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SONGS
OF INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE
[Mojo,
November 2005. Words: Danny Eccleston. Pictures: Steve Gullick.]
"
Rather like
R.E.M., that other unlikely trio, they prefer to interview separately and appear
to have chosen to live as far away from each other as feasible without moving to
the North Pole, the Marianas Trench and the moon.
"
Summary:
A near-faultless long
article - with plenty of direct comment from the band - covering the entire
history of Depeche Mode. The writer looks at the band through the filter of
their inhibitions and flaws, but never losing sight of the bigger picture. It's
a shame the author focuses more on the early years and Devotional myth: had he
had space to turn his attentions equally to other years, this would have been
a masterpiece. [4289 words]
View pages: contents page page 1 page 2 page 3 page 4 page 5 page 6 advert
Try
also: "Many
Smack-Free Returns!" [Q, June 2001]
"The Landscape Is Changing" [Q,
14th January 2005]
For 25 years, Depeche Mode have dragged soul-scouring pop out of synthesizers,
battling the ogres of smack and Basildon to emerge vindicated. Now if they could
just learn to talk to each other.
In 1996, Anton Corbijn, rock photographer to the stars, received a phone call
from one of his clients. The content of the conversation was immediately
startling.
“It was Michael Stipe,” recalls Corbijn. “He said he’d just met Dave
Gahan in a bar in L.A. And that Dave was in a terrible state. And could I do
something about it?”
Corbijn’s relationship with Depeche Mode went back to 1986, when he directed
the promo clip for A Question Of Time, a single off their fifth album, Black
Celebration. But it was the first Corbijn had heard of the Depeche Mode
singer’s violent narcotic descent.
He wasn’t the only one in the dark. In 2005, as Gahan relives his life as an
addict, he describes the decadence, deceit and black hole of self-hate: “I
lived in this place on Nichols Canyon in the Hollywood Hills. I called it the
Purple Palace, because so many people turned blue there.”
The anecdotes are uglier than in any of the rock’n’roll biographies Gahan
likes to devour. Between 1991 and 1996 he shot smack diligently, in partnership
with then-wife Theresa Conway – previously shacked up with notorious Guns N’
Roses drug mule Steven Adler. He OD’d regularly, and clinically died on May
28, 1996 having shot a speedball at LA’s rock hostel, the Sunset Marquis. He
was once discovered by his mother and eldest son on the floor of his Santa
Monica apartment, with his arms bleeding, scrabbling through bin bags in search
of his works. But none of these things made him quit.
“I swore to myself every morning… er, afternoon, when I came to, that I
would stop,” he told me two years ago. “Classic drug addict stuff –
actually believing that the adrenaline that ran through me when I was heading
off to cop, that feeling of purpose, actually meant something. A drug addict’s
life is repeating the same thing every day and expecting a different result.
It’s the dictionary definition of insanity.”
Today, clean for nine years, Gahan will admit that part of him sought entrance
to the mythic rock valhalla that membership of a geeky synth combo from Basildon
appeared to deny him. Another part was making up for a youth marked by
abandonment: the death of a stepfather at the age of 9, and the brief return
then inexplicable exit of his birth father when he was 11. Yet another sought
distraction from his increasing sense of estrangement from the band that, since
early 1980, had become his life.
“From Violator [1990] onwards, I’ve not been comfortable. I’ve been saying
we’ve got to push harder. We’ve got to almost destroy what we’ve done to
create something new. Until the end of Violator, I was happy to go along and do
my thing and be part of Depeche Mode as it was then, but then it changed and I
changed and somehow I was looking for something else…”
This month, Depeche Mode’s 11th studio album is released. Titled
Playing The Angel, it is the first to feature songs written (or as Martin Gore
will accurately, if unchivalrously, insist, co-written) by Gahan. It’s a new
phase for a band who, since the shock departure in 1981 of original songwriter
and driving force, Vince Clarke, have been defined by the monomania of
songwriter Gore, and secretly scarred by a system of internal non-communication
perhaps unique among bands. “Let’s just say,” relates Anton Corbijn,
“that if, of all the bands I’ve worked with, U2 have the most, and longest
band meetings, Depeche have the least, and the shortest.”
According to Gahan, Playing The Angel producer Ben Hillier had another word for
it. “He said that we’re by far the weirdest band he’s ever worked with.”
As Depeche Mode congregate for MOJO’s photo shoot in a nondescript West
Hollywood neighbourhood, black-clad in the blistering August heat, “weird”
is not an adjective that leaps to mind. Andrew ‘Fletch’ Fletcher – former
bass guitar player, Chelsea fan – smokes and scribbles in a pocket-sized
Sudoku compendium. Martin Gore, scrambled-egg hair balancing atop tiny head,
hides his shyness between a ready display of ultra-white teeth. Gahan, having
left behind the puffy-eyed, post-drug aura that surrounded him throughout the
late ‘90s, and indeed the unkempt “I am rock” look of his guitar-laden
2003 solo album, Paper Monsters, looks tip-top in a slick quiff and
“wife-beater” vest. As if in compensation for the low-key wariness of Gore
(leavened by the occasional, alarmingly frog-like chuckle) or perhaps to make up
for the pre-therapy and pre-solo album years of blocked expression, he raps a
mile-a-minute, his vowels contorting under the effort to assimilate Southern
Californian into Estuary English.
Gore lives 78 miles up the coast in sleepy Santa Barbara, Gahan in New York’s
West Village, Fletch in Maida Vale, north-west London. Gore is working on his
first divorce, Gahan on his third marriage. Rather like R.E.M., that other
unlikely trio, they prefer to interview separately and appear to have chosen to
live as far away from each other as feasible without moving to the North Pole,
the Marianas Trench and the moon.
They banter, strip and change shirts with the ease of men who’ve shared
minuscule dressing rooms for 25 years. Everyone around them – manager Jonathan
Kessler, label boss Daniel Miller – is calling their latest album the least
ever, but it could easily have gone the other way. Gahan made it clear after
Paper Monsters that there would not be another Depeche Mode album made under
previous conditions, but Gore didn’t immediately embrace the idea of another
writer in the band. “At first it got a pretty icy response,” says Gahan.
“But I expected that. It’s been Martin’s role, and my guess is that he
would feel that it was something being taken away from him rather than something
that was being given.”
Gore thinks Gahan could have been more diplomatic… “During the press for his
solo record, he went a bit too far, saying stuff like he felt like a puppet and
I was a dictator, and he felt he had a right to contribute. I realised during
that period that if the band were going to continue then I would have to (pause)
allow that to happen up to a point. But I didn’t think it was right that after
25 years he should step in and write 50 per cent of the songs.”
Gahan: “Martin said (adopts pinched, E. L. Wisty-type voice) ‘I think it’s
going to be very hard for Depeche Mode fans to take this.’ I was like,
Bull-shit!”
It doesn’t take a Sigmund Freud to see Depeche Mode’s story as one of
deferred conflicts, ignored crises and unexpressed emotions. When pushed on the
topic, Gore and Fletcher get defensive, but Gahan embraces the theme. “The
only way I’ll know what Martin really thinks is when I read this,” he says.
“I used to think that it was just something to do with me, but it’s just the
way he operates.”
What the three of them have always shared is Basildon, the Essex new town that,
in Fletch’s words, “went wrong”. Conceived in the utopian honeymoon of
post-war urban design, it foundered on ghetto planning, as “problem”
families from London’s East End were poured into the newer estates that ringed
the original ones.
“As the factories closed down and unemployment grew in the ‘70s it became a
violent town,” says Fletcher. “I think one of the reasons we’re still
around today is our work ethic, which came from the feeling that we didn’t
want to go back there.”
Having schooled together since year dot, Fletcher and Gore can’t remember the
first time they met; Gore vaguely recalls the former “as the annoying one down
the front in Geography who put his hand up to answer every question.” The two
would also meet at a Christian Fellowship group which Fletcher – a veteran of
Boys’ Brigade and a born-again Christian since the age of 12 – attended with
Vince Clarke. All somewhat peculiar in their way – Clarke is typically
described as “a loner”; Gore claims he self-consciously gave up drinking
between the ages of 16 and 18” – the three became music-obsessed, fixated at
first with Bolan and Bowie, then quickly embracing the new directions in
electronic pop advanced by The Human League and John Foxx-era Ultravox!.
It’s tempting to draw parallels between their environment – the dystopic
modernism of Basildon – and their enthusiasm for futurist soundscapes, but
Fletcher, ever the pragmatist, isn’t having any of it. “[Emphatically] No.
It was timing, really. After punk, people were looking for the next thing. Some
people became rockabillies, some went down that Kraftwerk / Bowie / Futurist
route. And there was the sudden availability of monophonic synthesizers, coming
on the market for £199, even £150. Like the Moog Prodigy. This wasn’t a
massive Rick Wakeman thing. This was something you could take out of a suitcase
and plug straight into a PA system.”
Fletcher, Clarke and Gore did time in various, absurdly-named bands. No Romance
In China, Norman & The Worms. Gahan – a local face with form for car theft
and cool contacts on the club scene in London and Southend – was
“discovered” at a rehearsal with Gore’s band The French Look. Meant to be
operating the drum machine, he found himself on the mike, singing Bowie’s
“Heroes”. A star was born.
“It was Vince who said we should go totally electronic,” continues Fletcher.
“Vince was so driven back then. It was his aim to make money and drive a
Rolls-Royce through the centre of Basildon. He used to work in a yoghurt factory
and earn £30 a week, of which he’d save £29.50. Without Vince’s drive
Depeche Mode wouldn’t have happened.”
Under the provisional title of Composition Of Sound, Fletcher, Clarke, Gore and
Gahan worked the Essex nightspots: pale versions of New Romantic nights at Blitz
in London and its seamier Futurist equivalent, Billy’s, where DJ “Stevo”
spun Gary Numan, Gina X and Throbbing Gristle. Playing Clarke originals and the
odd cover (Mouldy Old Dough a speciality), Depeche headlined Croc’s Glamour
Club in nearby Rayleigh every Saturday, resplendent in DIY approximations of
Blitz garb (Fletcher in bedroom slippers painted black and a purple blouse run
up by Vince Clarke’s mum).
Meanwhile Clarke and Gore hustled demos in London, buttonholing Geoff Travis at
his Rough Trade shop. It was here, in September 1980, that they first ran into
Mute Records head Daniel Miller – already the nascent indie scene’s
godfather of pervtronica since notorious releases by The Normal and Silicon
Teens (both Miller noms de synth) – but Miller was anything but impressed.
“I hated new romantics. And they looked like fake new romantics.”
By midnight on November 12, Miller had revised his opinion 100 per cent, as the
renamed Depeche Mode alchemised Spector and Kraftwerk as support to Mute act Fad
Gadget at Canning Town’s erstwhile Oi! stronghold, The Bridgehouse. “I
wasn’t really going to watch,” he recalls today. “I was going to go out
and get a burger with [Fad Gadget mainman] Frank Tovey. But this band came on,
each with a mono-synth on beer crates, and Dave stood stock still with kind of a
light box that he’d made shining underneath to make him look kind of gothy. I
thought, This song’s really good, but it’s just their first song. I’m sure
they play their best song first. But it just went on and on and on, these
incredibly arranged pop songs. They were kids, and kids weren’t doing
electronic music at that time. It was people who’d been to art school mainly,
but Depeche weren’t processed by that aesthetic at all. They were doing just
pop music on synthesizers. And it just worked incredibly well.”
By the end of the year, Depeche were a mute band. Within 12 months they’d had
the label’s first three hit singles and released an album, Speak & Spell,
that defined how commercial pop music could be harmonised with the technological
avant-garde. Then, just as the future beckoned, their sole songwriter told them
he was leaving. Never adequately explained (even Miller, who continues to put
out Clarke’s records – first Yazoo, then Erasure – allows that “his deep
reasons for leaving Depeche Mode have never been clear”), Clarke’s departure
would set the tone for all future Depeche crises: brushed over, unconfronted.
“I was the one person Vince didn’t tell,” says Gore. “He went round and
knocked on Andy’s door, knocked on Dave’s door. He said he would continue
with the tour he’d committed to with us, but basically after that he’d be
leaving. But he never had that conversation with me. Andy phoned me.”