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Dave
gahan's horoscope
Summary:
This is an astrological birth chart and interpretation
that I drew up for Dave in April 2003. It was sent to him c/o Mute Records as his
41st birthday present, which is why I'm calling him "you" throughout.
Since then I've kept it stashed away but with another birthday rolling round
this week I think it deserves to get some fresh air! The accompanying picture is
an old family snap of Dave as a toddler, taken from the "A Broken
Frame" tour programme.
Oh and in the best Sacred DM tradition I suppose we'd better word-count it. [3256 words]
David Gahan
Born Epping, Essex, UK
Wednesday, 9th May 1962
05:00am BST
Taureans are reliable, patient,
plodders who would much rather take time and care to get something right the
first time than act a little faster only to be uncomfortable with the result. As
children they may appear to be slow learners, but in actual fact will simply be
steadily working things through in their own time, refusing to be ruffled by
others’ demands. Your persistence in seeing a particular project through to
your satisfaction can border on stubbornness, and while the right person may
possibly be able to divert you with an appeal to your finer feelings, no-one
would ever be able to drive you against your will.
One of your greatest pleasures is in food and drink, in fact all physical
or sensuous pleasures, and you like nothing more than to relax around a table
with good food and sparkling, stimulating company. Getting you to eat up your
greens was unlikely to have been a problem as a child and the best way to have
treated you for good behaviour or bribed you out of bad would no doubt have been
sweets or a burger. Even now you tend to enjoy comfort eating: a good meal makes
up for a lot of whatever might have gone wrong in the course of the day and if
you have never tried it may come as a pleasant surprise (especially to Jen) that
you are a dab hand in the kitchen.
You have an exceptionally
practical nature and a good dose of common sense which helps you make sound
decisions in business. When you decide on a course of action it will generally
be a wise one, which is just as well given the difficulty someone else would
have if they tried to turn you from it! You do, however, tend to make your
decisions very quickly, and even change them again just as quickly, which comes
out of nowhere and can startle those around you at the apparent contradiction.
Such almost blasé, at times, decision-making ought to have landed anyone else
in serious trouble, but fortunately, together with inherent practicality you
have an acute sense of intuition which can be relied upon almost as well. But
your intuition is not quite as strong
as you would often have yourself believe, and it is important not to neglect
tried and tested logical ways of reaching decisions.
Your sensible and balanced outlook makes you excellent at giving advice
to friends who may approach you with problems, and you happily make your
shoulder available for people around you to cry on when they need to. You are
sympathetic and encouraging with those who come to you for guidance and able to
empathise and identify with their situations. While you are generally expansive
in conversation and readily take on board other people’s problems, you tend to
have difficulty in getting your own off your chest, instead bottling them up and
leaving yourself frustrated. Presenting an image of yourself as strong and
formidable appeals to you, which sometimes leads you to be secretive about
personal matters. Usually this is done on purpose, but on occasions your
assurances to others that everything is just fine are put so believably that,
worryingly, you can fool even yourself.
An
open disposition, together with a warm and genial humour, have gained you a wide
circle of friends, and you thrive on being slap bang in the middle of them.
Those you choose as close friends will often be those you look to for their
experience or influence, while others value you for your reliable character.
People know that you will practice what you preach and not waste time telling
them anything you do not wholeheartedly mean. If anything, you would want all of
your friends, even those who are better described as just acquaintances, to be
closer to you than they are, as you have comparatively few people whom you feel
you can confide in and relax with as real friends.
Sometimes you need to be reminded of the difference in these two kinds of
friends and to remember that the kind of close friendship you would like is not
something you could maintain with everyone in your broad circle. You may even
lose friends, or perceive someone to be less of a friend than they are, because
of your high expectations from the friendship. As a devoted and loyal person
yourself, you sometimes expect from your friends more loyalty than they could
reasonably be expected to give, and may put yourself through needless
disappointment through being hurt if they don’t or can’t quite meet your
standards.
As
pragmatic and careful as you tend to be, this is all offset with an urge towards
the spontaneous and unpredictable. As much as you know you need
routine to feel secure, you don’t always like
it. It is almost as if one part of you is impatient with the other part and
secretly enjoys setting the cat amongst your own pigeons once in a while. You
are a highly imaginative and emotional person, who comes at almost any new
situation with plenty of energy and enthusiasm, and as such you like to play
hard, with little time for trivial or conventional leisure pursuits. In fact,
you are so naturally energetic that without some kind of physical outlet (or
better, several varied hobbies on the go at once) you can quickly feel
unfulfilled and restless.
With
all your energy and aggression a fierce temper sometimes bursts through your
normally easygoing exterior, especially in times of work-related stress or
strain. You can form strong opinions, becoming convinced you are right, and not
rest easy until everybody else has been convinced too. As an imaginative person
who is often following several trains of thought at once, you can sometimes
misjudge situations by going on the defensive or overreacting. An outburst of
anger can flare up seemingly out of nowhere and when this happens you can become
physically violent, taking it out on things around you. You have a long fuse
attached to a very large bomb. Yet you rarely fester or hold grudges, letting it
all out of your system in one go, and before those around you know it you have
gone back to your usual self.
Home
Life
Your
need for stability in the home, and security in all areas of life in general,
are especially strong. You like
routine, as routine means stability, and while you are reasonably good at
adapting to a new situation once you have been able to convince yourself of the
sense of it, you do not welcome the idea of changes on any level and would much
rather not have to adapt at all. At times those close to you, particularly
partners, could accuse you of becoming boring in this respect, as your urge to
create a safe and secure home life and fear of the unexpected can make you a
slave to your chosen routine.
Material
possessions and even status symbols give you immense pleasure, and you are not
comfortable setting up a home until you feel you have the wherewithal to give a
partner all the creature comforts they could ask for. You may at times become
over-possessive of your acquisitions or lay too much emphasis on them, and your
normally sound business head has its weak spot here. Glamour, life in the fast
lane, is irresistible to you. Once in a blue moon, the temptation to break out
of the steady, predictable, practical routine gets the better of you and you
blow silly money on something that you just saw that was crying out. Whatever it
is that appeals to you, it will not be something tastefully understated. What is
the point, you would say, investing in a fine artwork if it is only visitors to
the apartment that see it? More ‘you’ would be some mean machine you could
take a mischievous pleasure in by revving at every traffic lights. “See this
everybody?” you beam. “It’s mine!”
In
the home, trendy or even kitsch items appeal to you, and you take a lot of
pleasure in anything tactile and luxurious-feeling. Your home is your haven, so
wherever possible there will be cushions, velvets, silk or satin in the bedroom,
seats you can sprawl all over in the lounge, and the kind of carpets and rugs
that you can really wriggle your toes into.
As
comfort and security in your home life are so dear to you, anything amiss in
this area of your life spills over into other areas and undermines your sense of
stability there too. You are prepared to really put your back into work in order
to supply material needs, especially as it so often happens that you are held
back from getting the things you truly want. While possessive and proud of your
material gains, nobody could ever call you tight, in fact generosity and a
willingness to share with a friend in need are some of your trademarks.
Sometimes this generous streak and sympathy towards friends can mislead you into
lending to less than genuine ‘friends’ who promptly disappear into the
sunset with the cash you, with the best of intentions, thought was going towards
helping them out of a tight spot.
Home
life presents its especial worries to you and your colourful imagination
doesn’t help – you worry about problems before they happen, often needlessly
fearing the worst. Your possessive streak extends to family members who may
gently have to remind you that they are individuals too, and they may feel a
little overwhelmed or claustrophobic watching you obsessively organise the
details of domestic life as you see it. You haven’t quite mastered the art of
throwing useless things away, and the top drawer is probably stuffed with odd
socks that you have kept even after the other of the pair got a hole, just in
case another sock from an identical pair also got a hole. Being an occasional
scatterbrain in this department doesn’t help – many household bits and bobs
disappear for years at a stretch while you protest “I put it somewhere safe so
we’d know where to find it”.
A strong attachment to your own family (especially your mother) means
that you may have taken a relatively long time to step out from the influence of
parents. Your closest family are those of the same generation, and even now you
may have some preoccupation with childhood events, in turn being somewhat
‘clingy’ when setting up a family of your own. You always had a strong urge
to have children, and will take it harder than most parents when the time comes
for a child to leave the nest, as it means that you cannot watch over them and
keep them safe. Your tendency to worry is at its strongest where loved ones are
concerned.
Love
Life
You
tend to treasure your own independence and dislike becoming over-involved with
people, and as such this could make you a little too detached and reserved. Any
partner you choose will need to reach a rapport and mutual understanding with
you not only on an emotional level, but also on an intellectual one, sharing
common interests and presenting you with a challenging personality. They will
definitely need to be your friend before they even think of being your lover,
and if there is not the meeting-point on all these levels you will be uneasy
about starting a steady relationship. With potential partners, as with friends,
you are strongly idealistic, maybe expecting too much of them and then being
frustrated when they don’t measure up.
As such you can only show faithfulness to a partner once you are
convinced the relationship is secure and has some mileage in it, and until the
relationship gets to that point you can be an incurable flirt, maybe even
getting into affairs. No doubt you would be a little less confident in embarking
on affairs were it not for the fact that you have been blessed with the ability
to wriggle your way off of the hook, in fact, despite being a normally genuine
and earnest person, you don’t object to bullshitting for England when the
situation calls for it. If you do have a ‘fling’ it may be very spur of the
moment and you find you have expended your feelings on someone who does not
return them. You can be as much of a risk-taker emotionally as you can be
physically and financially, but have more resources than most when it comes to
working to overcome obstacles in a relationship. Should a relationship fail you
are optimistic enough to be able to bounce your way back from it with
comparatively little grief.
At heart, though, no-one could deny that you are an old romantic, in fact
it is one of your most obvious qualities. If you do sometimes become fickle or
misled in relationships it is because your heart can lead your head and you
‘fall in love with love’. You happily let your romantic nature overrule your
otherwise pragmatic, careful outlook and you make a sympathetic, understanding,
lively and fun-loving partner. A partner could never doubt your strength of
feeling as you are one of the most intense, physically passionate and
demonstrably affectionate people around, and your tactile nature makes you the
ideal person for a massage or general TLC.
A
contented home life being your priority, you are prepared to sacrifice your own
happiness or put your own ambitions on a back burner for the sake of a loved
one. You may elevate a relationship to a near-mystical level, and from time to
time have to be pulled down from cloud nine by the ankles with irksome details
like paying the bills. The pleasures of a romantic night in are so irresistible
to you that you have been known to start an argument for the sake of it just so
that you can allow your partner to appeal to your sensitive side, and then
delight in graciously patching up the argument – either with a posh meal or a
snuggle on the settee!
Career
In
work, you would be content to do boring but mundane tasks for a guaranteed wage.
As pleasant as a more high-flying and better paying career move might be with
the benefits of extra cash, this would be outweighed in your mind by the nagging
thought that the money coming in could not always be relied on. You build your
career steadily, wary of sudden leaps forward, and are patient enough to keep
your eyes on the long term result.
An
unusual career path is evident in your horoscope and Taureans are regularly
found in musical careers, with many being powerful vocalists. Fellow musical
Taureans include Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Cher, Roy Orbison, Perry Como,
Mike Oldfield and, err, Gary Glitter. Were you not to have taken this path you
would have been strongly drawn to caring, or humanitarian professions as these
are issues that concern you. Social injustice and animal welfare are also
matters important to you and you may support charities related to this.
You have immense drive and ambition to succeed, gritting your teeth in
order to achieve above and beyond usual expectations, and are rarely daunted by
failure even when surrounded by naysayers. If you are discouraged from your
aims, which are always long-term beyond what others would even consider, it will
be as a result of a little voice inside you nagging you about a fear of failure.
A lot of willpower is poured into expressing your creative or artistic side, and
this enables you to weather any failures. As such you take a great deal of pride
in personal successes which is not dimmed if those around you show indifference.
Any problem or new situation is approached dynamically and originally, as
you are a compulsive seeker and questioner of received opinions and ways of
doing things. An intellectual challenge is a red rag to you and you
enthusiastically apply yourself to study. You constantly need to be exchanging
and weighing up contrasting views and opinions, and if anything opinions are of
more significance to you than hard fact.
Once
settled on a point of view, others will have difficulty in turning you from it
and you may become entrenched. If this happens, you can follow an objective
almost fanatically, and if your charisma fails to win others round to your
obsessive pursuit of a goal or insistence on how to go about a particular
project, you can become stubborn or bloody-minded. If you feel you are in a
position to impose your views on others you can become cold in dealing with
them, and your usual forbearance dries up if you feel you are being challenged
here. You may try to browbeat peers into taking the course of action that seems
best to you even when they are uneasy, but more often you win them round either
through more subtle and cunning means or your infectious and dynamic enthusiasm.
By and large you have a good head for money and know when a scheme is
financially sound. You need to guard against schemes for getting rich quick as
your crafty streak can tempt you into wheeling and dealing, and also take care
to read the small print of anything you sign because you often don’t! Your
biggest safeguard in finance, as with most areas of your life, is that you have
the convenient knack of landing on your feet come what may.
Health
With your innate love of food
and ‘the good life’ your biggest health worry is the battle of the bulge.
Fortunately your impulsive energy means few problems here but putting on weight
may start to become a concern as you get older: you do not always eat as
sensibly as you ought to.
You have a serious inability to relax and just ‘chill out’, and this
restlessness also makes you prone to worry. This and your difficulty in
unburdening your troubles to others can mean that some kind of relaxation
therapy or meditation to give your mind a little breathing space is very
welcome, as if not addressed promptly, professional help may be needed. Worry
and stress can leave you more prone to catching whatever is going around or just
feeling generally under the weather.
Unusual health symptoms go hand in hand with the unusual career, and here
you can be your own worst enemy. Your imaginative and sometimes escapist streak
can become poisonous, and the urge to recourse to alcohol and drugs and go on
some kind of kamikaze mission here, even to the point of self-destruction, is
clearly in your horoscope. But, fortunately, so also are the emotional
resilience and ability needed to draw a line under these problems.
You sunburn easily and any cuts and grazes will take a long time to heal.
Being in your line of business it won’t be very welcome news that you have a
tendency to throat problems (even outside of what would be expected from the
strains of performing) and also to headaches. Overall you are one of the most
naturally vivacious and energetic signs and other aspects of your chart back
this up, and as you get older this will mean you are better able to remain fit
and active while being mentally as sharp as ever. Given this and your willful
character I can hear the shout go up in the old folks’ home now – “Nurse!
Mr Gahan’s out of bed again!”