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PENANCE
EXTRA
[NME,
18th September 1993. Words: Gavin
Martin. Pictures: Stefan de Batselier.]
" In a recent interview Gahan denied that he has ever had a drug dependency, adding quickly that he did, at one time, drink too much. His press officer asked the writer not to bring up the drug subject again. "
Summary:
First of two articles (second part here)
following Depeche Mode on tour in Hungary. The author observes internal relationships and backstage goings
on sharply and critically, measuring up what the band, especially Dave, have to
say to him with what he sees. The result is the plain and awful truth about the
condition of the band, and the only article I have seen that states it so
reliably. You need to read this. [5328 words]
View pages: page 1 page 2 page 3
Try
also: "I Never
Wanted To Destroy Depeche Mode" [Melody Maker, 3rd April 1993]
"Jesus!" [Vox, October
1994]
"Dead Man Talking" [NME,
18th January 1997]
After years of stadium success, cracks are starting to appear in the fabric of
the DEPECHE MODE organisation as band members fail to communicate with one
another, preferring instead to battle with their own personal Jesuses. GAVIN
MARTIN joins the faithful, and despite being fed the party line that it’s all
wine and roses, sees something very rotten in the state of Depeche.
“You can fulfil / Your wildest ambitions / And I’m sure you will / Lose your
inhibitions / So open yourself for me / Risk your health for me / If you want my
love / If you want my love.”
Some
lines from “Judas”, a Martin Gore song, one which David Gahan doesn’t
sing, on the “Songs Of Faith And Devotion” album.
David
Gahan is breathless, metaphorically bouncing off the walls, leaping from the
couch to illustrate his points. His voice is worn away to a raw husky rasp.
Still on that adrenalin-surging, post-showtime high, he has just come offstage
after a performance in front of a 25,000 crowd at a football stadium in
Budapest, Hungary.
On the table before him there’s an inhaler to soothe his throat. His assistant
/ helper / handmaiden / protector – press officer, dressing room designer,
promotional person and bodyguard – are close at hand. This is the interview. A
quick meeting, 20 minutes, much of it pseudo superstar babble, cut short when
someone taps me on the shoulder and calls it to a halt.
The tap on the shoulder is an unnerving detail, redolent of the polite but firm
signal that ends a visit to a sick relative in hospital.
By that time David has said so much – much more than Martin Gore had to say in
an interview lasting three times as long that afternoon – it’s hard to
believe the chat has been so brief. It has also been such a sad charade, it’s
hard to believe it has been allowed to happen at all.
Gahan’s own private dressing room has been transformed into a darkened coven.
Candles burn on table tops, on flight cases and other surfaces provided by his
makeshift road furniture. Loud music blasts from his hi-fi. Jasmine incense
sticks are burned to give the atmosphere he desires. Behind him there’s a red
carpet, hung against the wall, the final touch in this full rock’n’roll
Parnassian set up. Such are the trappings that befit a Cool Icon, a man playing,
or trying to play, the role of A Rock God.
David Gahan has all the trappings, and a few of the problems, of a Rock God. His
“problems” have become Depeche Mode’s dirty little secret – everybody in
the camp knows about them but no-one mentions them. Gahan talks about them in
vague terms. He means to get things sorted out, he says. But everyone knows a
rock’n’roll tour isn’t really the place to start sorting things out.
He doesn’t look or sound like a well man. His skin is sickly grey in the half
light, his eyes sunk into bluish sockets. Beneath his vest, tattoos embellish
his biceps and torso, but the inside of his long skinny arms are all bruised and
scratched. Later someone tells me they are scratch marks inflicted by rabid fans
who tore their idol apart when he launched himself at them from a stage in
Germany.
Depeche Mode have survived, they’ve worked hard, and in previous interviews
they’ve alluded to how they like to play hard too. In a recent interview Gahan
denied that he has ever had a drug dependency, adding quickly that he did, at
one time, drink too much. His press officer asked the writer not to bring up the
drug subject again.
The only time the drug subject surfaces during our chat is when David mentions
it. He goes off the record once, but it has nothing to do with drugs. He asks me
not to print some information. “If you do I’ll have to kill you,” he says,
not too convincingly.
Dave Gahan wasn’t cut out for a cosy life in the new town of Basildon, the
cradle of the ’80s Thatcherite revolution. A clean suburb with a nasty
underside, Basildon was confirmed as south east England’s still-surviving Tory
stronghold at the last election, almost a decade after David made his escape.
Early interviews and the Depeche Mode debut single “New Life” placed Dave
and his cohorts in a modernist context, a new type of group for a new era,
appropriately rising from a planner’s dream town.
The effortless rise and rise of Depeche has masked complexities beneath the
surface. All the world sees is fame of humungous proportions. The internal
struggles, the turmoil played out in their songs, the lavish hedonistic conceit
that has grown around them all goes largely unprodded.
People think of Depeche as clean middle class boys. Though he was studying
design at college when the band formed, David was from the rough side of town
and he was an emotional yoyo as a teenager. Traumatised by his broken home
background, he turned to crime and was in several scrapes with the authorities
before Depeche provided an escape.
D. A. Pennebaker’s Depeche Mode documentary movie 101 gives a glimpse
into how fame affects a young man like David Gahan. Made in 1989, Pennebaker’s
movie captures Depeche at the point where cult following has become mass
phenomenon, focussing on a status-sealing show at the 70,000 capacity Pasadena
Rosebowl Stadium. Ostensibly 101 is about the band’s huge stateside
following and lucre-crazed nature of The Bigtime Rock Event (their toytown
capitalist satire “Everything Counts” provides the recurring keynote). But
Pennebaker is an acutely sussed documentarist and when he zeroes in on David
Gahan, the footage used is very revealing.
Two scenes stick in the mind. In a hotel room in the middle of the tour, David
graphically illustrates a fight he’s had a few nights previously with a taxi
driver.
“Letting out all that built up energy and tension like you do onstage –
it’s not enough, you’ve still got more,” he explains to the interviewer.
“That was definitely a release. I was looking for a fight for a good few
days.”
At the main event, his wife and baby child are in attendance, flown out
especially for the Rosebowl triumph. David seems to carry it all off easily,
orchestrating the chanting crowd onstage, playing the doting daddy offstage. But
when he comes to the end of the show he’s ravaged.
“I was thinking about the whole thing during the gig, everyone. I couldn’t
stop crying, y’know?” he says, falling into the arms of a Depeche crew
member. Just as he seems to be about to break down the camera pulls away.
Gahan tried to make a go of it. In 1987 he was enjoying his 19th Top
20 hit, but he told an interviewer he was still looking for his long-lost
father. “Maybe when I have a family of my own it will stop me thinking about
my dad.” He tried to settle down into a marriage with his local girl bride,
Joanne, who was running the group’s fanclub. He tried to do what friends call
“the Essex thing”. But he was leading a schizophrenic life, joining in the
wild hedonistic pursuits of his colleagues on tour while trying to keep a home
life going. Inevitably he eventually split with his wife and kid. Then he fell
under the influence of, and fell in love with, Teresa Conway.
Conway is the fresh-faced blond publicist featured in 101. Later she
worked with Jane’s Addiction. By the time she married Gahan, last year,
she’d become a thin-faced brunette. 1992 was also the year when David had to
bury the estranged father he’d never really got to know, and as he did so he
was stung by the realisation that the same sort of relationship was beginning to
develop between him and his own son. To top it all, arguments with the band
raged during the making of “Songs Of Faith And Devotion” in Spain. None of
the others even attended his wedding to Teresa. But the story was he’d come
through it all – hardened, matured, a man. [2]
Spend some time around the Depeche camp, see David’s forlorn little
expressions, hear his thinly veiled cries for help; the opposite seems to be the
case. Gahan is treated with something bordering on mild contempt by at least one
of his colleagues. “Did he meet you in his harem then?” sneers keyboard and
business operative Andy Fletcher when we get back to the hotel after the
interview. [3]
Gahan is like a lost child. He is fronting an outfit which – give or take
Martin Gore’s dalliance with bondage gear and leather skirts – isn’t noted
for its extrovert image. What’s more, he’s trying to cater for a phenomenal,
monstrous following. That’s the thing – Depeche have become bigger than
anyone every imagined. In Hungary they have become a neo religious cult,
inspired by the dark mystery and chilling invocations that run through their
most memorable music.
Blonde-haired Chico Marx look-alike Martin Gore – bank clerk turned black arts
investigator, choirboy come existentialist, geek as svengali – writes the Mode
meditations on lust and sin and death and envy. But it is Gahan who sells them,
who sings them, who is at the cutting edge where band meets fan. How do you deal
with that? David’s solution seems to become the new Peter Pan of Pop.
The Jane’s Addiction song “Wings” is playing on his ghetto blaster. He
lowers the volume but, when asked how the show went, he keeps talking about
“Wings” anyway, on his feet, arms aloft, playing out some fantasy in his
mind.
“Now with “Wings” that’s just actually how it is, that’s the song. I
was just sitting listening to that before you came in and… I saw this band at
their last gig in Irvine Meadows in California, me and my wife, we were both
there and… This f---ing song was just like it was tonight, it just BLEWMEAWAY!
“It was just like everybody could have wings for one night. That’s the
greatest feeling and this is possibly my all time greatest song for everything.
Everybody has wings. You just have to fly,” he says.
By everyone’s estimation, even the partisan Depeche crew, the gig David has
just played was a lukewarm affair, a chill Eastern European response compared to
the hot blooded Latin reception of their Spanish shows the week before. Gahan
never really gave the impression of being at the match. Sure, stadium gigs are a
hard place to communicate with the audience but it wasn’t that. His
performance was disconnected, flailing helplessly as he tried to brandish and
capture a spurious sense of bigness.
[1] - That's this article, and out of all Dave's soul-bearing pieces from this era it ranks as one of the most useful. [continue]
[2] - This article is a prime suspect for the sort of slant the writer is referring to. [continue]
[3] - What either Andy or the writer was too polite to mention is that the other band members had taken to referring to Dave as "the Cunt" by this time. [continue]