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[Uncut, May 2001. Words: Stephen Dalton. Pictures: Anton Corbijn /
Redferns - page 6 of 8]
Alan Wilder agrees that "the myth that has been building up around the Devotional tour now seems to be fully out of control. In actual fact, it wasn't really any more 'rock 'n' roll' than other Depeche Mode tours over the years - everyone had their own little 'on tour' world which existed alongside a professionally run live show. It was just longer than the others and had been subsequently better documented. The well-oiled machine meant that, quite often, our paths wouldn't even cross, apart from the two hours on stage."
Gore recalls, "There were different levels of debauchery for all the different members of the band. I really don't think I was particularly bad during the Devotional tour, I think I was worse on the World Violation tour. That was the end of the acid times, there was a lot of Ecstasy still flying around. But by the time of the Devotional tour I couldn't cope with that - mentally more than physically. I had to choose my moments."
For Fletch, too, the Devotional tour only magnified his existing problems. "It was horrible," he says. "Things spiralling out of control, the excess got worse and worse. All of us had quite big personal problems for a long time because of that tour. There was a lot of drugs doing the rounds. It was very debauched, but I was going through a rocky patch, so I wasn't so much into that. I had my own problems, which made it 10 times worse."
Support bands had a hard time on the tour. Spiritualized were sent for an early bath after a handful of dates. Then Mute labelmates Miranda Sex Garden were pelted with rotten meat and dogshit during their warm-up set. [1] Despite this, they bonded with the Mode and violinist Hepzibah Sessa would later become Alan Wilder's long-term girlfriend.
By now, Gahan was in full-on Muppet Michael Hutchence mode. Prowling a giant futuristic stage set conceived by Anton Corbijn, the singer became consumed by his crotch-grabbing techno-grunge messiah caricature. But backstage he would hide from his fellow band members in a private party room adorned with candles and rugs. Communications soon collapsed.
"It was different limos, different hotel floors," sighs Daniel Miller. "I don't think anyone spoke to Dave the whole tour. They saw Dave on stage and Dave went off into his dressing room and his candles and everything. Alan wasn't really talking to Martin and Fletch. Obviously it was very sad in some ways. But if you saw the funny side, the ridiculous side, it was Spinal Tap, too."
Gore says, "Dave and Alan had their own separate limos. Me and Andy always travelled in the same car." He also argues that separate hotel floors were a practical necessity in case individual band members threw raucous parties - like the Berlin aftershow, which ended with a police raid and a permanent ban from the Intercontinental hotel.
In Mannheim, Gahan stage-dived into an ocean of grabbing hands of fans and was almost torn limb from limb. The singer would later blame these crowd-surfing antics for the ever-increasing number of scars on his forearms. At the Crystal palace show in London on July 31, where the Mode played to 30,000 people, NME's Gavin Martin noted Gahan's wracked state: "His skin is sickly grey, his eyes sunk into bluish sockets. The insides of his long skinny arms are all bruised and scratched."
Band relations were now at crisis point. Gahan was branded "The C***" by his fellow Mode members. Meetings would end in fisticuffs. A late summer hiatus gave the quartet a cooling-off period while they prepared a live concert video and shot a promo for 'Condemnation", directed by Anton Corbijn. But when the tour's initial North American leg opened, in Canada on September 8, the madness began anew with the arrest of Gahan and his old Basildon buddy Daryl Bamonte following a hotel fracas. The singer had punched a concierge in the mouth during a power cut, and spent the night behind bars.
As the Mode progressed across the US, their hedonism took several dark turns. On October 5, in New Orleans, Gahan was stretchered away to hospital after his mid-show heart-attack. "I was told by the doctor that maybe I should continue the rest of the tour on a stool," Dave nods, "as my heart probably wouldn't take it. I looked at my manager and said 'I can't do that!' So we cancelled the next show, I got one day off, and then just carried on."
The tragicomic excess of the Devotional tour escalated, with three day parties punctuated by scarifying flights which left band members praying for their lives. In late November, in an ominous portent of Gahan's later problems at the same venue, Gore collapsed at the Sunset Marquis hotel in Hollywood.
"I didn't eat anything that day," he recalls. "We were shooting a video a couple of days before that happened and I went straight from the video shoot into a bar, and started drinking. Then I went on to a club, met some guy who gave me some stuff, so I was up all night until probably 9 or 10 in the morning. We had a band meeting at 12 o'clock and I managed to sleep for about an hour. The I got up and I've never felt so dreadful in my life. I managed to literally crawl to this meeting, I had to lay on the floor just saying 'Yes' or 'No', that was all I could muster. At some point, I tried to get up and went into convulsions caused by alcohol and drug withdrawal."
Gore recognised the symptoms. "That wasn't the first time," he confesses. "It happened two weeks previously, but I didn't know because I was on my own. I suddenly woke up and couldn't remember where I was...it was a real warning to me."
A month later, Gore was arrested and fined in a Denver hotel for disturbing the peace at a drunken hotel party. The tour then moved on to Asia and Australia and beyond. In South Africa, Alan Wilder was hospitalised with kidney stones. Meanwhile, Fletch's behaviour became increasingly erratic. Approached by an autograph hunter in a Johannesburg sports bar, he replied, "Did you call me a c*** mate?" After learning that a shooting involving the same group of people had occurred there just the night before, the band were hurriedly smuggled out the back door.
Soon afterwards, a severely depressed Fletch quit the Devotional tour, flew home, checked into hospital and swore never to play with Alan Wilder again. He was replaced by Gahan's touring buddy Daryl Bamonte after a week of coaching from Wilder.
While the Mode thundered through South America, word came through of Kurt Cobain's suicide. "I was pissed off," Gahan later admitted. "I felt like he'd stolen my idea."
With hindsight, the Mode admit that their final 1994 lap of America with Primal Scream was probably a mistake. Gahan pushed for the Primals as support: "I wanted us to swing like that, to be that loose." Fletch was in hospital by this point, but had serious fears for his colleagues.
"I wasn't in favour of doing a second American leg," he says. "I think it was probably bad news for the Primals more than Depeche. I don't even think they realised the state everyone was in at that point. I think they were shocked. The length of the tour was a mistake. That's why now we'll only commit to tours half or a third that size. It was a mistake - after the Violator period we thought we were kings, we thought we could tackle anything. And unfortunately, we couldn't."
Primals keyboard player Martin Duffy remembers the shows as "monotonous" and "soul destroying", playing to arenas full of indifferent Mode fans munching on take-out pizzas. Duffy claims, "I think we did more positive work for Depeche Mode than we did for Primal Scream. We got the band back together. They weren't speaking to each other before we went on the tour."
At one of the June Primals shows, at Jones Beach, Long Island, a deeply intoxicated Dave Gahan bit British reporter Andrew Perry on the neck. Perry was backstage in Primal Scream's party room, where he spotted the singer "shovelling coke up his nose". Gahan burbled away at Perry, then chomped his neck, vowed to "put a curse" on him, and stormed out.
"I remember reading about it afterwards but I don't really remember doing it," Gahan laughs. "I think I had some strange fascination at the time with vampires. In all seriousness, I was really starting to move into this place where I really believed what I was creating. I definitely could have been a vampire, in my own head. Even the bed that I slept in in Los Angeles was in the shape of a coffin - a huge double bed shaped like a coffin! Ha, ha! My whole life was Spinal Tap at that time..."
On the tour's last night, at Deer Park Music Center in Indianapolis on July 8, Gahan took another near-fatal dive into the crowd. He plunged 12 feet, smashed his shoulder against a row of seats, and was stretchered off to hospital. It took a day for him to sober up and realise he had two cracked ribs. By now an emaciated junkie, he checked out and disappeared with wife Teresa to a cabin near Lake Tahoe in the Sierra Nevada mountains. The singer was alive - but only just.
The Devotional tour ended with all of the Mode in emotional shreds, in a chemical haze, or in hospital. Within months, the band would disintegrate and Dave Gahan would come close to full-on annihilation. Incredibly, their darkest hour was yet to come.
The months following the Devotional meltdown should have been a time for healing, but instead they threw up fresh break-ups and breakdowns. In late August, Martin Gore married his Texan girlfriend Suzanne Boisvert. Dave Gahan, who had jammed with Primal Scream at the Reading Festival, arrived at the wedding party in the small hours with several Scream members in tow. Then he slipped away, back to his L.A. twilight.
Alan Wilder split up from his wife and set off on holiday with Hepzibah Sessa. On September 1, the couple witnessed a shockingly macabre incident near the placid shores of Loch Earn in central Scotland. As they admired the view, an RAF Tornado smashed into the ground barely 200 yards away, showering Wilder's open-topped car with debris.
[1] - From Bong 41 (Autumn 1999): "Miranda Sex Garden's percussionist Trevor Sharpe confessed to Q magazine in April, that he has fond memories of playing to 33,000 angry DM fans in Germany by saying: 'They threw a bag of shit on stage so I picked it up and threw it back!' " [continue]
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