Dave Gahan Back From The Brink (The Guardian, 1997)

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Back From The Brink
[The Guardian, 7th February 1997. Words: Caroline Sullivan. Pictures: Anton Corbijn.]

Newspaper feature interviewing Dave Gahan, with minimal contribution from Martin, about the upheavals of the last couple of years of his life. The focus is somewhat more on Dave's state of mind in the time since his recovery than the gory details of his addiction, and the length of the article makes it a suitable primer for someone who doesn't want to pick over every last detail of this unpleasant chapter in Mode history.
" That’s all they’re going to talk about for ever. Even in 10 years’ time, all I’ll be to them is Dave the junkie. "
Apologies for the poor quality of the scanned pages: this is due to them being printed from microfilm copies of the original newspaper.

Falling-outs, drug problems: the past six years have been hell for Depeche Mode. But, says Caroline Sullivan, it’s getting better.

Last year on May 28, Dave Gahan’s heart stopped beating and for two minutes he was dead. It wasn’t the first time Depeche Mode’s singer had overdosed on heroin (this time mixed with cocaine), but it proved pivotal. As soon as Gahan was revived by Los Angeles paramedics, he was arrested for possession and spent two nights in the cells. Bailed, he immediately scored more heroin and “thought I was going to die. When I shot up, there was absolutely no feeling at all.”

It was at this point that his friends decided that enough was enough. He was summoned to a meeting and informed he was going into rehab that day. “I went home, did my last little deal, had my last little party and checked into rehab” – the same programme, coincidentally, that Kurt Cobain discharged himself from days before his suicide. [1]

That was June 6, and, after five days of seizures during which he had to be tied down, Gahan got clean and has remained so ever since. Depeche Mode have just completed their 12th album, Ultra – in many ways one of their finest – and the band’s future looks brighter than at any time since 1990, when Gahan acquired his habit. But the 34-year-old singer, who has spent his entire adult life in the band, is still in a delicate position – well on the road to recovery, yet not so far removed from his addiction that he can discuss it without discomfort.

A number of songs on Ultra, which is even more dramatically doomswept that its five million-selling predecessor, Songs Of Faith And Devotion, seem to allude to his struggle. The claustrophobia-inducing first single, Barrel Of A Gun, is pitiless: “This twisted tortured mess… longing for some rest.” But principal songwriter Martin Gore maintains: “It’s only partly about the hell Dave’s been through. It’s written from my perspective… I have a problem with life, too.” He admits to being a heavy drinker. “You drink 15 pints a night and take your clothes off and cause a scene,” according to Gahan.

The pair are sequestered in a “junior terrace suite” in London’s arty-posh Covent Garden Hotel, finishing a week of promotion for Barrel Of A Gun, their first single in three years. Keyboardist Andy Fletcher is on phone interview duty in another room and third keyboardist Alan Wilder left unamicably in 1995, citing “dissatisfaction with the group’s working practices”.

Darkness is falling as they face the 10th and last interview of the day. Gore looks a bit wearier than in his photos but is recognisable by his nimbus of blond candyfloss – the same hairdo he has maintained throughout Depeche’s 17-year career – and his interest in leather (the miniskirts of his youth have been supplanted by more becoming trousers). Gahan is skinny, long haired and sporting something half way between stubble and a beard. Of the three Modes, he bears the least resemblance to the fresh-faced infant of the early days. The difference is enough to stop you in your tracks. As he flops on to one of the suite’s suggestively large beds, he’s restive and uncomfortable.

“We just finished an album against all odds, and I’ve been clean and sober for eight months, but that’s not of any interest to the press.”

Gore adds from the armchair where he’s slumped, “They only want to talk about drugs, especially the English press. I get really depressed thinking it’s always going to be like this.”

“That’s all they’re going to talk about for ever. Even in 10 years’ time, all I’ll be to them is Dave the junkie,” echoes Gahan. His LA-via-Basildon tones are doleful. Understandable, but not altogether fair to the press, which, presented with the spectacle of a 30-million-selling band trying its best to self-destruct, could hardly ignore it.

All three members had lifestyles unhealthy enough to rival even Elvis Presley’s. Even Fletcher, ginger-haired and clerkly, had a revelry-induced breakdown 10 months into the Songs Of Faith And Devotional Tour. That epic slog will probably be immortalised as the first to have had its own drug dealer and therapist.

That they sank to such depths is still hard to comprehend. The Depeche Mode that formed in Essex in 1980 were cuddly purveyors of plinky electropop that won them hits but not respect. All that changed in 1981 when Gore replaced Vince “Erasure” Clarke as songwriter. His partiality to both German experimentalists Einsturzende Neubaten and religious symbolism imbued the music with grim foreboding, which was enhanced by Gahan’s sepulchral voice. He imparted a certain majesty even to couplets like “People are people so why should it be / That you and I get along so aw-ful-ly?”

Surprisingly, this turned out to be what broke them in America, where they became colossal. A memorable scene in their 1989 tour film, 101, shows their accountant literally knee-deep in dollars backstage at a California concert.

Their last two albums, 1990’s Violator and 1993’s Songs Of… reached two and one respectively in the UK charts. They were relentless, saturnine collections that saw Gore waxing iconoclastic about spirituality and obsessions – not your everyday pop fare.

[1] - Dave Gahan / Kurt Cobain themed coincidences, #2: Kurt Cobain received his first guitar as a 14th birthday present on the same day that Depeche Mode released their first single, Dreaming Of Me: 20th February 1981.

 

[demoderus]

Then when Violator became their biggest hit to that time, Gahan consciously decided to transform himself into a rock catastrophe. He left his wife and son, moved to Los Angeles and began taking heroin (which he’d tried back in Basildon), in roughly that order.

Why?

“I had a hopeless fascination with death, I just wondered what it would be like on the other side,” he says simply, observing his black-varnished nails, then the impassive Gore. [2]

The moth / flame allure led to a suicide attempt in September 1995, which ended in his arrest for trying to take his own life, a crime in California. He falteringly began work on Ultra the following month. [3]

“We went into the studio with the idea of ‘Let’s record a few songs and see how it feels’, but I was still using heroin, and I’d get clean for a while and then use again, so my input was really sketchy.”

Gore shifts in his chair with a squeak of trousers and puts his glass of red wine on the table. Gahan, who no longer drinks, resolutely avoids looking at it. During the interview he touches nothing, though the suite is awash in coffee, mineral water and incisor-challenging ginger biscuits, of which he japes, “I couldn’t eat those, not with my teeth.” Actually, his teeth look like they can hold their own when he reveals them with a rare smile. [4] It’s the rest of him that seems vulnerable, though that could be an illusion created by his slightness and his eyes, huge in his small face.

“There was still the flame inside me that wanted to do this record,” he goes on, “but physically I just couldn’t do it. I relapsed several times, and after I knocked it on the head in New York I went back to LA and got back to my old tricks. Before I left I said to my girlfriend in New York… I met her in detox, she’s been clean five years and she was instrumental I couldn’t do what I was doing successfully any more. Anyway, as I left she looked me in the eye and said, ‘You’re gonna get high,’ and I said ‘Yup’. She says, ‘You don’t have to’ and I said, ‘I do’. And I went to LA and had the worst binge I’d ever had.”

He pauses, sick of the memory, sick of discussing it. Gore slumps halfway down the chair and closes his eyes, his expression somewhere between ennui and annoyance.

“I was using intravenously but it hadn’t been working for two years, so by this time I was mixing heroin with cocaine, and using so much I couldn’t fill the rig up any fuller. The last time I did it I knew something was wrong and I asked my friend not to fill the rig up so much. It’s a long story, but I had a heart attack.”

There’s a longer pause and a glance at Gore, and he finally sighs, “I can only really talk about this in the rooms, at Narcotics Anonymous, with people who know how I feel. Unless you’ve done it yourself you can never really understand.”

Gahan is worried about the effect of all the publicity on his nine-year-old son, to whom he has only recently been re-allowed access. He’s even more concerned, you suspect, about his own equilibrium, which is still shaky, though improving by the day. Seventy-five per cent of the time, he says, he’s convinced of the wisdom of getting straight; it’s the other 25 per cent that shakes him, when he’s assailed by a powerful longing to get high. “If I thought I could go and have a drink I would, but to me it’s an obsession. Twenty-four hours a day I used to be thinking of where I could go to be on my own and get up to my old tricks. I could be talking to my mother and be looking her in the eye and be dying to get away.

“It goes against the rules of the programme to be talking about this with people outside the rooms. When I share about how I feel in the rooms… I can’t wait to get back to my hotel now and phone my sponsor and tell him what’s going on and he’ll have some suggestions about how I could feel better.”

He hugs his knees to his chest and adds tremulously, “I just yearn to feel comfortable in my skin. It’s happening, but it’s taking a while,” to which there’s little to add. Gahan and colleagues are counting on the austere, lovely Ultra to help them leave the last six years behind. Gahan unexpectedly hugs me as he departs. Life before death this time.

[2] - Whatever it was, I'm really not sure Dave has got to the nub of it here, I think he is talking more in terms of how it appears to him with hindsight rather than what his rationale was at the time. A lot of Dave's comments in his early clean-up / confessional period are quite reductive in this way.
[3] - The suicide attempt, according to this article, was on 17th August.

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[4] - It's true! Take a look at any close-up of Dave on a promotional video (Useless is a good one) and he definitely has fangs. I thought, when first looking at the menacing close-up shots of Dave in the Barrel Of A Gun video, that his teeth had been deliberately blacked in in some way to make him look more wolfish and feral, but no, they are his own.