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[Uncut, May 2001. Words: Stephen Dalton. Pictures: Anton Corbijn /
Redferns - page 4 of 8]
A month after the album's release, in October 1987, Dave Gahan became a father. He and Joanne named their firstborn son Jack. Eight days later the Mode's biggest tour yet kicked off in Spain. It would rumble on for nine months, during which Gahan alternated between cocaine excess and soul-sapping guilt. "I felt like shit because I constantly cheated on my wife," he confessed six years later. "I went home and lied, my soul needed cleansing badly."
The final show of the tour, at the Pasadena Rosebowl near LA on June 18, 1988 was filmed by D.A. Pennebaker and his wife, Chris Hegedus, for the tour documentary 101. Director of the legendary 1965 Bob Dylan documentary Don't Look Back, Pennebaker knew nothing of the band before taking the job. Released in 1989 with a companion live album, 101 inevitably tells only half the story.
"We never really allowed Don Pennebaker to see the darker side of being on the road," admits Wilder. But for Fletch, a celluloid record of selling out a 70,000-seat stadium was justification enough for 101. "No-one believed an alternative band could play to so many people," he says, "and again that set the ball rolling for a lot of bands after us. We were conquering the world."
As Depeche Mode retooled their sound for the Nineties, they were unexpectedly hailed as underground dance pioneers. The rise of rave culture and acid house boosted their cool rating, especially when Detroit techno pioneers like Juan Atkins and Derrick May began to namecheck them as an inspiration. Initially, though, these veteran punks and soulboys were baffled.
"When rave culture started, a lot of techno musicians cited Depeche Mode as big influences," says Daniel Miller. "They didn't quite understand that initially. I understood it completely, but they didn't really like the music very much. They were partiers but not ravers."
In 1989, Depeche Mode flew to Detroit for a meeting with Derrick May arranged by The Face magazine. [1] Alan Wilder later described May as "the most arrogant fucker I've ever met" and his music as "fucking horrible". But for Fletch, being mobbed by American club kids at Detroit's legendary techno club Industry proved inspirational.
"We weren't getting much attention at home so to be mobbed by black kids in Detroit is something," he nods. "We thought we must be doing something right. In those days, that scene was orange juice and no drugs. We just wanted a beer. It was frustrating."
The notion of an extremely white synth-pop band from one of the whitest regions of Britain impacting on the black American club underground might seem highly unlikely - at least as unlikely as Kraftwerk helping to inspire hip-hop. But Martin Gore has always been a fan of blues, soul and gospel music. Around the time of Violator, he also discovered to his amazement that his biological father was a black American GI. This is the one subject he refuses to discuss in our interview, because it "brings up family traumas".
In the late Eighties, Depeche Mode started enlisting credible clubland remixers for their singles, from Bomb The Bass to Underworld to Dave Clarke. [2] Even so, Gore still considers dance music to be "90 per cent dross". But the chemical side of rave culture was another matter, and Ecstasy figured heavily in their Violator sessions of 1989.
"Everybody has a honeymoon period with drugs where everything's fine and you can bounce back the next day," nods Gore. "But that didn't last very long for me. I was always depressed for weeks afterwards. Obviously, everybody has a very different chemical make-up, but in the end it wasn't very productive for me."
But the band's increasingly excessive lifestyle was taking its toll. "It was just one party after another for five, six, seven years," says Fletch. "And it was good, but then it was terrible. It became too much." Beneath his unflappable exterior, Fletch began suffering from severe depression. This may have been a delayed reaction to the death of his sister from stomach cancer in the mid-Eighties, or an obsessive-compulsive streak inherited from his father. He began to morbidly obsess on every minor ailment, despite all medical evidence that he was healthy.
"It was absolutely hopeless, it didn't matter what you said," recalls Gore. "He would sit in the studio moaning with the longest face on, then would get up and kind of shuffle to the floor like an old man. There was one day after he walked out, the rest of us looked at each other and burst out laughing because it just looked like an act! We were thinking he can't be serious! But he was. That was the first week of it happening, we had no idea that he was going through depression."
Fletch finally quit the Violator sessions and checked himself into a south London hospital which, years later, would become synonymous with rock-star rehab - The Priory.
"It was quite a normal place," he recalls. "Now, of course, celebs check in there as a career move. That certainly wasn't the case with me. The day I went there for the first time I thought I was going into a mental institution. It was funny because when I went in there the geezer from the Cure was in there, Lawrence. We were both in the same situation."
Fletch initially spent a month in The Priory, returning several times over the next decade. But he insists his psychological problems are much like any normal person, famous or otherwise. "I think it would have happened whether or not I was in a band."
Soon, Fletch's troubles would be overshadowed by Gahan's. "Dave was increasingly living in his own world," says Wilder. "The most unsettling thing was that his drug use adversely affected his personality, either through enhanced aggression or the loss of his greatest asset, his sense of humour. I think I noticed it during the period of recording for Violator in Milan. The 'spanner' in him came to the fore. I remember, for no reason, he deliberately picked a fight with about 10 locals just walking down the street. I was petrified, expecting to be knifed at any moment, but somehow he always got away with that sort of behaviour."
Violator was produced by relative newcomer Mark 'Flood' Ellis, who would later work with U2 and Nick Cave, then given a sleekly contemporary mix by disco veteran Francois Kevorkian. It became a huge transatlantic hit in March 1990, spawning a slew of Top 10 singles, including the techno-glam stomp of 'Personal Jesus' and the sleek, mournful disco lament, 'Enjoy The Silence'. For the first time in the band's career, critical and commercial success came hand in hand.
'Personal Jesus' became a million-selling US single after MTV removed a shot from Anton Corbijn's video, apparently on the grounds of implied bestiality. "The shot of the horse's arse comes when there's all this heavy breathing on the track," explains an incredulous Martin Gore. "I don't know if Anton was consciously trying to be perverted, I think it was more coincidental that it happened at that point. These video people see things very strangely."
As newly crowned godfathers of the burgeoning 'alternative' scene, the Mode embarked on the 75-date World Violation tour to promote the album. In June, they filled two nights at LA's Dodgers Stadium. As support, they invited the newly formed Electronic, featuring New Order's Bernard Sumner, ex-Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr and Pet Shop Boys Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe. For a band often dismissed as Top Shop to New Order's Armani, the Basildon quartet were emerging as first among equals at this gathering of electro-pop titans.
Backstage, spirits were high and liquid Ecstasy flowed freely. "I got completely and utterly fucked up on the first night," recalls Bernard Sumner later. "There was a shower in the dressing room and I just filled it with puke. It was the worst fucking moment of my life."
Travelling by private charter plane and cushioned by a huge entourage, the Mode's own appetite for excess now took on premier league dimensions. "I wouldn't say the tour was any more intense than at many other times," argues Alan Wilder. "Tickets were selling like hot cakes and we were enjoying ourselves. There was a lot of Ecstasy around, but I couldn't say that anybody was adversely affected by that. Apparently, Dave was using heroin, but this wasn't obvious in his performances, and there was the usual amount of drinking and frivolity. It was a long tour and maybe there was a delayed reaction, with the cracks appearing later."
Gahan's marriage to Joanne had unravelled and he fell for his new love, American publicist Teresa Conway, on the World Violation tour. After the tour, in April 1992, Gahan and Conway married at an Elvis-themed Las Vegas chapel. Dave settled in LA, leaving behind a wife and young son. Ominously, his own father had done exactly the same thing.
"That was always tormenting me," Gahan says. "It was like I was walking away from something that really was a part of me and I really wanted to nurture in my life. I guess I felt fucked up over that for a while, and trying to drown the feelings. But I spent more time trying to drown the feelings than actively getting off my ass and doing something, which would have been the right thing to do."
Adrift in LA, Gahan drowned his feelings of exile and inadequacy with drugs. Like dozens of exiled Brits before him, LA became the singers fantasy rock-star theme park. Huge success and wealth only deepened the problem. Waster or not, he could get into any party, club or crack house.
"I went along for the ride and got carried away with it," Dave nods. "The problem with that is the idea became much bigger than the person, the character got out of control. So then, even when we weren't touring, I sort of felt like I had some kind of image to live up to. I wasn't making any music - I might pick up a guitar now and again and have a pathetic attempt, a terrible jam when my mates were round. But other than that it was just playing the part."
When the Mode reconvened in Madrid in March 1992 to record the sequel to Violator, the shit finally hit the fan. By setting up a makeshift studio in an opulent villa half an hour outside the city, the four members hoped the energy of living together would generate creative chemistry. In reality, after a year apart, the isolated location only magnified the widening gulf between them.
[1] - The article that resulted is here. [continue]
[2] - At the time being referred to, Bomb The Bass had just remixed 'Everything Counts' for the live single release. Underworld have since supplied three remixes of 'Barrel Of A Gun' in 1997, and Dave Clarke remixed 'Dream On' in 2001. [continue]
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