Dave Gahan Dave's Addiction (Spin, 1997)
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SPIN: What do you see when you look in the mirror these days?
Dave Gahan: That’s something I have to practice. It’s still kind of scary. I’ve spent a lot of time in bathrooms over the years. [Laughs]
You’ve been clean and sober for eight months. What’s it like not having your old methods of escape?
At times it’s very, very hard and I have to do everything I’ve been taught to stop myself from reverting back to old habits. I have to go to NA meetings every day. I have to set aside time to phone people to talk about how I’m feeling. But staying clean is a lot simpler than what I had to do to maintain my existence before.
What is it like being in Narcotics Anonymous? You’re far from anonymous.
I’m having problems with that at the moment. I have to learn to trust again, to be able to reach out to people when I need help and to take advice and not thing they have a hidden agenda.
Do you miss your old rock-star lifestyle?
Sometimes. For example, I want to go on tour again. But most of the time I’m in fear of that because I don’t think I’m strong enough to do that yet. When I got off the last tour and tried to go back to my normal life, I found that I had lost David completely. I was just Dave.
Who is David?
A very scared person who lost the ability to trust, to love or to be loved, or to feel anything at all. The only feeling that was comfortable was to be in pain. I do pain really good. It’s one of my big problems. [Laughs]
What were you using?
Pretty much anything, but my drug of choice was heroin. It was the ultimate painkiller. And it eventually took everything away.
It’s hard for people who’ve never tried heroin to understand why anybody would be attracted to such a physically destructive drug.
I would be lying if I didn’t say that it made me feel great – six years ago. But that feeling wears off so fast and then the disease takes over. I couldn’t be in a room full of people and hold a conversation without it going through my mind that I couldn’t wait to get out of there and play with my little friend.
How did living in Los Angeles affect you?
I would say it was really damaging. [Laughs] The city is very isolating and perfect if you want to withdraw. I felt safest when the doors were closed, the curtains were drawn, and I was locked inside my house. I was so scared to go out that I would wait until four in the morning to collect the mail from my mailbox.
Why didn’t anybody do something before you tried to kill yourself?
There were a lot of people telling me I needed help. But I didn’t want to listen. And everyone was in denial to a certain extent. To be honest, Martin [Gore], Fletch [Andrew Fletcher] and Alan [Wilder, no longer with the band] were pretty naïve. They thought that I had decided to become more reclusive and become this strange rock star. And I was pretty strange. It had gotten to the point where I was thinking if you want to be a rock star, you’ve got to be Keith Richards. Everything was really safe and false at the time, especially all the new so-called grunge bands. They looked right and they sounded right, but they weren’t right. And being the old-timer, I thought I’d show ‘em how to do it.
Alan once said that you’re easily influenced by other people.
Absolutely. One of my biggest problems is being a people-pleaser. I want the whole world to love me. If people seemed like they weren’t having fun, I would try to become the center of attention. I tried so hard that I forgot about loving myself. I have to check myself on that now.
But isn’t that your job, to rev up a crowd and get them to love you?
I’m much more happy to make a record. I think Ultra, our new album, is classic Depeche Mode. But to go out and justify myself is very dangerous. Just talking to you on the phone makes me nervous. I’d much rather be sitting with you so you could see me and know that I’m a very different person from the one you saw on the last tour. I feel like I’ve been there, done that, and bought the T-shirt. And now I don’t want to wear it anymore.
I think we were all worried when you started looking like a member of White Zombie. You used to be one of the ultimate synth-pop cutie-pies.
In retrospect, I was trying to create something that I wasn’t. We had gotten to a stage after Violator where I didn’t think we could go any further with what we were doing. Everything needed to be shaken up and I went about it the wrong way.
How do you feel about recent pronouncements that alternative rock is dead and electronica is taking over?
I feel very unaffected by all of that. Depeche Mode is an entity unto itself. It’s dangerous to run with that scene. I did that with Songs Of Faith And Devotion and it almost destroyed the band. People say to us, “Isn’t it great that electronic music is in now? You’re the grandfathers of all that. You fit in now!” Get over it. Our two biggest albums came out at the height of grunge.
People have always seemed to either love Depeche Mode and possess your every remix or hate you and think synth-pop is the devil incarnate.
Those are good reactions. I’d rather be getting that than plodding along in a mediocre way and not challenging the listener at all. If nothing else, Depeche Mode has changed the idea of what a rock band is. To be this band of doom and yet to go on stage and have 20,000 people screaming at the top of their lungs – what more can you want?
Obviously there was something more that you wanted.
I’m a classic addict. Whatever it is, I want more. If I’m walking through the woods and I have the choice of walking into the bramble bush or walking down the country lane, I’ll walk into the bramble bush so I could feel like I’d achieved something. But you know what? I want to take that country lane now. [Laughs] I want to smell the roses.
