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Dave Gahan Despair Mode (Sunday Times, 1996)
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Despair Mode . Dave again...in Sunday Times June 9th 1996.
DESPAIR MODE
Depeche Mode, the 1980s British band, still sells millions of records, yet singer Dave Gahan slit his wrists and recently nearly died of a drug overdose. What went wrong? [INLINE]
Depeche Mode in the 1980s [INLINE]
`Even after all the success, they were still just lads from Basildon who had put together a band in the back room. But when Dave moved out to LA, the rock-star thing caught up with him' [INLINE]
Just Can't Get Enough: Dave Gahan, left after his drug overdose. The AA pamphlets, above, were found in his car.
Dave Gahan, hip-thrusting lead singer if the British rock band Depeche Mode, narrowly avoided becoming the latest stop on Hollywood's notorious Graveline Tours 10 days ago. The company whisks sightseers, in converted hearses, on ghoulish excursions around town, with the aim of showing them exactly where the stars died.
Gahan had been found unconscious, in the early hours of the morning, on the floor of his room at the trendy Sunset Marquis hotel just off Sunset Boulevard. The hotel lies midway between the Graveline tour stop where River Phoenix died of a drug overdose on the pavement outside the Viper Room club, and the bungalow at the Chateau Marmont hotel where John Belushi OD'd, fatally, before him.
According to police, Gahan had injected himself with a speedball - a heart-jolting, intravenous concoction of heroin and cocaine - and passed out. The police said they had found syringes and a "sizable" amount of cocaine in the bathroom.
After being released from hospital, Gahan, 34, was charged with posession and being under the influence of controlled substances. He was released on $10,000 bail and in due to appear in court on June 18t. As he walked out of the jail, an apparently contrite Gahan aplogised on television to his fans and to his mum.
Graveline Tours has had its eye on Gahan ever since Depeche Mode became of of the biggest rock'n'roll successes in the world. And one of the most unlikely. Akthough only one member of the band, Alan Wilder, has ever claimed to be a competent musician, Depeche Mode has managed to outsell and outlast a ll the bands that emerged from the New Romantic era of the early 1980s.
Where now are Soft Cell, Heaven 17, Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark, Spandau Ballet, Frankie Goes to Hollyword and Culture Club? As Duran Duran were desperately planning a comeback in 1990, international sales of Depeche Mode's Violator album topped 6m.
It was the ultimate revenge of the "wimps with synths", the "knob twiddlers", "America's favourite Euroweenies", as Depeche were tagged by the vicious British press. They would never let the band forget their origins as a bunch of unpreposessing Basildon lads who wore frilly shirts and cheap makeup, and gleefully discussed their favourite colours in Smash Hits, the magazine for prepubescent girls.
Despite their attempt to transubstantiate into heavy-duty, leather-clad rockers, Depeche's musical offerings of synthesized religion, safe bondage, and low-brow teenage angst - hits such as See You and Just Can't Get Enough - never won over the critics. "J D Salinger in lederhosen," one reviewer called songwriter Martin Gore's quest for deeper meaning.
Friends say that Gahan's headlong dive into drup-induced oblivion came from the desperate desire to be taken seriously, to erase for ever the embarassing teenybopper label. The former window dresser, whose father left when he was five, and whose mother spent much of her time on her Salvation Army work, was determined to re-emerge as a contender to rock gods such as Bono and Kurt Cobain.
Gahan left Britain for Los Angeles after the band's 1990 Violator tour. At the same time, he echoed his father's departure by leaving his first wife, Joanne, with whom he has an eight-year-old son, and hooking up with Teresa Conroy, who had been the band's American publicist, eventually marrying her and moving into a grand house in the Hollywood Hills, where "he was surrounded by sycophants and leeches", according to one friend. It was an unhappy and nearly fatal move.
"I just went of f to LA and did all those classic guru-meeting, refinding my spirit things - or finding my spirituality - and the classic debauched things as well," Gahan told Q magazine last year.
"As hippie as it sounds, I had to find out what Dave Gahan wanted to do," he said. And what did Gahan discover about himself on his spiritual quest?
"It doesn't matter if it's in a bottle of vodka or if you're banging a needle into your arm," posited the newly reflective Gahan, "at the end of the day, you're going to the same place - which is oblivion - and it's going to kill you."
"The others were back in England and Dave just took himself out of the loop," says a close friend of the band. "There was nobody around to tell him he was being a fool, as there would have been in England. He lost his hold on reality."
Gahan credited Teresa Conroy for initiating his transformation, introducing him to the new generation of alternative rock bands such as Alice in Chains and Jane's Addiction that were beginning to drive Depeche Mode and their ilk of the playlists of the hip radio stations. "He became embarassed that Depeche Mode weren't a guitar band like all the new Seattle bands," says one band insider.
"The great thing about Depeche Mode was that they were never caught up in the whole rock-star thing," says another associate. "Even after all the success, they were still just a bunch of lads from Basildon who had put together a band in the back room. But when Dave moved out to LA, the whole rock-star thing caught up with him."
By now he was rootless, cast adrift from his first wife and son and without - bar Conroy - any secure anchor in LA. Conscious, too, that while he was the band's front man, it was Gore who was the brains behing the band, Gahan was seeking an identity. He was sporting a goatee, he had taken up body-piercing and he was almost completely covered in tattoos. He was babbling incomprehensible new age California-speak that he had begun to parrot from a "spiritual advisor" he had aquired and whom he insisted the band took on their next tour.
The other group members were horrified when Gahan turned up in Madrid for the recording sessions for the last, much less succesful album, songs of Fith and Devotion. Gahan demanded that they throw away their trademark synthesizers and pick up guitars and drums, which none of them could really play. The sessions collapsed in disarray. "I think the rest of the band were pretty scared of me," Gahan told Rolling Stone. "I was pretty powerful."
"I think Dave's easily influenced and I don't think living in Loas Angeles has had a good effect on him," says Wilder, diplomatically.
During the last tour, despite the daily presence of Dave's psychotherapist and spiritual advisor, the problems between the band worsened dramatically. Only one thing seemed to hold them together - mony, "It felt as if it was over," says one person who toured with them, "the energy, the buzz, was gone."
One band member, Andy Fletcher, left the tour before it even finished, ostensibly to be with his wife when she gave birth, but really, claim insiders, because he had allegedly suffered a breakdown, brought on, they suggest, by his increasing guilt and embasarrment about the fact he'd never really had any significant musical role.
By midway through last year, Gahan's second marriage was falling apart, and in Augst the depressed singer was briefly admitted to hospitale after what appeared to be a suicide attempt. "I drank a bottle of wine and swallowed a handful of Valium," said Gahan at the time. "That combination is really stupid. I walked into the bathroom and saw a razor blade and slashed it across my wrists real hard. It was a spur of the moment thing. I cut real deep, so I couldn't deel my fingers any more."
Now Gore and Fletcher are worried that, even though Gahan's latest drug debacle has not killed him off, it may mean the death of the band. There are doubts that the new album will ever be finished.
"Since January, the record company has been telling us that they've recorded four or five songs and that the album was going to be out in June of July," says Richard Blade, who, as a DJ on LA's KROQ, was instrumental in the late 1980s and early 1990s in Depeche Mode's west coast success, "but now they've pushed the release date back to February 1997 and I doubt that tey're even going to make that."
"The band is on very shaky ground," Blade adds. "The next album is make-or-break."
Gahan's court appearance may be make-or-break, too. A drug conviction could stop him recording or touring in America. Even the resilient Depeche Mode would not survive that, and even if he overcomes his problems with drugs, Dave Gahan may find that he has only succeeded in reinventing himself into a gilded obscurity. He is a long way from home. Graveline Tours won't care where he dies. Christopher Goodwin, The Sunday Times
DESPAIR MODE
Depeche Mode, the 1980s British band, still sells millions of records, yet singer Dave Gahan slit his wrists and recently nearly died of a drug overdose. What went wrong? [INLINE]
Depeche Mode in the 1980s [INLINE]
`Even after all the success, they were still just lads from Basildon who had put together a band in the back room. But when Dave moved out to LA, the rock-star thing caught up with him' [INLINE]
Just Can't Get Enough: Dave Gahan, left after his drug overdose. The AA pamphlets, above, were found in his car.
Dave Gahan, hip-thrusting lead singer if the British rock band Depeche Mode, narrowly avoided becoming the latest stop on Hollywood's notorious Graveline Tours 10 days ago. The company whisks sightseers, in converted hearses, on ghoulish excursions around town, with the aim of showing them exactly where the stars died.
Gahan had been found unconscious, in the early hours of the morning, on the floor of his room at the trendy Sunset Marquis hotel just off Sunset Boulevard. The hotel lies midway between the Graveline tour stop where River Phoenix died of a drug overdose on the pavement outside the Viper Room club, and the bungalow at the Chateau Marmont hotel where John Belushi OD'd, fatally, before him.
According to police, Gahan had injected himself with a speedball - a heart-jolting, intravenous concoction of heroin and cocaine - and passed out. The police said they had found syringes and a "sizable" amount of cocaine in the bathroom.
After being released from hospital, Gahan, 34, was charged with posession and being under the influence of controlled substances. He was released on $10,000 bail and in due to appear in court on June 18t. As he walked out of the jail, an apparently contrite Gahan aplogised on television to his fans and to his mum.
Graveline Tours has had its eye on Gahan ever since Depeche Mode became of of the biggest rock'n'roll successes in the world. And one of the most unlikely. Akthough only one member of the band, Alan Wilder, has ever claimed to be a competent musician, Depeche Mode has managed to outsell and outlast a ll the bands that emerged from the New Romantic era of the early 1980s.
Where now are Soft Cell, Heaven 17, Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark, Spandau Ballet, Frankie Goes to Hollyword and Culture Club? As Duran Duran were desperately planning a comeback in 1990, international sales of Depeche Mode's Violator album topped 6m.
It was the ultimate revenge of the "wimps with synths", the "knob twiddlers", "America's favourite Euroweenies", as Depeche were tagged by the vicious British press. They would never let the band forget their origins as a bunch of unpreposessing Basildon lads who wore frilly shirts and cheap makeup, and gleefully discussed their favourite colours in Smash Hits, the magazine for prepubescent girls.
Despite their attempt to transubstantiate into heavy-duty, leather-clad rockers, Depeche's musical offerings of synthesized religion, safe bondage, and low-brow teenage angst - hits such as See You and Just Can't Get Enough - never won over the critics. "J D Salinger in lederhosen," one reviewer called songwriter Martin Gore's quest for deeper meaning.
Friends say that Gahan's headlong dive into drup-induced oblivion came from the desperate desire to be taken seriously, to erase for ever the embarassing teenybopper label. The former window dresser, whose father left when he was five, and whose mother spent much of her time on her Salvation Army work, was determined to re-emerge as a contender to rock gods such as Bono and Kurt Cobain.
Gahan left Britain for Los Angeles after the band's 1990 Violator tour. At the same time, he echoed his father's departure by leaving his first wife, Joanne, with whom he has an eight-year-old son, and hooking up with Teresa Conroy, who had been the band's American publicist, eventually marrying her and moving into a grand house in the Hollywood Hills, where "he was surrounded by sycophants and leeches", according to one friend. It was an unhappy and nearly fatal move.
"I just went of f to LA and did all those classic guru-meeting, refinding my spirit things - or finding my spirituality - and the classic debauched things as well," Gahan told Q magazine last year.
"As hippie as it sounds, I had to find out what Dave Gahan wanted to do," he said. And what did Gahan discover about himself on his spiritual quest?
"It doesn't matter if it's in a bottle of vodka or if you're banging a needle into your arm," posited the newly reflective Gahan, "at the end of the day, you're going to the same place - which is oblivion - and it's going to kill you."
"The others were back in England and Dave just took himself out of the loop," says a close friend of the band. "There was nobody around to tell him he was being a fool, as there would have been in England. He lost his hold on reality."
Gahan credited Teresa Conroy for initiating his transformation, introducing him to the new generation of alternative rock bands such as Alice in Chains and Jane's Addiction that were beginning to drive Depeche Mode and their ilk of the playlists of the hip radio stations. "He became embarassed that Depeche Mode weren't a guitar band like all the new Seattle bands," says one band insider.
"The great thing about Depeche Mode was that they were never caught up in the whole rock-star thing," says another associate. "Even after all the success, they were still just a bunch of lads from Basildon who had put together a band in the back room. But when Dave moved out to LA, the whole rock-star thing caught up with him."
By now he was rootless, cast adrift from his first wife and son and without - bar Conroy - any secure anchor in LA. Conscious, too, that while he was the band's front man, it was Gore who was the brains behing the band, Gahan was seeking an identity. He was sporting a goatee, he had taken up body-piercing and he was almost completely covered in tattoos. He was babbling incomprehensible new age California-speak that he had begun to parrot from a "spiritual advisor" he had aquired and whom he insisted the band took on their next tour.
The other group members were horrified when Gahan turned up in Madrid for the recording sessions for the last, much less succesful album, songs of Fith and Devotion. Gahan demanded that they throw away their trademark synthesizers and pick up guitars and drums, which none of them could really play. The sessions collapsed in disarray. "I think the rest of the band were pretty scared of me," Gahan told Rolling Stone. "I was pretty powerful."
"I think Dave's easily influenced and I don't think living in Loas Angeles has had a good effect on him," says Wilder, diplomatically.
During the last tour, despite the daily presence of Dave's psychotherapist and spiritual advisor, the problems between the band worsened dramatically. Only one thing seemed to hold them together - mony, "It felt as if it was over," says one person who toured with them, "the energy, the buzz, was gone."
One band member, Andy Fletcher, left the tour before it even finished, ostensibly to be with his wife when she gave birth, but really, claim insiders, because he had allegedly suffered a breakdown, brought on, they suggest, by his increasing guilt and embasarrment about the fact he'd never really had any significant musical role.
By midway through last year, Gahan's second marriage was falling apart, and in Augst the depressed singer was briefly admitted to hospitale after what appeared to be a suicide attempt. "I drank a bottle of wine and swallowed a handful of Valium," said Gahan at the time. "That combination is really stupid. I walked into the bathroom and saw a razor blade and slashed it across my wrists real hard. It was a spur of the moment thing. I cut real deep, so I couldn't deel my fingers any more."
Now Gore and Fletcher are worried that, even though Gahan's latest drug debacle has not killed him off, it may mean the death of the band. There are doubts that the new album will ever be finished.
"Since January, the record company has been telling us that they've recorded four or five songs and that the album was going to be out in June of July," says Richard Blade, who, as a DJ on LA's KROQ, was instrumental in the late 1980s and early 1990s in Depeche Mode's west coast success, "but now they've pushed the release date back to February 1997 and I doubt that tey're even going to make that."
"The band is on very shaky ground," Blade adds. "The next album is make-or-break."
Gahan's court appearance may be make-or-break, too. A drug conviction could stop him recording or touring in America. Even the resilient Depeche Mode would not survive that, and even if he overcomes his problems with drugs, Dave Gahan may find that he has only succeeded in reinventing himself into a gilded obscurity. He is a long way from home. Graveline Tours won't care where he dies. Christopher Goodwin, The Sunday Times
This article was taken from UK Newspaper The Sunday Times, June 9th 1996.