Dave Gahan Dead Man Talking (NME, 1997)
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Dave Gahan, the singer with '80s pop phenomenon Depeche Mode, has died. Not for long, granted, but for two minutes last May 'super' Dave was no more, speedballed into a darker place. Not that anyone was surprised, what with the numerous other ODs, suicide attempts, years of drug abuse...In the first of a two-part special, Keith Cameron listens to one of rock's most frightening tales. Dispatch mode: Stefan de Batselier
In an upstairs lounge at Abbey Road Studios, a man perched on the edge of a large black sofa stares at the video images on the television screen. The picture, shot from above, shows a man writhing on a bed, in the throes of some sort of fit. The colours are garish, unreal.
The man on the sofa begins to circle his head and shift his upper torso back and forth in time to the soundtrack - ominous electro beats attempting to staunch an insistent flow of synthetic noise. A man's voice spits out above it all, his corroded diction echoing the man on the bed's distressed movement.
"This twisted tortured mess, this bed of sinfulness is longing for some rest and feeling numb..."
The man on the sofa lights a cigarette, places it between his nail-varnished fingertips and resumes his sedentary grooving. The images on the screen unfold, jumpy and impressionistic, like edits from a nightmare.
"A vicious appetite visits me each night and won't be satisfied, won't be denied..."
The man on the screen is mouthing the words on the soundtrack. The man on the sofa is nodding, in apparent empathy. The man on the screen and the man on the soundtrack and the man on the sofa are all David Gahan, 34 years of age, father of Jack, ex-husband of Joanne and Theresa, singer with Depeche Mode and still a living, breathing, fully paid-up member of the human race.
Just.
The video for "Barrel Of A Gun", the new Depeche Mode single, ends.
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Have you seen Trainspotting, Dave?
"A couple of times, when I've been using and when I've been sober." Dave Gahan laughs heartily and takes a mouthful of Abbey Road's best quality cappuccino. "I saw it recently and I actually found it really funny, sober. And yeah, I got pretty excited with all the using scenes! I thought it was a great movie.
"It all becomes too real, with Renton disappearing into the carpet and the Mother Superior dragging him outside. I've had that done to me and I've done it to other people. That's junkie living. When people die around you, you just boot 'em out. Your feelings are so f---ed up. When I saw it the first time round, I immediately went out and got high afterwards. I went with my friend and manager Jonathan, trying to stay clean, and went out and did the opposite. This time, I saw it in a different light. It's a fantasy. It doesn't last."
A quarter of a mile from Abbey Road, band members Andy Fletcher and Martin Gore are eating lunch downstairs in the restaurant Fletcher co-owns with his wife. Over the past hour or so, they have been discussing just how Depeche Mode, together with producer Tim Simenon, succeeded in making their new album during a period in which their singer variously OD'd, attempted to commit suicide, had a heart attack, got arrested and finally took decisive action to kick the heroin addiction which had ruled his life and informed the band's existence for the best part of five years.
"It's all been done in London, basically," Andy says, briskly. "Started September '95, then we had a six-week period in New York last spring, then Tim went to LA after that...after Dave's...thingy," his voice hastens, "to record Dave's vocals for three or four weeks, then we came back home and finished here."
Martin Gore starts shaking with laughter. "That's the best I've heard it described!" he cackles. "Dave's thingy - hahahaha!"
Dave's thingy has been the great unmentionable for Depeche Mode. Tacitly acknowledged, it was publicly denied until events took such a traumatic turn that even the considerable resources of damage limitation available to a colossally successful rock band became redundant.
Even then, it took Gahan's near-fatal overdose from a heroin and cocaine 'speedball' last summer for reality to finally bite. His admission to Los Angeles' Cedars Sinai Medical Centre the year before, where he was treated for "lacerations to the wrist consistent with being slashed with a razor blade", was not, according to official Depeche Mode statements, a suicide attempt, rather, Gahan had "accidentally cut his wrists during a party at his home". A faintly creepy photograph appeared of Gahan displaying his ostensibly scar-free wrists.
Today, however, Dave is not in the mood for dissembling. As recording work concludes downstairs in the studio vacated when Oasis fled London's tabloid glare for the countryside, he loads up on nothing stronger than coffee and Marlboro Medium, and proceeds to reveal in unflinching detail the depths to which he sank. It is the week before Christmas, and he has been clean now for six-and-a-half months.
"It helps me to be able to talk about it and not to try and pretend that none of it happened. Because that's dangerous for me. I don't want to come across like any kind of preacher for being clean. Those people really piss me off, and to be honest what they're doing is replacing their drug addiction with another addiction. I want to keep this mine. The only thing there is to share is to offer hope to people out there that they could also turn it around and get clean, it's just a matter of wanting to do it."
For Dave Gahan, it's that simple: up until six-and-a-half months ago, he didn't want to do it enough to actually do it. His story is littered with failed attempts at rehabilitation, and increasingly desperate cries for help to a dwindling circle of friends in LA. Amanda de Cadenet is one of the people he credits with helping him make that climactic step towards sobriety, just after his release from custody on a charge of possession of controlled substances.
Gahan had returned to the Sunset Marquis Hotel, his favoured venue for responsibility-free drug binges. Despite the fact his heart had actually stopped beating for two minutes as a consequence of his latest overdose, he still couldn't see an alternative. Arguing with his manager about this latest mishap, Dave blamed a "dodgy dealer downtown", insisting that had his regular Beverly Hills supplier been available, nothing untoward would have happened.
"I came out of jail and I got straight back into it," he says. "I remember Amanda came round to visit me at the Marquis, and her face said it all. She could see I was f---ed up again, and tears were welling up in her eyes. When she left it was like she was saying goodbye. So I checked out of there and got myself home, and I remember I was sitting on the couch and I'd shot up dope again, and it wasn't working. It wasn't taking away the way I was feeling any more, and it hadn't been for a long while. It had become really f---ing obvious."
Desperate, Gahan spoke on the phone to his girlfriend in New York, a reformed heroin user herself. Desperate too, she told him she wasn't able to be around a junkie. [1]
"I just couldn't do this to people any more. I didn't want my son to grow up and wonder why his dad died or killed himself. So I picked up the phone. For the first time the couple of years that I'd been in and out of detox, I picked up the phone and said, 'I need help, I wanna get clean. What do I do?'"
Notwithstanding the fact that the alternative wasn't doing wonders for his complexion, Dave Gahan looks good on sobriety. He carries his taut frame with some measure of confidence and his eyes are sharp, piercing blue-green dots. There is ready patter and a disarming undercurrent of mordant wit. On noticing that his press officer's hand is damaged after a nasty kitchen incident involving boiling hot gravy, he ponders which painkillers she could use. "Anything you want to know about American prescription tranquilisers, man, ask me. I've done the lot."
But of course, it was his close personal acquaintance with prescribed tranquilisers that constituted the core of Dave's thingy. His arms bear the healed scars of intravenous drug use. What began as recreational dabbling on the '90-'91 'Violator' tour [2] rapidly escalated after he left his first wife Joanne to live in Los Angeles with Theresa Conway, a publicist who had worked with Depeche Mode in the US and whom he married in 1992. By the time the band reconvened in Spain that year to start recording the 'Songs Of Faith And Devotion' LP, physically and mentally Gahan was a changed man. Moreover, he was a charged man - piqued by the Mode's lingering image as a fey synth-pop group whose aspirations to gravitas were too lightweight to be taken seriously, he decided to embark upon a mission to become the ultimate embodiment of rock 'n' roll.
"I actually consciously thought, 'There's no f---ing rock stars out there any more. There's nobody willing to go the whole way to do this. So what's needed? What's missing here? What am I missing? It's one thing singing the songs, but does anybody really mean it?' So I created a monster. And I made the mistake of thinking that meaning it meant you had to take yourself to the very depths of hell. So I dragged my body through the mud, to show that I could do it."
Unsurprisingly, once Depeche Mode embarked upon the massive 14-month 'Devotional' tour, Gahan's Dionysian conceit found its natural habitat. Catered to by an army of personal helpers, drug doctors and all-purpose smokescreen attendants, Dave Gahan forced his increasingly unwilling body to accede to his ego's demands.
"A couple of times, when I've been using and when I've been sober." Dave Gahan laughs heartily and takes a mouthful of Abbey Road's best quality cappuccino. "I saw it recently and I actually found it really funny, sober. And yeah, I got pretty excited with all the using scenes! I thought it was a great movie.
"It all becomes too real, with Renton disappearing into the carpet and the Mother Superior dragging him outside. I've had that done to me and I've done it to other people. That's junkie living. When people die around you, you just boot 'em out. Your feelings are so f---ed up. When I saw it the first time round, I immediately went out and got high afterwards. I went with my friend and manager Jonathan, trying to stay clean, and went out and did the opposite. This time, I saw it in a different light. It's a fantasy. It doesn't last."
A quarter of a mile from Abbey Road, band members Andy Fletcher and Martin Gore are eating lunch downstairs in the restaurant Fletcher co-owns with his wife. Over the past hour or so, they have been discussing just how Depeche Mode, together with producer Tim Simenon, succeeded in making their new album during a period in which their singer variously OD'd, attempted to commit suicide, had a heart attack, got arrested and finally took decisive action to kick the heroin addiction which had ruled his life and informed the band's existence for the best part of five years.
"It's all been done in London, basically," Andy says, briskly. "Started September '95, then we had a six-week period in New York last spring, then Tim went to LA after that...after Dave's...thingy," his voice hastens, "to record Dave's vocals for three or four weeks, then we came back home and finished here."
Martin Gore starts shaking with laughter. "That's the best I've heard it described!" he cackles. "Dave's thingy - hahahaha!"
Dave's thingy has been the great unmentionable for Depeche Mode. Tacitly acknowledged, it was publicly denied until events took such a traumatic turn that even the considerable resources of damage limitation available to a colossally successful rock band became redundant.
Even then, it took Gahan's near-fatal overdose from a heroin and cocaine 'speedball' last summer for reality to finally bite. His admission to Los Angeles' Cedars Sinai Medical Centre the year before, where he was treated for "lacerations to the wrist consistent with being slashed with a razor blade", was not, according to official Depeche Mode statements, a suicide attempt, rather, Gahan had "accidentally cut his wrists during a party at his home". A faintly creepy photograph appeared of Gahan displaying his ostensibly scar-free wrists.
Today, however, Dave is not in the mood for dissembling. As recording work concludes downstairs in the studio vacated when Oasis fled London's tabloid glare for the countryside, he loads up on nothing stronger than coffee and Marlboro Medium, and proceeds to reveal in unflinching detail the depths to which he sank. It is the week before Christmas, and he has been clean now for six-and-a-half months.
"It helps me to be able to talk about it and not to try and pretend that none of it happened. Because that's dangerous for me. I don't want to come across like any kind of preacher for being clean. Those people really piss me off, and to be honest what they're doing is replacing their drug addiction with another addiction. I want to keep this mine. The only thing there is to share is to offer hope to people out there that they could also turn it around and get clean, it's just a matter of wanting to do it."
For Dave Gahan, it's that simple: up until six-and-a-half months ago, he didn't want to do it enough to actually do it. His story is littered with failed attempts at rehabilitation, and increasingly desperate cries for help to a dwindling circle of friends in LA. Amanda de Cadenet is one of the people he credits with helping him make that climactic step towards sobriety, just after his release from custody on a charge of possession of controlled substances.
Gahan had returned to the Sunset Marquis Hotel, his favoured venue for responsibility-free drug binges. Despite the fact his heart had actually stopped beating for two minutes as a consequence of his latest overdose, he still couldn't see an alternative. Arguing with his manager about this latest mishap, Dave blamed a "dodgy dealer downtown", insisting that had his regular Beverly Hills supplier been available, nothing untoward would have happened.
"I came out of jail and I got straight back into it," he says. "I remember Amanda came round to visit me at the Marquis, and her face said it all. She could see I was f---ed up again, and tears were welling up in her eyes. When she left it was like she was saying goodbye. So I checked out of there and got myself home, and I remember I was sitting on the couch and I'd shot up dope again, and it wasn't working. It wasn't taking away the way I was feeling any more, and it hadn't been for a long while. It had become really f---ing obvious."
Desperate, Gahan spoke on the phone to his girlfriend in New York, a reformed heroin user herself. Desperate too, she told him she wasn't able to be around a junkie. [1]
"I just couldn't do this to people any more. I didn't want my son to grow up and wonder why his dad died or killed himself. So I picked up the phone. For the first time the couple of years that I'd been in and out of detox, I picked up the phone and said, 'I need help, I wanna get clean. What do I do?'"
Notwithstanding the fact that the alternative wasn't doing wonders for his complexion, Dave Gahan looks good on sobriety. He carries his taut frame with some measure of confidence and his eyes are sharp, piercing blue-green dots. There is ready patter and a disarming undercurrent of mordant wit. On noticing that his press officer's hand is damaged after a nasty kitchen incident involving boiling hot gravy, he ponders which painkillers she could use. "Anything you want to know about American prescription tranquilisers, man, ask me. I've done the lot."
But of course, it was his close personal acquaintance with prescribed tranquilisers that constituted the core of Dave's thingy. His arms bear the healed scars of intravenous drug use. What began as recreational dabbling on the '90-'91 'Violator' tour [2] rapidly escalated after he left his first wife Joanne to live in Los Angeles with Theresa Conway, a publicist who had worked with Depeche Mode in the US and whom he married in 1992. By the time the band reconvened in Spain that year to start recording the 'Songs Of Faith And Devotion' LP, physically and mentally Gahan was a changed man. Moreover, he was a charged man - piqued by the Mode's lingering image as a fey synth-pop group whose aspirations to gravitas were too lightweight to be taken seriously, he decided to embark upon a mission to become the ultimate embodiment of rock 'n' roll.
"I actually consciously thought, 'There's no f---ing rock stars out there any more. There's nobody willing to go the whole way to do this. So what's needed? What's missing here? What am I missing? It's one thing singing the songs, but does anybody really mean it?' So I created a monster. And I made the mistake of thinking that meaning it meant you had to take yourself to the very depths of hell. So I dragged my body through the mud, to show that I could do it."
Unsurprisingly, once Depeche Mode embarked upon the massive 14-month 'Devotional' tour, Gahan's Dionysian conceit found its natural habitat. Catered to by an army of personal helpers, drug doctors and all-purpose smokescreen attendants, Dave Gahan forced his increasingly unwilling body to accede to his ego's demands.
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"It wasn't really apparent to me at the time, but I had become a complete cliche of myself. I remember in Chile, when I got the news that Kurt had blown his head off, my first reaction was that I was angry. I was pissed off. I felt like he'd stolen my idea, like he'd beat me to it. That's how f---ed up I was. I really was that gone."
The tour finally wound up midway through 1994. Dave Gahan's excuse to act like God day after day had gone, but not his heroin addiction. By Christmas of that year, he had decided to go into rehab. Checking himself into a clinic in Arizona, he stayed there for six weeks and sobered up. On leaving, he met up with his wife. Over lunch he informed her of his intentions to stay clean.
"That's when it really dawned on me - 'I'm talking about the rest of my life here.' So of course, it wasn't long after that that I started using again, but in secret. Gradually, she got sick and tired of picking me up off the floor, and she decided to split."
The break-up of his second marriage appears pivotal to Gahan's subsequently rapid journey to rock bottom. Each attempt to get clean would result in a progressively more intense relapse back onto heroin. Alone, either at home or at the Sunset Marquis, he vented his unhappiness upon himself.
"Trust issues have been going on all my life, so when Theresa left I was then give the excuse to go out and get even more f---ed up. I was hellbent on going the whole hog. My wife had left me, friends were disappearing and so I was left surrounded by a bunch of junkies. And I knew exactly what was going on - y'know, I had the money, I had the drugs and that's why they were around. I knew it, and that fuelled my anger even more."
Still he went to clinics, yet still he always checked out and then checked in again at the Marquis.
"I didn't know whether I wanted to get clean. It was becoming very apparent that the party was gonna be over pretty soon. I was either gonna die or I was gonna get sober."
In August 1995, Gahan attempted the latter before opting for the former. Returning from a detox unit, he discovered that his house had been burgled. Everything was gone: TVs, recording studio, two Harley Davidsons, even cutlery. On leaving, the robbers had reset the alarm code. Seeing as the only people who knew the code were himself, a few close friends and a couple of workmen, Gahan assumed it was an inside job, that his 'friends' had extracted revenge on him for trying to clean up.
"It all seemed very sinister, like this f---ed up LA movie that I was actually in. And I thought, 'I'm not really supposed to f---ing be here. And perhaps if I'm not around everyone else could get on with their lives.'"
He went to the Sunset Marquis and phoned his mother to tell her he'd just come out of rehab again. His mother, however, said she had just been told he'd never been to rehab in his life. The fact that his mother didn't even believe him was the final excuse Gahan needed to make his most dramatic artistic statement thus far. He shot up, went into the bathroom and slashed his wrists, "knowing that somebody would come by in the end". Which they did. His bloody arms wrapped in towels, Gahan was on the verge of unconsciousness by the time a friend dropped by and dialled the emergency services. He was brought round by the searing pain of his wrists being stitched; there wasn't time for an anaesthetic.
"The paramedic said to me, 'You silly sod, not you again!' The same team of paramedics in West Hollywood came and picked me up quite a few times. They were starting to call me 'The Cat'! Like, 'You're running out, Dave, you're running out...' Anyway, I woke up the next morning in a psychiatric ward, strapped up, the full padded cell. First of all, I thought I might be dead, then this psychiatrist came in and informed me that it was a felony to take your own life in California - so I was busted for trying to kill myself! [1] Hahaha! I'm glad I can laugh about it now."
The Cat talked himself out of the straitjacket and went back to his old tricks, first at the Sunset Marquis, then a rented pad in Santa Monica, from where he "got into some serious using" - yes, the mind does boggle - and hid from the world behind increasingly black mental drapes.
"Things went from worse to worse. There were loads of other occasions of overdoses, waking up outside dealers' places downtown, on the lawn with no clothes on, robbed. But there were always people to pick me up. I'd go to these meetings and be f---ing high as a kite among all these sober people. And you can't imagine a worse place to be when you're loaded! I used to go to the bathroom and shoot up then come back and raise my hand and say, 'I got 30 seconds clean!' I was taking the piss, really, but I was doing it to myself."
The tour finally wound up midway through 1994. Dave Gahan's excuse to act like God day after day had gone, but not his heroin addiction. By Christmas of that year, he had decided to go into rehab. Checking himself into a clinic in Arizona, he stayed there for six weeks and sobered up. On leaving, he met up with his wife. Over lunch he informed her of his intentions to stay clean.
"That's when it really dawned on me - 'I'm talking about the rest of my life here.' So of course, it wasn't long after that that I started using again, but in secret. Gradually, she got sick and tired of picking me up off the floor, and she decided to split."
The break-up of his second marriage appears pivotal to Gahan's subsequently rapid journey to rock bottom. Each attempt to get clean would result in a progressively more intense relapse back onto heroin. Alone, either at home or at the Sunset Marquis, he vented his unhappiness upon himself.
"Trust issues have been going on all my life, so when Theresa left I was then give the excuse to go out and get even more f---ed up. I was hellbent on going the whole hog. My wife had left me, friends were disappearing and so I was left surrounded by a bunch of junkies. And I knew exactly what was going on - y'know, I had the money, I had the drugs and that's why they were around. I knew it, and that fuelled my anger even more."
Still he went to clinics, yet still he always checked out and then checked in again at the Marquis.
"I didn't know whether I wanted to get clean. It was becoming very apparent that the party was gonna be over pretty soon. I was either gonna die or I was gonna get sober."
In August 1995, Gahan attempted the latter before opting for the former. Returning from a detox unit, he discovered that his house had been burgled. Everything was gone: TVs, recording studio, two Harley Davidsons, even cutlery. On leaving, the robbers had reset the alarm code. Seeing as the only people who knew the code were himself, a few close friends and a couple of workmen, Gahan assumed it was an inside job, that his 'friends' had extracted revenge on him for trying to clean up.
"It all seemed very sinister, like this f---ed up LA movie that I was actually in. And I thought, 'I'm not really supposed to f---ing be here. And perhaps if I'm not around everyone else could get on with their lives.'"
He went to the Sunset Marquis and phoned his mother to tell her he'd just come out of rehab again. His mother, however, said she had just been told he'd never been to rehab in his life. The fact that his mother didn't even believe him was the final excuse Gahan needed to make his most dramatic artistic statement thus far. He shot up, went into the bathroom and slashed his wrists, "knowing that somebody would come by in the end". Which they did. His bloody arms wrapped in towels, Gahan was on the verge of unconsciousness by the time a friend dropped by and dialled the emergency services. He was brought round by the searing pain of his wrists being stitched; there wasn't time for an anaesthetic.
"The paramedic said to me, 'You silly sod, not you again!' The same team of paramedics in West Hollywood came and picked me up quite a few times. They were starting to call me 'The Cat'! Like, 'You're running out, Dave, you're running out...' Anyway, I woke up the next morning in a psychiatric ward, strapped up, the full padded cell. First of all, I thought I might be dead, then this psychiatrist came in and informed me that it was a felony to take your own life in California - so I was busted for trying to kill myself! [1] Hahaha! I'm glad I can laugh about it now."
The Cat talked himself out of the straitjacket and went back to his old tricks, first at the Sunset Marquis, then a rented pad in Santa Monica, from where he "got into some serious using" - yes, the mind does boggle - and hid from the world behind increasingly black mental drapes.
"Things went from worse to worse. There were loads of other occasions of overdoses, waking up outside dealers' places downtown, on the lawn with no clothes on, robbed. But there were always people to pick me up. I'd go to these meetings and be f---ing high as a kite among all these sober people. And you can't imagine a worse place to be when you're loaded! I used to go to the bathroom and shoot up then come back and raise my hand and say, 'I got 30 seconds clean!' I was taking the piss, really, but I was doing it to myself."
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In the midst of all this, work on the next Depeche Mode album was under way in London. In the spring of last year, they all met in New York, a halfway house location - "to give Dave a boost," as Fletch remembers it. The intention was to spend six weeks there, during which Dave would record his vocals. After six weeks, only one usable vocal was completed.
"I was going through the motions," he admits.
By this point, Gahan was shooting up heroin and cocaine, because neither was working individually any more. But for that matter, neither worked together either, much to his annoyance.
He returned from New York with a plan: "To go f---ing mental. The definition of insanity is repeating the same action but expecting a different result. I'd been told this so many times, but I was like, there's nothing wrong with me, I can handle it, I can kick it...I couldn't! I was definitely on a death wish. I wanted to know what it was all about, if I had the chance to go somewhere else and get away from myself. Which, of course, was all a fantasy. That was the first time it hit home what a junkie I was.
"I went through a phase for a little while, if I couldn't get dope I'd be virtually shooting water. Just squeezing out the cotton, getting whatever was left, just for tying off and banging off. I was definitely into the ritual side of things. In fact, now I think about it, the naughty boy excitement stuff of going and getting it, when the drugs weren't working any more, that was the big thing. Scoring without having me head blown off - that was it."
David Gahan duly went f---ing mental, then managed to stay off drugs for two weeks. Yet his downward spiral led him back to the Sunset Marquis where, early in the morning of May 28, 1996, he OD'd once more. His partially cleansed system was unable to withstand the dosage and underwent cardiac arrest. A friend dialled an ambulance. He was turning blue. His heart stopped for a couple of minutes. Dave Gahan was officially dead for a short while last year.
"They gave me the full Pulp Fiction treatment and got a beat on the way to the hospital. The first thing I remember hearing was a paramedic in the background saying, 'I think we lost him...'"
So, er, what's it like to die?
"All I remember about it was it was really black and really scary, and I remember feeling that it was wrong. This was something really not supposed to be happening. I was thinking I could control this, I could pick the date when Dave was gonna die. That's how f---ed up my ego is. So I woke up and I was handcuffed to a cop and he was reading me my rights." [2]
Dave Gahan spent two nights in LA County jail. He might yet get the chance to reacquaint himself with that establishment. Currently he is on parole, awaiting trial and sentencing in February. He is required to take two urine tests a week, and will be for the next two years. If he stays clean, then the chances are the charges will be dropped. Were The Cat to fancy his chances once more, however, and give a positive urine test, he would face two years in prison. When he says it's a "sobering" thought, one is indeed inclined to defer to his formidable experience on the subject.
"In California, they'll work with junkies. You're breaking the law, but I mean, I was in a cell with f---ing murderers, people who'd blown people's heads off. I was a menace to myself, sure, but not society!"
Gahan has been clean ever since that day he picked up the phone and asked for help. He saw through the recovery programme at Exodus, the detox unit that both Kurt Cobain and Blind Melon's Shannon Hoon walked away from. The first five days were the worst, he says, strapped down, watched 24 hours, having seizures every hour so hard was the withdrawal. Then the meetings, just like the ones he'd attended before while whacked off his gourd.
"For the first time I was listening. That was the difference. An addict thinks the world ends at them, and that you're completely alone in this world. And you find there's a lot of people from different walks of life that are exactly the same as you. When I went to Exodus I was making the admission that this shit had destroyed my life. It had taken away my soul and left me f---ing empty. It was fantastic for a couple of years. I'd be lying if I didn't say I thought I was f---ing God! I felt brilliant - nothing mattered, man, I was high! And then it stopped. It stopped overnight, and then I was always chasing that first high.
"I was going through the motions," he admits.
By this point, Gahan was shooting up heroin and cocaine, because neither was working individually any more. But for that matter, neither worked together either, much to his annoyance.
He returned from New York with a plan: "To go f---ing mental. The definition of insanity is repeating the same action but expecting a different result. I'd been told this so many times, but I was like, there's nothing wrong with me, I can handle it, I can kick it...I couldn't! I was definitely on a death wish. I wanted to know what it was all about, if I had the chance to go somewhere else and get away from myself. Which, of course, was all a fantasy. That was the first time it hit home what a junkie I was.
"I went through a phase for a little while, if I couldn't get dope I'd be virtually shooting water. Just squeezing out the cotton, getting whatever was left, just for tying off and banging off. I was definitely into the ritual side of things. In fact, now I think about it, the naughty boy excitement stuff of going and getting it, when the drugs weren't working any more, that was the big thing. Scoring without having me head blown off - that was it."
David Gahan duly went f---ing mental, then managed to stay off drugs for two weeks. Yet his downward spiral led him back to the Sunset Marquis where, early in the morning of May 28, 1996, he OD'd once more. His partially cleansed system was unable to withstand the dosage and underwent cardiac arrest. A friend dialled an ambulance. He was turning blue. His heart stopped for a couple of minutes. Dave Gahan was officially dead for a short while last year.
"They gave me the full Pulp Fiction treatment and got a beat on the way to the hospital. The first thing I remember hearing was a paramedic in the background saying, 'I think we lost him...'"
So, er, what's it like to die?
"All I remember about it was it was really black and really scary, and I remember feeling that it was wrong. This was something really not supposed to be happening. I was thinking I could control this, I could pick the date when Dave was gonna die. That's how f---ed up my ego is. So I woke up and I was handcuffed to a cop and he was reading me my rights." [2]
Dave Gahan spent two nights in LA County jail. He might yet get the chance to reacquaint himself with that establishment. Currently he is on parole, awaiting trial and sentencing in February. He is required to take two urine tests a week, and will be for the next two years. If he stays clean, then the chances are the charges will be dropped. Were The Cat to fancy his chances once more, however, and give a positive urine test, he would face two years in prison. When he says it's a "sobering" thought, one is indeed inclined to defer to his formidable experience on the subject.
"In California, they'll work with junkies. You're breaking the law, but I mean, I was in a cell with f---ing murderers, people who'd blown people's heads off. I was a menace to myself, sure, but not society!"
Gahan has been clean ever since that day he picked up the phone and asked for help. He saw through the recovery programme at Exodus, the detox unit that both Kurt Cobain and Blind Melon's Shannon Hoon walked away from. The first five days were the worst, he says, strapped down, watched 24 hours, having seizures every hour so hard was the withdrawal. Then the meetings, just like the ones he'd attended before while whacked off his gourd.
"For the first time I was listening. That was the difference. An addict thinks the world ends at them, and that you're completely alone in this world. And you find there's a lot of people from different walks of life that are exactly the same as you. When I went to Exodus I was making the admission that this shit had destroyed my life. It had taken away my soul and left me f---ing empty. It was fantastic for a couple of years. I'd be lying if I didn't say I thought I was f---ing God! I felt brilliant - nothing mattered, man, I was high! And then it stopped. It stopped overnight, and then I was always chasing that first high.
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"So that's the choice. The minute I muck up again, I'm gone. And I can't deny that my life's better now. Although it don't feel good saying it! But just this weekend I got the opportunity to spend time with my son. It was great, we went to see 101 Dalmatians! One thing I notice about him now, which I didn't notice when I was using, is the way he looks at me. He looks at me with a lot of love and affection, and I never noticed that so much before as I did this weekend. I could look him right in the eyes, it wasn't like he'd be looking at me and I'd be feeling ashamed. It was almost like he was the adult and I was the child for a long time."
When he laughs, you can still hear the boy inside Dave Gahan, the cherubic teenage sprite singing those early Depeche tunes, whose memory he wanted so desperately to erase from history, as if the increasingly mighty Mode canon through the late '80s had not already done so. Such insecurity invariably begins at a young age, and is merely exacerbated by adulthood's erosion of innocence. Gahan never really knew his father, and was clearly ill-equipped to deal with the guilt that he had hurt his own son just as he himself was hurt. He began taking drugs at a young age.
"I first took heroin when I was probably 17, when I was living in a squat in King's Cross. But I didn't like it, 'cos speed was the thing at that time. I realise now I've had a very addictive nature when it comes to getting off my head and escaping from myself. 'Cos that's what it's all about, really. I used to steal barbiturates from my mother - she suffers from epilepsy - so these little downers were where it all started. No fault of my mother's. Then it progressed to different things. Alcohol's been there throughout. I would definitely define myself as an alcohol addict, for sure. I can't do one or the other. If I drink I'll get dope, I'll get high. If I have one drink, I'll want a bottle of vodka. My problem was more. I wanna do what I'm doing to myself until I'm gone.
"And I picked up heroin again when I went to live in Los Angeles. Wherever I was I'd be thinking about it. And that's when you've got a problem. I'd wake up and I'd think about it. A big problem I had, I was a junkie with money. An endless supply of it! And all I really wanted was my dope. I wasn't interested in cars or aeroplanes, all the other trappings of the 'rock star'. I weren't capable! I wouldn't dare get on my Harley, 'cos I was living up in the canyons...That's the insanity of it, I was more worried about killing myself in a car accident, but I was quite happy to shoot dope in my arms. And over the last few years I was using daily."
How difficult is it for you, right now, to stay clean?
"It's a lot easier than trying to get high, I know that. Trying to maintain it and kid yourself and fool everyone else. That becomes overwhelming because you're not having any fun anyway. I can't remember the last time I took any drugs and I could say I had a great time. It was probably during the 'Violator' tour, when E was the thing, and you'd pop an E after every show. I wasn't a social drug taker after that, it was an isolated thing. In my house in LA I had my own room, the blue room it was called, it was a blue closet and I'd shut myself in a closet.
"I remember reading Kurt saying the same thing, he had a closet under the stairs. That was plenty enough room. I'd be in there with my candle and my spoon, and that was it. Often Theresa would come knocking at the door, we'd have house guests and..." He runs a hand through his neatly clipped hair and gives a palpable shudder, his first real outward manifestation of emotion in nearly an hour. Heaven knows what it's like deep down inside there.
"It all sounds like, 'How the f--- did you get yourself into that shit?', but if you play with the devil you're gonna get burnt. And I believe heroin is the devil, because it takes your soul away. I think if there is a God there he chooses to leave you and let you get on with it, and that's what it feels like. You're this walking shell. I couldn't even look at myself in the mirror."
Can you be around people who drink or do drugs? What if I were to chop out a line right here?
"I'd have to leave. Because I'd want some. And I'd only want to test it, know what I mean? Mart and Fletch, they drink, Mart drinks a lot, and they drink around me, and sometimes that's a bit difficult - not because I want to get drunk, but just 'cos I don't feel part of it. That gets me into trouble. But then I get my arse to a meeting and I find that helps, to be able to sit somewhere for an hour and a half among people where I don't have to say anything. I don't have to act like anyone. Sometimes it's hard, yeah. About a month ago I went through a period where I was constantly thinking, 'What the f--- is this all about? I weren't that bad!' I was really kidding myself that I could have another go at it, go out and do a bit more research!"
The Cat came back...
"Yeah, it's there on the left shoulder all the time. I'm aware of it now. I have too much to live for. I was lucky I had people round me, I was able to be put in the right sort of places and looked after. But there's still times when you're sitting on you're own, like anybody, and you get depressed. What I've learned from this experience is that I know I'm not gonna find anything there. If God gave out drugs and alcohol, I've had my fair share! Instead of a lifetime I used it all up too quick. Which is a bit of a drag sometimes, but man, I don't wanna die today. Six months ago I was ready to throw in the towel."
As we arrived at Abbey Road, there was the regulation clutch of tourists ogling the wall of Beatles graffiti. When Dave Gahan emerged from the taxi, a succession of jaws dropped. They weren't necessarily certain who it was, but that didn't matter. Here was a Rock Star, in the flesh, himself. Cool. Attractive. Alive.
That's the tragedy of Dave Gahan: he didn't really need to try that hard in the first place. And from the look on his face as he watches himself once again on video, you suspect Dave Gahan realises as much.
"I do a lot of praying," he says. "I don't pray for forgiveness, but what I do is I get on my knees and I thank God for keeping me sober another day. I pray to the ceiling in the hope that somebody's listening. But you know what? I feel a lot better in doing it. It makes me feel better to believe in something. I don't wanna go back there, I've got too much to lose now. And I don't mean the band, I mean myself.
"There's little bits of David that come back every day, and he ain't such a bad guy. I sit and I watch Harry Enfield and I laugh my arse off. Or I cry at some soppy movie - I didn't do that shit for a long while! I didn't have those normal feelings! I would sit and watch the f---ing weather channel for 12 hours of the day. It didn't matter, man, I was completely gouching out and days would go by, and years went by. But there's something happens every day, no matter how minute, that gives me the feeling I've got so much to live for.
"I wanna see my son grow up. When we were going back down in the care to take him home yesterday morning I said, 'Who is your favourite band anyway?' And he turned round and he said 'Huh! You, of course!' Really cute! I was really hoping he wasn't going to say something like the Spice Girls! No disrespect to the Spice Girls, but..."
...But not all nine-year-old boys think they're ace. Indeed, one particular nine-year-old boy still loves his dad's group above all others. How great does that feel? Dave Gahan doesn't even attempt to work this one out. Instead, he smiles broadly and reaches for his umpteenth Marlboro Medium of the day: time to chill for a moment before joining the others downstairs.
But then he pauses. The silver cigarette case snaps shut. Nah. Best not for a bit, eh? Cats have only nine lives, after all.
- Next week: More drugs! This time also featuring Fletch, Martin and Primal Scream! Bad vibes! How Dave Gahan nearly took Depeche Mode down with him! Alan Wilder! The one that left - boy, do they not like him! Not forgetting - the new album! How did they do that?! Depeche Mode put the needle on the record!!!
When he laughs, you can still hear the boy inside Dave Gahan, the cherubic teenage sprite singing those early Depeche tunes, whose memory he wanted so desperately to erase from history, as if the increasingly mighty Mode canon through the late '80s had not already done so. Such insecurity invariably begins at a young age, and is merely exacerbated by adulthood's erosion of innocence. Gahan never really knew his father, and was clearly ill-equipped to deal with the guilt that he had hurt his own son just as he himself was hurt. He began taking drugs at a young age.
"I first took heroin when I was probably 17, when I was living in a squat in King's Cross. But I didn't like it, 'cos speed was the thing at that time. I realise now I've had a very addictive nature when it comes to getting off my head and escaping from myself. 'Cos that's what it's all about, really. I used to steal barbiturates from my mother - she suffers from epilepsy - so these little downers were where it all started. No fault of my mother's. Then it progressed to different things. Alcohol's been there throughout. I would definitely define myself as an alcohol addict, for sure. I can't do one or the other. If I drink I'll get dope, I'll get high. If I have one drink, I'll want a bottle of vodka. My problem was more. I wanna do what I'm doing to myself until I'm gone.
"And I picked up heroin again when I went to live in Los Angeles. Wherever I was I'd be thinking about it. And that's when you've got a problem. I'd wake up and I'd think about it. A big problem I had, I was a junkie with money. An endless supply of it! And all I really wanted was my dope. I wasn't interested in cars or aeroplanes, all the other trappings of the 'rock star'. I weren't capable! I wouldn't dare get on my Harley, 'cos I was living up in the canyons...That's the insanity of it, I was more worried about killing myself in a car accident, but I was quite happy to shoot dope in my arms. And over the last few years I was using daily."
How difficult is it for you, right now, to stay clean?
"It's a lot easier than trying to get high, I know that. Trying to maintain it and kid yourself and fool everyone else. That becomes overwhelming because you're not having any fun anyway. I can't remember the last time I took any drugs and I could say I had a great time. It was probably during the 'Violator' tour, when E was the thing, and you'd pop an E after every show. I wasn't a social drug taker after that, it was an isolated thing. In my house in LA I had my own room, the blue room it was called, it was a blue closet and I'd shut myself in a closet.
"I remember reading Kurt saying the same thing, he had a closet under the stairs. That was plenty enough room. I'd be in there with my candle and my spoon, and that was it. Often Theresa would come knocking at the door, we'd have house guests and..." He runs a hand through his neatly clipped hair and gives a palpable shudder, his first real outward manifestation of emotion in nearly an hour. Heaven knows what it's like deep down inside there.
"It all sounds like, 'How the f--- did you get yourself into that shit?', but if you play with the devil you're gonna get burnt. And I believe heroin is the devil, because it takes your soul away. I think if there is a God there he chooses to leave you and let you get on with it, and that's what it feels like. You're this walking shell. I couldn't even look at myself in the mirror."
Can you be around people who drink or do drugs? What if I were to chop out a line right here?
"I'd have to leave. Because I'd want some. And I'd only want to test it, know what I mean? Mart and Fletch, they drink, Mart drinks a lot, and they drink around me, and sometimes that's a bit difficult - not because I want to get drunk, but just 'cos I don't feel part of it. That gets me into trouble. But then I get my arse to a meeting and I find that helps, to be able to sit somewhere for an hour and a half among people where I don't have to say anything. I don't have to act like anyone. Sometimes it's hard, yeah. About a month ago I went through a period where I was constantly thinking, 'What the f--- is this all about? I weren't that bad!' I was really kidding myself that I could have another go at it, go out and do a bit more research!"
The Cat came back...
"Yeah, it's there on the left shoulder all the time. I'm aware of it now. I have too much to live for. I was lucky I had people round me, I was able to be put in the right sort of places and looked after. But there's still times when you're sitting on you're own, like anybody, and you get depressed. What I've learned from this experience is that I know I'm not gonna find anything there. If God gave out drugs and alcohol, I've had my fair share! Instead of a lifetime I used it all up too quick. Which is a bit of a drag sometimes, but man, I don't wanna die today. Six months ago I was ready to throw in the towel."
As we arrived at Abbey Road, there was the regulation clutch of tourists ogling the wall of Beatles graffiti. When Dave Gahan emerged from the taxi, a succession of jaws dropped. They weren't necessarily certain who it was, but that didn't matter. Here was a Rock Star, in the flesh, himself. Cool. Attractive. Alive.
That's the tragedy of Dave Gahan: he didn't really need to try that hard in the first place. And from the look on his face as he watches himself once again on video, you suspect Dave Gahan realises as much.
"I do a lot of praying," he says. "I don't pray for forgiveness, but what I do is I get on my knees and I thank God for keeping me sober another day. I pray to the ceiling in the hope that somebody's listening. But you know what? I feel a lot better in doing it. It makes me feel better to believe in something. I don't wanna go back there, I've got too much to lose now. And I don't mean the band, I mean myself.
"There's little bits of David that come back every day, and he ain't such a bad guy. I sit and I watch Harry Enfield and I laugh my arse off. Or I cry at some soppy movie - I didn't do that shit for a long while! I didn't have those normal feelings! I would sit and watch the f---ing weather channel for 12 hours of the day. It didn't matter, man, I was completely gouching out and days would go by, and years went by. But there's something happens every day, no matter how minute, that gives me the feeling I've got so much to live for.
"I wanna see my son grow up. When we were going back down in the care to take him home yesterday morning I said, 'Who is your favourite band anyway?' And he turned round and he said 'Huh! You, of course!' Really cute! I was really hoping he wasn't going to say something like the Spice Girls! No disrespect to the Spice Girls, but..."
...But not all nine-year-old boys think they're ace. Indeed, one particular nine-year-old boy still loves his dad's group above all others. How great does that feel? Dave Gahan doesn't even attempt to work this one out. Instead, he smiles broadly and reaches for his umpteenth Marlboro Medium of the day: time to chill for a moment before joining the others downstairs.
But then he pauses. The silver cigarette case snaps shut. Nah. Best not for a bit, eh? Cats have only nine lives, after all.
- Next week: More drugs! This time also featuring Fletch, Martin and Primal Scream! Bad vibes! How Dave Gahan nearly took Depeche Mode down with him! Alan Wilder! The one that left - boy, do they not like him! Not forgetting - the new album! How did they do that?! Depeche Mode put the needle on the record!!!
