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[Uncut, May 2001. Words: Stephen Dalton. Pictures: Anton Corbijn /
Redferns - page 5 of 8]
"Dave had changed," Fletch nods. "We hadn't seen him for eight or nine months. He'd grown his hair long and he was talking about these bands we hadn't really heard of."
Inspired by the emergent grunge scene, Gahan pushed for a more gritty feel to Songs Of Faith And Devotion. "I was determined that we should be trying to do new things and be something we weren't," he says, "and not become this stereotypical band who put out the same stuff all the time. I was pushing to be heavier, to give us a rockier feel. I wanted to combine both things and I didn't feel like that had been done properly yet. There were a few bands at the time, like Nine Inch Nails and Nitzer Ebb, with that harder and bluesier edge. I wanted to RARRRRRK!! And to be honest, I kind of got my own way."
For the first time in Mode history, tracks on Songs Of Faith And Devotion evolved via studio jam sessions. Then Alan Wilder and producer Flood would tackle the 'screwdriver' work. But Gahan's passion for hard rock was more than merely cosmetic. He was living the self-destructive myth to the hilt.
"Dave was taking a lot of heroin at the time," says Gore, "which took me a while to realise. I'm not a drug expert, I don't know all the symptoms. But he was disappearing into his room all the time - we wouldn't see him sometimes for three days. And at the same time, I felt totally distanced from the rest of the band, I really didn't want to be there. Up until that point we always felt like a gang - then suddenly it felt really wrong for the first time."
The three-month Madrid sessions proved disastrous. The band scarcely communicated or socialised together. Gore became withdrawn, boozed heavily and spent days playing Sonic The Hedgehog. Gahan retreated to his room to paint, play guitar and shoot up. Meanwhile, relations between Fletch and Wilder collapsed, highlighting faultlines in the warped democracy of Depeche Mode which would eventually split the band completely.
"Alan really didn't get on with Andy," Gore explains. "We've always been honest about the fact that Andy's not really musical - when we play live we give him parts to play, but it's not exactly taxing. And Alan around that time was heavily involved with what made Depeche Mode, in production and arrangement. I think he felt that it was wrong that he was making the same money as Andy, who basically doesn't do anything in the studio."
After a few weeks, Daniel Miller arrived to check on progress. "It was such a bad vibe," he recalls. "Nothing was happening, nobody was communicating, Alan was off playing drums with headphones on, Fletch was reading the paper, Flood was trying to get some sound without anyone really helping him. The engineer had his feet up on the desk and was half asleep. It was like, what the fuck? This is the beginning of the album, it should be a really exciting time."
Although Miller was generally shielded from the band's drug use, Gahan's ravaged state was too obvious to miss. "He used to do this great impersonation of a rock casualty," Miller sighs, "but he fell into the character. It was very hard to communicate with him. Dave is one of the funniest people I know, but he completely lost his sense of humour and his ability to laugh at himself."
Gahan admits, "I could no longer poke fun at it because I'd look in the mirror and that was me. Yeah, I did lose my sense of humour. drugs will do that to you. They're not very funny. You lose your sense of anything."
Even Gahan's closest ally in Depeche Mode, Alan Wilder, became exasperated with the singer. During a rare group night out in a Madrid bar, Wilder witnessed Gahan start a "totally unprovoked" fight with a gang of Hell's Angels.
"From what I recall," Wilder remembers, "Dave took offence at being 'looked at' and made it known in the strongest possible terms to the largest and grisliest looking of the bunch. Flood, Daryl and I looked at each other with a collective 'Oh fuck, here we go...' as all the Angels left the bar. It was fairly obvious what was coming. Sure enough, as soon as we stepped out of the door when the bar closed, we were attacked. I think Dave, Daryl and Martin came off worst although the calibre of our defence was difficult for me to gauge since, being a born coward, I hung back and miraculously remained unscathed apart from suffering acute embarrassment. As the old adage goes, 'You can take the boys out of Basildon but...'"
Wilder says Gahan's increasingly erratic, macho behaviour became "an added pressure in an already quite tense group relationship. A distance formed which I found sad, considering what an enthusiastic and vital person he really is. Dave also has a very generous, open nature but therein lies the problem maybe - and yes, of course everyone tried to help him in their own way, but I don't think any of us had a clue how to go about it."
Gahan's new mood was partly rooted in insecurity about his role in Depeche Mode, and impatience with the band's defiantly non-rock image. "I wanted to give us a real leader, a real front person," he says. 'I didn't think we had any character to what we were doing. I thought that Martin wrote some great songs, but we went about it in a very nerdy way, and it wasn't really me."
But for all the friction it caused, the singer's new hard-rock agenda also catalysed a new chapter in the band's sound. The surging electro-gospel anthem 'Condemnation', for example, would become an instant Mode classic.
"That was the one song where I really sang my heart out," Gahan nods. "I really felt connected to something. It still totally moves me. It was almost touching on what I wanted to do, but I didn't have the energy or I wasn't there enough to really follow it through. I'd come in with these sporadic ideas and emotions but I wasn't there to follow it through. It was really Alan and Flood sitting there at the desk."
After a healing break, the album sessions relocated to Hamburg. These, Alan Wilder recalls, were far more productive. "By the time we started the Hamburg sessions in an altogether more suitable commercial studio, we had remembered that less people hanging around equalled more work done. Fletch went back to England and booked himself back into The Priory. Dave only really showed up to do his vocals, and that left myself, Flood and Martin - who perked up a bit - to get on and knock the album into shape."
Gore was still binge drinking in Hamburg, at one point reportedly sinking 67 beers in a single 11-hour marathon. But temporarily, at least, he managed to smooth over his friction with Wilder. With Fletch out of the way, Wilder loosened up and socialised with Gore.
Finally completed on New Year's Eve 1992, Songs Of Faith And Devotion began its rise to million-selling success by topping the UK charts in March 1993. It became a landmark Depeche Mode album even though Gahan, Gore and Daniel Miller have all since branded the final mix a flawed dilution of their original intent. Forged from shattered friendships and wracked emotions, these songs of hate and implosion almost finished the band for good.
"There was a struggle on that album - all of a sudden, after all these years together, we were becoming very separate individually," says Gahan. "The hardest job of all was probably for Flood, pulling it all together. I think that album virtually destroyed him, too. He's worked with Nick Cave and U2 and everyone, but he said to me afterwards that the darkest album he's ever worked on was Songs Of Faith And Devotion. It's amazing that we managed to pull through all that. I think there's a something about Depeche Mode that's much bigger than any of us individually. It's like some Mafia that we created for ourselves."
The Mode survived their darkest album to date. That which did not kill them had left them stronger, or so they believed. But the monstrously excessive tour which followed would push them to the brink of total breakdown.
During the first quarter of 1993, the Mode frantically cleared the decks for their biggest ever world tour - a potentially ruinous 156 dates over 15 months. Despite deepening depressions, Fletch married his long-term girlfriend Grainne on 16 January. Dave, meanwhile, was pumping himself up physically with marathon circuit training, and spent 10 hours acquiring a new winged tattoo for the tour. Neither of these rituals would protect him from the chemical chaos ahead.
With a travelling staff of 120 people, including both a drug dealer and a psychiatrist, Gahan described the Devotional tour as "like taking a mental asylum on the road". Given that it included heart-attacks, alcoholic seizures, overdoses, sinister vampire fantasies and rumoured backstage orgies, the Devotional tour has inevitably assumed legend status.
"Most of the stories have an element of truth about them," Wilder admits. "Everyone was indulging in their own thing, sometimes with destructive results, but that's all part of the private way you deal with such a bizarre and unreal world. When I look back, it seems incredible that we paid an on-the-road psychiatrist $4,000 per week to listen to our ramblings - something I think I instigated. The idea was that he could provide some kind of support for those people who wanted it - although the real reason was to try to persuade Dave to come off smack because we weren't confident he was going to make it to the end of the tour. Ironically, I think everybody went to see the shrink at some point apart from Dave, who was far too wise to the scheme."
Reporters who witnessed the tour returned with stories of superhuman sex and drug binges. Of roadies who would "pick out the 15 or 20 most beautiful girls in the crowd, evidently for the Mode's pleasure." Of Dave Gahan thronged by "drug barons" and groupies in "fishnets and stockings, incapable of even putting their lipstick on straight". Of "porn-themed" VIP areas awash with half-naked beauties. Other insiders hinted at stranger antics still, of S&M harnesses and hotel mini-bars deployed in novel but possibly illegal ways. Much of it rumour and speculation, of course.
"Everything turns into myth," sighs Martin Gore. "It never was an orgy, it wasn't completely out of control all the time. We wouldn't have survived if it really had taken on the epic proportions that everybody speaks about..." Really? That's a shame. "That also gives me a get-out," laughs Martin.
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