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[Uncut, May 2001. Words: Stephen Dalton. Pictures: Anton Corbijn /
Redferns - page 2 of 8]
"Vince and I were born-again Christians from the age of 11 to about 18," explains Fletch. "Dave wasn't, and Martin just used to come along because he liked the singing. That was where we learned how to play instruments and sing - we learned our trade, I suppose. We used to go to Greenbelt every year from the age of 11, which is a massive Christian rock festival. In fact I once saw U2 there, in 1980."
Fletch no longer feels any faith or devotion, and is therefore condemned to burn for all eternity. "I'm worse than a non-believer," he nods. "The Bible says a person who believes and then doesn't believe is going to be spewed out of God's mouth. Then I go down to the boilers and stoke coal. To be honest, it was more the social aspect of the church, and the music. It was quite a big social scene and in Basildon, there wasn't much else to do. You had to either steal cars or go to church."
Gore was never a believer either, but an enduring curiosity about spirituality still runs through his blasphemous beats and devotional lyrics. A lover of gospel music and a keen student of everything from occultism to Buddhism, Martin has always distrusted organised religion.
"At some point I just get put off," he shrugs. "I think Jesus was one of the greatest figures that ever walked the earth. He never said a word of shit. Every book I read about him, I fall in love with him more and more, but unfortunately that doesn't help me become a Christian because Christianity is something else."
Gore also took a "quite pious" anti-drugs stance in his youth. "If I ever saw anyone doing them around me I would walk away," he says. "It was kind of a moral thing at the time, I don't know why. Maybe it was fear as well, because I'd been quite sheltered and never done it - I just didn't want to get involved."
Vince Clarke was the songwriter and driving force behind Composition Of Sound, but a reluctant frontman. One day, after hearing Gahan belting out Bowie's "Heroes" in a school rehearsal room, he offered Dave the post of singer.
"About a week later I got this phone call from Vince," Gahan recalls. "He said 'Was that you singing?' and I said "Yes" - it was actually a bunch of people singing, but I said it was me. They were already gigging as well, and I had this bunch of friends who liked to dress up and go to gigs. So we almost had a ready-made audience of about 30 people who were the cool people of Southend. Friday night people. The oddballs."
Gahan was the band's missing jigsaw piece. Although a mere mouthpiece for songwriters Clarke and Gore, his laddish charisma sent a jolt of punky rock 'n' roll through their electro-pop machine. Always a sharp dresser, he rechristened the quartet Depeche Mode after a French fashion magazine - translated literally, the name means "fast fashion", although it simply sounded cool at the time. A future supergroup was born.
Throughout 1980 and early 1981, Depeche Mode became local legends in Essex clubland. Vince Clarke honed a catchy, hook laden, upbeat pop formula that sat somewhat incongruously with the band's emerging leather and chains uniform. Martin, especially, was developing a taste for skirts and make-up which would lead to endless speculation about his sexuality.
"I honestly don't know what was going through my head when I was doing that," he sighs. "There was some kind of sexuality to it that I liked and enjoyed, but I look back now and see a lot of the pictures and I'm embarrassed. But it never crossed my mind that I might be gay. I always knew I was heterosexual. Over the years I've met so many people that have naturally assumed I'm gay - I don't have a problem with that. The fact that I'm not is neither here nor there." [1]
Mute Records boss Daniel Miller, who eventually signed Depeche Mode, argues that fetishism and bondage was key to the Essex post-punk underground. Derived from Lou Reed and Suicide, it was the region's hardcore answer to goth and New Romantic. The Mode were never New Romantics. Miller calls them "futurists - a very subtle difference." They appealed to his vision for Mute as a modernist, Eurocentric, pro-electronic label.
But his first encounter with the band, at the Rough Trade shop in west London, was hardly promising. "It wasn't that I wasn't impressed, I didn't actually listen," Miller admits. "I was in the middle of something else, they wanted to play me stuff, and I said I can't listen to it now. I just thought they looked like dodgy New Romantics. I didn't even hear the music at that point. The first time I heard the music was at this gig in Canning Town. I didn't even associate them as being the same group."
Mute were far from the obvious choice, but Clarke persuaded his fellow Mode members that Miller's left-field pop instincts would serve them well in the long term. "We've got a better chance on Mute," he explained in an early Sounds interview. "Daniel's been good to us and we like the way he operates."
Gore recalls being offered "ridiculous amounts of money" to sign with various major labels, but they chose Miller largely because they admired Mute artists like Fad Gadget, The Normal and Silicon Teens. "We were very lucky that we did," Martin nods. "One of the people after us was Mark Dean who went on to sign Wham! - that whole fiasco. I'm sure if we'd have signed to any one of those major labels we wouldn't be around today. We'd have been dropped by our second or third album."
The foursome agreed a handshake deal with Mute at the start of 1981, accepting a 50/50 profit-share which later became the god standard for artist-led labels. They would not sign a formal contract for 20 years. "I thought that if you're fair with an artist, if you pay them, give them the freedom you want and do the best to promote their records, why would you want a contract?" Miller says. "Why get lawyers involved? It just seemed impure."
Although their unorthodox Mute deal would eventually prove highly lucrative to both band and label, the Mode spent their early career watching the pennies. Even while gigging and recording their debut album Speak & Spell in 1981, Fletch and Gore stuck with their banking and insurance jobs in east London. When their second single "New Life" shot to Number 11 in June, they travelled to their debut Top of The Pops appearance by tube.
"I didn't have a choice," Fletch shrugs. "There was no advance at all." I think Vince got a small publishing advance, and we got a hundred quid, so we didn't have any money. All we ever wanted was our beer money and to give our mums 10 quid a week, and that was it. It was a bit peculiar - I think for the first two years we went to Top Of The Pops on the tube with our synths and things. I'd go into work the next day and get a standing ovation."
But just as success loomed, the Mode masterplan faltered. Vince Clarke announced his decision to quit the band even before Speak & Spell became a Top 10 album in October 1981. "I never expected the band to be this successful," Clarke said soon after quitting. "I didn't feel happy. Or contented. Or fulfilled. And that's why I left. All the things that come with success had suddenly become more important than the music. There was never enough time to do anything."
With hindsight, Fletch suggests that Clarke simply felt he could fare better outside the group - which he would soon prove with Yazoo and later, Erasure. "Vince was always the ambitions one," says Fletch. "He was the driving force behind the band initially. He was unemployed, he used to get 30 quid a week and he'd save, like, 29 pounds 86p. He used to get one loaf of bread a week."
Two decades later, Martin Gore remains baffled by Clarke's departure. "Maybe it was personal, maybe there were frictions," he speculates, "minor frictions compared to what we've put up with for the past 20 years. One thing that might have been a turning point was when he came along to rehearsal with two new songs, and he was teaching us how they went, and when he went to the toilet we just looked at each other and said, "We can't sing these, they're terrible!"
One of the new songs dismissed as derivative rubbish was 'Only You', later a huge hit for Yazoo, the pop duo Clarke formed with Alison Moyet after leaving the Mode. "Great song," sighs Fletch. "It's a mistake anyone can make."
Fletch insists post-split relations with Yazoo were amicable, but admits "You had to be careful with Alison because she'd just beat you up. She was in our class at school and she was the best fighter in the year. Once, when we were in this small Mute office, she thought we were laughing at her and she said, 'Fletch, if you laugh at me once again I'll kick you in the bollocks.' Never laugh at Alison Moyet. She will kill you on the spot."
Gore says the Mode were "in shellshock" after Clarke left, but it was also a "godsend" for his songwriting ambitions. The band advertised in Melody Maker for a replacement keyboard player. West Londoner Alan Wilder was recruited on a weekly wage of £50 in late 1981, initially for live shows only. He would not become a full band member for 18 months.
At first, Wilder's more middle-class roots created distrust in the band. "They were very 'Bas'," recalls Daniel Miller. "All their friends were from Basildon and Alan came from a slightly different - slightly posher, in their eyes - background. He was musically very adept and, at the beginning, slightly snobbish about the fact that everything they played was one-finger monophonic stuff."
Due to his more advanced abilities, Wilder was initially branded a 'muso', the ultimate punk insult. "I suppose my classical upbringing was a factor in this," he says. "What I added was an enthusiasm and desire to experiment more. I was also desperate for us to be taken more seriously, which meant producing a darker, more weighty sound."
Wilder also brought a certain symmetry to the Mode, functioning as Gahan's party-loving ally, while close friends Fletch and Gore formed a more introverted faction. Years later these divisions would fuel serious friction. But the new boy's first impressions were mostly positive.
[1] - Lest anyone still has lingering doubts about this, Martin has been a married man for some years and is a father of three. There's also his decidedly curt responses to some probing questions from a gay magazine's interviewer here. [continue]
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