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IN THE MODE
[Details,
April 1993.
Words: William Shaw. Pictures: Anton Corbijn.]
"
“I
hope,” Gahan tells me, “that Joanne falls in love and she can be as happy in
that area of life as I am, because then she’ll know and understand why I had
to do it. It was for very selfish reasons.”
"
Summary:
A detailed interview in which all the band members
get the opportunity to speak candidly about both the making of Songs Of Faith
And Devotion and the changes in their personal lives. I never understood Dave's
perspective on his first divorce until I read what he has to say here. At times
the interviewer's approach can become uncomfortable as he doesn't quite seem to
know when to leave a sensitive matter alone, but overall the band open up
considerably, making for a rewarding read. [4672 words]
Many thanks to Gina Gomez for kindly supplying the scans of this article.
View pages: cover page 1 page 2 page 3 page 4 page 5 page 6 page 7
Try
also: "Four
Into One" [Drum Media, 22nd February 1994]
Dave Gahan looks me over suspiciously. “I remember you reviewed one of our singles once,” he says. “Can’t remember if it was good or bad.” He escorts me into a playback room in London’s Olympic Studios to listen to seven of the tracks Depeche Mode have spent ten arduous months making. Dave tells me to sit between the two enormous speakers on the mixing desk, because that’s the best place to hear it. He doesn’t sit next to me; he’s heard it all a thousand times before. So I sit there alone and listen, scribbling notes, wondering what he would like me to say. Gahan is a bundle of nervous intensity, nodding his head in time to the music, scrutinizing me for a reaction.
When it’s over he asks me what I think of it.
I enthuse. I seem to pass the test. Gahan stands up, clutching a can of Budweiser, and says, “I was watching you and I could tell you got something.” He starts talking about this album, how it’s the best thing he’s been involved with, how it’s not been easy, about how it’s partly all wrapped up in stuff he’s been going through and partly to do with the way the world is at the moment. “It’s something that’s needed,” he tells me. “It’s a positive thing.”
For Dave Gahan, this album is therapy. The last few years have been strange and painful.
The album is pretty much finished. This is the third and final recording session. They started 1992 in Madrid, moved to Hamburg, and now they’re back in London. Today they’ve been finishing a rhythm track for “Rush”, a loose pounding of sequencers and guitars that’s a million miles from the clean electronic music they started out with thirteen years ago. Alan Wilder is concentrating on a screen full of numbers. Wearing a black woollen hat pulled down to his ears, Martin Gore sits in front of a mixing desk with Flood, the producer who worked with the group on their 1990 LP, Violator. Occasionally Andy Fletcher, who doesn’t have much to do with the music at this stage, sticks his head in to see how it’s going. Two weeks more and it’s all over.
Depeche Mode know that after a very long while they are teetering on the brink of something very large indeed. Each time they release a record they sell more, moving on from being the odd English cult artists who went Top 20 in the U.S. in 1984 with “People Are People” to filling stadiums and selling six million copies of Violator.
Dave Gahan has changed since Violator. Visually he is unrecognisable. That, originally, was the point. After the tour he needed a break. He moved to Los Angeles and grew his hair to his shoulders and made the goatee he’s flirted with in the past a more permanent fixture. He began to prefer people calling him David, though no-one really does. He started listening to Jane’s Addiction, Soundgarden, and Neil Young. “Now I’m just a total and absolute Neilhead.”
The biggest difference is in the way he acts. Before, he shared his other band members’ diffidence; now, he’s self-possessed and hyperactive with enthusiasm. I’m so amazed at the transformation that I tell him so. He lowers his voice and says, “Every single aspect of my life has changed in the last couple of years. Everything. I’d like to think that I’m a much better person than I was before.” He looks me in the eye. “I’ve been through a lot of stuff, William.”
A lot of things have happened to Dave Gahan. He comes from Basildon, a postwar town twenty miles northeast of London, significantly off the tourist maps and, in the late ‘70s, brim full of bored teenagers scuffling on the streets. Dave Gahan was one of them. His dad left home when he was about six months old, returning only briefly for a few years when Dave was seven, after his stepfather died. In Gahan’s early teenage years he got into what he describes as “a dodgy phase” stealing motorbikes; it was just what boys did in that part of Basildon. He was saved from getting into anything worse when he met Vince Clarke, Andy Fletcher, and Martin Gore, from the other, nicer side of town. The three of them were in a group called Composition Of Sound and played synthesizers. Painfully aware of a lack of charisma, they knew they needed a frontman. One day they turned up to rehearse in the local scout hall and heard Gahan running through a version of David Bowie’s “Heroes” with another band.
Depeche Mode’s first champion, producer Daniel Miller, used to be a film editor. He had a minor late-‘70s hit with “T.V.O.D.”, a primitive electronic single, so he formed his own label, Mute, and started releasing synth-pop cover versions under the banner of Silicon Teens. When he came across four real teenagers playing sweetly harmonized electronic music in a pub in east London, it was too good to be true.
It was 1981, the year of the British New Romantic movement. In those days Dave Gahan wore baggy suits and cute bow ties. A neatly coiffured New Romantic fringe drooped in front of his eyes and a stud shone from his pierced nose. Depeche Mode had a couple of hits, became pinups, and seemed to be nothing more than microprocessed bubblegum. But by the end of the year Vince Clarke, the band’s songwriter, had left (to form Yaz and, later, Erasure), and Martin took over. Gore began spending time in Berlin and, though he downplays it, was inspired by industrial noisemakers like Einsturzende Neubaten. Subsequently, Depeche Mode fashioned a harder electronic backdrop for Gore’s increasingly sophisticated songs about teenage suicide and twisted romanticism.
By the middle of the decade, Gahan too had undergone a transformation. He was no longer the slight teenager who on the group’s first tour had stood awkwardly onstage, waiting for somebody to cue up the backing tapes. Now he had a new stage routine, full of pirouettes, kicks, mike stand swinging, and sweat. Audiences began to swoon for his wiggling, leather-clad bottom.
At the time, Dave was going out with a Basildon girl named Joanne. For a while she ran the Mode fan club. In 1985 they married. In 1987 they had a son, Jack. In 1991 they started getting divorced.
Dave Gahan sits on the sofa in the studio. He wants to talk about the new album, about the divorce and his new marriage, about why everything is better now. “You start out with all the right intentions when you’re in a band, and it’s not that you lose those ideals – you just get wrapped up in the band. I thought it was time to readdress my life because there were aspects of it that were just so wrong and I had to change.”
By the Violator tour, Gahan was losing control. His personal life was a mess. A little bit of partying is fairly normal Depeche behaviour, but Gahan was pulling out the stops. The rest of the band were becoming worried. “I think he just felt that performing was the only thing he could do right,” Andy Fletcher remembers. “He was very emotional with all of us. I personally tended to steer clear of him.”
For years Dave’s marriage was falling into the familiar boy-marries-girl-becomes-rock-god trap. He was sleeping around on the road. A lot. He felt awful about it, but he couldn’t make himself stop. “You make yourself blind and you go out there. It’s great to meet lots of different girls and have fun, but then you realise what a shit you are and how you’re destroying other people’s lives – or life – with it.”
Did you feel guilty about it?
He groans and smiles self-consciously. “Absolutely. And it had been building up for years. I think…” He pauses. “Well, I know, well… I think pretty much I know… that my wife, my previous wife, was completely faithful to me. And I’d go back to her and… not lie, because Joanne wouldn’t even ask me things.”
Presumably she suspected.
“I’m sure she did. She wasn’t stupid.”
Things came to a head in 1990 when Gahan fell in love. Teresa Conroy was a publicist who’d worked for producer Rick Rubin. In 1988 she worked on Depeche Mode’s Music For The Masses tour. In those days she had bleached-blonde hair and wore punky clothes. She travelled with the band, setting up interviews and ticket giveaways on local radio stations. After the tour, Gahan headed back to Joanne and Jack in England. But during ’89, when he was in Milan recording Violator, he’d call Teresa up, often drunk, and talk about what he was doing.
They met again at rehearsals for the Violator tour. Gahan realized he had fallen in love with Teresa, and it was like being smashed on the head with a hammer. “You look at yourself in the mirror one morning and suddenly everything’s very, very different and the whole perspective has suddenly changed. Last night wasn’t just ‘I wanted to get laid’ – I didn’t want to be that person anymore. Teresa brought out some emotions in me that I hadn’t discovered, like love,” he says, touchingly.
I remind him he once said that even though he sang about love, he didn’t fall in love himself.
He thinks for a bit and then says, “Well, I think I was just denying my true feelings a lot of the time, having to lie my way through a lot of my life with people I was supposed to respect and love and care for. So I blew that completely.”
The new LP is Depeche Mode’s Joshua Tree, the moment when a cult band transforms itself with a loud declaration of self-confidence. There are still moments of minor key introversion, like in the sinister love song “In Your Room”, but much of it is rich, loud, bluesy, electronic rock. Dave Gahan’s increasing influence on the group is clear in the euphoric stadium rock of “Rush”. And there are spirituals like “Get Right With Me”, complete with gospel choir, and “Higher Love”, which Fletch appositely describes as “our Tears For Fears number”. Plus the low-key Martin Gore moment, where he steps out of the shadows and sings the ballad “One Caress” to a ringing string arrangement.
The new album is called Songs Of Faith And Devotion. It’s not the first time Martin has revelled in his love for religious imagery, but the record might also be about the last few years of Dave Gahan’s life. Gore denies that he actually wrote the album for Gahan’s situation, but its themes of love and salvation fit pretty well. In 1991 Martin became a father. Since then, he says, his songs are more “uplifting and positive”. In the words of the ever-pragmatic Andy Fletcher, the new songs are “a bit more emotional and less pervy”.
Seven years ago, I sat next to Fletcher at a meal. He was fretting about the future. “When Martin stops writing songs,” he said, “it’s all over.” It was as if he were worried that because Gore’s songwriting talent had emerged so miraculously, apparently from nowhere, that it might suddenly disappear. Martin was sitting across the table, drinking. Someone from his record company leaned over and warned that any minute now Martin was going to start taking his clothes off. “He does that when he’s drunk,” she insisted.
Martin Gore is a strange, elusive man. “I was probably a weird child,” he says, and you perch on the edge of your seat to hear just how weird he was. Then he says, “Because I quite liked school and stuff.”
Martin Gore is that sort of weird.
He came from a working-class background, the other side of Basildon from Dave Gahan. At Nicholas School, a large, grim public school, he was a likeable boy who liked to do the right thing. Vince Clarke and Andy Fletcher went to the same school, as did Alison Moyet, who later formed Yaz with Clarke, and Perry Bamonte, keyboard player with The Cure. Bamonte remembers Gore as “very, very introverted.” One typically Gore-esque incident occurred five minutes before the bell rang in math. Bamonte was begging Martin to let him look at his answers so he could copy them. Gore turned each time he asked and looked blankly at him. “He just flatly refused,” says Bamonte. “It wasn’t the done thing.”
At thirteen, he was given an acoustic guitar, and he played it to death, He enjoyed being alone. “I didn’t use to go out very much between about sixteen and eighteen; I actually gave up drink for two years.” When Depeche Mode were having their first U.P. success with Vince Clarke’s bright electro-pop songs, Martin was still Mr. Ordinary working diligently at a local bank and going to church at the local Methodist chapel. It was only when their songwriter Clarke quit the band after their first album that Gore was thrust into the role of Depeche Mode songwriter and suddenly started to turn out the strangely subversive pop songs that have become the backbone of the group.
Andy, his closest friend in the band, admits that he doesn’t really see the connection between Martin and his songs. “He’s a really normal person. He likes to drink, he likes playing football, he likes really normal things, yet when he gets into a creating mode he seems to come up with these wonderful songs which make him this hero in some people’s eyes. It does amaze me; there’s nothing in his background to illustrate why this should happen.”