the United Kingdom and America. Consequently, the tour grew and grew.
"For us, more workload means more partyload," Fletcher attests. "I know it's a cliche, but wherever you go, everyone wants to scream at you, photograph you, take you out. For the night, you're the kings of the city."
"When you finish a concert and every door is open to you, it's very hard to say, Actually, I'm off to bed," argues Gore. "I went to bed early once in fourteen months on that tour - at Park West, outside Salt Lake City."
He lets rip a rare unbridled guffaw at the thought that he can remember such a thing amid the mayhem.
Their personal dislocation worsened. They took to separate limousines as well as separate dressing-rooms - Gahan's was a fetid black-candlelit lair, whence, after the show, minions would cart his smack-blasted body back to the required hotel.
[1]
- If there was a Martin Gore Dictionary, the entry for 'knees' would be quite
hefty, especially with the sub-heading 'down on my ~':
"You
treat me like a dog / Get me down on my knees" (Master And Servant, 1984)
"She
goes down on her knees and prays" (Blasphemous Rumours, 1984)
"I'm not
going down on my knees / Begging you to adore me" (Shake The Disease, 1985)
"And I
will go down on my knees / When I see beauty" (Sacred, 1987)
"I feel
diseased / I'm down on my knees" (To Have And To Hold, 1987)
"Well
I'm down on my knees again" (One Caress, 1993)
"...the
sickliest sweet-smelling sheets / That cling to the backs of my knees and my
feet" (Home, 1997)
"You'll
be down on your knees / You'll be begging us please" (The Dead Of Night,
2001)
...and probably more if you can find them. It's really quite a timewaster...
[continue]
[2] - Aaargh! No! It's pronounced "Gaan". This is a common mistake in the press and one of Dave's pet hates (see here). [continue]
[3] - A psychiatrist and a drug dealer were part of the Devotional Tour entourage. One was used by Dave a lot, the other was intended for use by Dave. With hindsight, they perhaps knocked the wrong one on the head. [continue]