Depeche Mode I Never Wanted To Destroy Depeche Mode (Melody Maker, 1993)

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"I Never Wanted To Destroy Depeche Mode"
[Melody Maker, 3rd April 1993. Words: Jennifer Nine. Pictures: Anton Corbijn / Uncredited.]

Dave buzzes with enthusiasm for Songs Of Faith And Devotion, showing some of the relentless drive which so alarmed the rest of the band in the studio the year before. He lets out the full details of the upheavals in his personal life and how these influenced the recording of the album - reading this intense, energetic piece you realise his soul-baring four years later wasn't "just a phase" after all. Currently the best item I have for 1993.
" USUALLY, the intimate details of “musical differences” – that handy, catch-all, music biz cliché – don’t come out until after a band splits up. Usually, according to interviewees, everything is going just swimmingly. However, in this unusual instance, the urge to confess all is gripping Dave Gahan tighter than a boa constrictor in love. So he ploughs on. "

… But he almost did. DEPECHE MODE started life in early 1981 as frilly shirted synthi-popper New Romantics (their electro-beat actually inspired the burgeoning House scenes of Detroit and Chicago). Later that year Vince Clarke left the group to form Yazoo, Assembly and, finally, Erasure. At which point the Mode toughened up. In 1983 they discovered Teutonic metal-bashing and band songwriter Martin Gore moved to Berlin. Throughout the mid-Eighties DM just got harder and harder (many of today’s industrial-rockers such as Nine Inch Nails and Ministry cite them as an influence). They also got bigger and bigger. By 1990 and the ‘Violator’ LP, Depeche were a colossal stadium draw in the States. Couldn’t be better, right? Well… The last three years have actually been quite difficult for the Basildon boys wonder. In this exclusive interview, vocalist DAVE GAHAN talks openly to JENNIFER NINE about doubt, despair, even divorce – all the pain that was exorcised on new album ‘Songs Of Faith And Devotion’ – as well as his struggle to make the Mode embrace the future.

“Jesus Christ!” A businesswoman, briefcase in hand, flies into the lobby of the Four Seasons hotel.

“I was trying to get in the door at the same time as a bunch of fans and some… rock star!” she says, flustered, to her waiting colleague. “I didn’t even recognise him,” she adds, peevishly.

Neither would you, readers. Nor indeed would his bandmates. A slight young man in goatee and leathers, shoulder-length hair and biker vest, strides over to the lift amid a knot of minders and paparazzi. Ladies and grungemeisters, Dave Gahan! Jesus Christ!

Upstairs on the umpteenth floor in the interview suite, you’d call it the same old show. The Depeche Mode singer grabs a quick sarnie as he meets you with a smile. Roger, the artist-relations man who’s strong-armed him through doorways and sobbing girls for a dozen years, smiles a Buddha-like smile and sets his stopwatch.

ACTUALLY, it’s not the same any more, and the goatee’s beside the point. Dave Gahan takes a deep breath, and for 27 minutes in gloriously uncorrupted Essex-speak, punctuated with “at the end of the day” and “to be honest”, every 30 seconds, he tells me why.

“Moving away, it opens your mind,” he starts, settling into a squashy hotel chair for this half-hour session with a journalist / therapist. “I needed to get out. I felt trapped by everything that was around me. The last go round was great, we had a lot of success and ‘Violator’ was huge round the world – and I should have been on top of the world, and I wasn’t.

“I had everything I could possibly want, but I was really lost,” he says, his voice suddenly going quiet. “I didn’t feel like I even knew myself any more. And I felt like shit, cos I constantly cheated on my wife, and went back home and lied, and my soul needed cleansing badly. I had to figure out why.”

PHEW. Gahan Confesses All shock! Whither the cuddly boy-next-door electro-popper of yore? Read on.

In the wake of the mega-normous ‘Violator’ album and the subsequent Tour of Everywhere, the decision to make 1991 the band’s first-ever year off was long overdue. And, for three members of Depeche Mode, it was more or less what you’d expect: home, wife / girlfriend, kids, more songwriting for Martin Gore, a Recoil album and some Nitzer Ebb production work for the workaholic Alan Wilder.

But it was pain, divorce and “go west, young man” for the Mode singer. Where he ended up – in case you haven’t figured it out from his looks – was Los Angeles.

“I just packed a case and split,” he tells me. “Went off and rented a place in Los Angeles. During the ‘Violator’ tour, I split from my wife. My year was really spent doing a lot of soul-searching and trying to find out what had gone wrong in my life, and thinking, to be quite honest, about whether I wanted to come back and do the whole thing – records, tours, fame, Depeche Mode - again.

 

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BEFORE I can dispense kind words about it being tough at the top and enquire about silver linings to clouds and stuff, Gahan’s polished off his Cappuccino and started talking about his new American Wife.

I’m halfway into sarky thoughts about successful men dumping their long-suffering partners for exotic foreign babes when this shy beam of a smile melts my right-on severity. F*** it, the guy looks happy for the first time since he started this little narrative – who am I to point fingers?

Pretty soon, I’m doing everything but asking to see the snaps. Where was the wedding? His eyes light up like Glitter Gulch. Appropriately enough.

“In Las Vegas!” he exclaims. “Fantastic!”

What, with Elvis?

“Yeah!” he barrels on, shamelessly. “At the Graceland Chapel, and my name’s up on the wall now next to Jon Bon Jovi’s, in big lights outside!” he adds, cracking up at the wonder of it all. “Of course, everything was plastic, you know, false,” he adds, anticipating my line of questioning. “They wouldn’t even light the candles in the chapel cos they were just there for show. We were a little upset! And they had a fake Elvis who we thought was just going to sing one song, but ended up doing about a half-hour set. In the end, I had to say, Will someone get him the f*** out of here? I want to get married! And so Theresa’s mum, Diane, sort of politely said, ‘Um, excuse me, Mr Elvis, do you think you could stop now, cos I think they want to get married.’ And so he says,” – Gahan does a passable imitation of an imitation of The King – “‘We-ell, I’ve just got one more song, darlin’.’ And he leans over to me and asks, ‘Have I offended you in some way?’ And I say, ‘No, just carry on with it, mate, get it done and get out!’”

MAYBE you never really understand a country until you marry into it.

It’s certainly true that you can tour it, even as often as the huge-in-America Mode, without absorbing much more than excess ultraviolet rays and piss-poor beer.

For Gahan (who, in calling himself a rock fan, conjures up visions of Maker colleagues shouting, “There’s always been a grunge element to our music…” and falling about laughing), living in America brought him into contact with the music he loves. Listening to “Songs Of Faith And Devotion”, I’m not surprised to read in a Toronto paper this week that Dave’s current favourite records are by Neil Young and Alice In Chains.

“My wife works in the music business,” explains Gahan. [1] “And at the beginning of the year off, she was out working on the Lollapalooza tour, the first one with Jane’s Addiction. I went out on the tour kind of as a fan, just hanging out. It was different just walking around in the crowd, really not bothered by the fans at all.”

This was no doubt a novel experience, I figure, remembering the millions of kids in leather jackets umpteen floors below.

“I noticed the audience was the same as the one we have,” he goes on, “or the Cure or lots of other bands, for that matter.

“Americans really see it all as just new, alternative music,” he exclaims, and I wonder how many times he’s despaired at being called a “Techno-popper” by the UK press. “And Jane’s were just the most incredible thing I’d seen in a long while. Sometimes they were really shit, and sometimes they were just so mountainous and fantastic.

“I spent the year trying to find the sort of music I wanted to be involved with,” Gahan continues. “There was so much really good new music coming out of the States at the time, much more so than where it usually comes from – Europe or London. I felt that what was happening back home, all that Techno stuff, was really boring.”

WHICH brings us to The Return To The Fold. Depeche Mode headed into the studio in early 1992 to record “Songs”, but for Gahan the trip back was from a different place, and I don’t just mean geographically.

“I came back,” he says, “really inspired by a lot of other bands like Jane’s. Not so much for what they were doing musically, but for the passion that they had. The danger really appealed to me. I’d felt quite safe in the last few years, and maybe I wasn’t trying as hard as I should’ve. So I think when I came back into the studio in January in Madrid, everyone was a little bit afraid of me somehow. I don’t know what they thought I’d been doing.”

Growing your hair, surely? He waves away my quip.

“It wasn’t even that. I think I was giving off quite a vibe at the time. I was very aggressive about what I wanted and what I felt we should be doing, and how we should, once again, be a band full of spirit!” he concludes, excited.

This isn’t to say, of course, that the other three Modes were set on merely photocopying past glories. Despite being instantly recognisable, Depeche have somehow always managed to shift the goalposts around deftly enough to keep one step ahead of the rest.

“There was never anytime that any of us thought we were going to go and do the same things as before,” Gahan says, fidgeting slightly in his seat. “We were conscious that we didn’t want to simply repeat what we’d done before.”

[1] - Theresa Conway had been involved with publicity on the American leg of the Music For The Masses tour in 1988.

 

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THEN again, Gahan’s new-found energy sounds like it might have been a little daunting to everyone else. From the word go, he recalls, “I was pushing hard all the time, and I think everybody backed off from me a little but. I’m sure they were thinking the people I was getting involved with back in the States were living a little too close to the edge.”

It wasn’t Basildon, I suggest.

“Right, it wasn’t Basildon, far from it! And I was the first of the band to break away.”

Maybe they felt you’d become Americanised, I add, looking at the tattoos peeking out from under his vest.

Bingo.

“Oh yeah, I mean, my wife’s American, and you know, she’s really aggressive, and I’ve definitely picked up on that,” he admits. “And most of the time she’s dead right about what she thinks. She’s said things to me over the last year that’ve completely changed my view about a lot of things I was doing, and she’s done nothing but encourage me. So I came back fully loaded with plenty of passionate ideas and things that I wanted to do to the sound of Depeche Mode, and everybody else was kind of like, ‘Well, actually, we’ve just been at home with the wife and kids for the last year, so calm down a bit there, Dave.’ Now I realise it, but, at the time, I just felt like it was me and them. And I had to keep pushing.”

USUALLY, the intimate details of “musical differences” – that handy, catch-all, music biz cliché – don’t come out until after a band splits up. Usually, according to interviewees, everything is going just swimmingly.

However, in this unusual instance, the urge to confess all is gripping Dave Gahan tighter than a boa constrictor in love. So he ploughs on.

“There’s an interview in Details magazine this month where Fletch says, “I think Dave felt the only thing he had in his life was his music, and everything else had disappeared that was important to him.’ Which wasn’t true, because I’d fallen in love, and that was more important to me than anything else, to be quite honest.

“But then he says, ‘You know, I just steered clear of him.’ And that was literally what was happening, and it just made me more isolated. I’d just shut myself up in my room in Madrid – we’d hired a house and built a studio in there – and whenever things got a bit sticky I’d run off to my room, lock the door and start painting.

“And I ended up painting a really fantastic oil for Theresa,” Gahan speed-recollects. “Which I’m really proud of, cos I hadn’t put brush to canvas for 10 years. I spent four weeks in the studio all day, after which I couldn’t sleep, so I’d be up all night painting. I found it incredibly therapeutic, cos it was my thing and I was like, well, f*** you lot, you can’t tell me how to do anything here.

“I remember when I’d finished, no one had really seen it except Anton [Corbijn, longtime Mode photographer and video director], and the rest of the band were really quite surprised. Martin, I remember, said to me…”

At this point, Gahan does a slow, puzzled voice.

“‘…Oh yeah, you know, I didn’t realise you could paint, I’ve never been able to do that myself.’ And I said, well, yeah, that’s what I used to do, Mart, that’s all I could do. I was in art college for three years, and the only thing I was even any good at was painting.

“Actually,” he adds, confidently, “it’s something that, after this next tour, if I get a bit of time, I want to try and get a lot more involved in. I know it’s kind of a cliched thing for people in bands to do, but I got a lot of enjoyment out of it. And,” he adds with a laugh, “I don’t care if it’s a cliché particularly. Most of the shit I do every day is a cliché, let’s face it!”

Dave clatters his teaspoon for emphasis, and Roger, the artist-relations man, makes a well-rehearsed, halfway-slide through the room.

LONELY, late-night painting sessions aside, however, he hadn’t been abandoned by his old mockers. While Gahan was revamping his life in LA, the silent and inimitable Gore was penning songs that, according to Dave, somehow managed to mirror his own personal tribulations and developments exactly.

“I have more rocky and bluesy influences than the others in the band. So when Martin started sending me bluesy demos for the new record, like ‘I Feel You’, and ‘Condemnation’, which was really gospelly, I thought, great! And the lyrics were completely appropriate to the way I was feeling. It was almost like Mart was writing the stuff for me.”

If, lyrically, Gore’s songs succeeded in accommodating Dave’s changing ideas, the band’s long-time support network was equally instrumental in encouraging his new-found passion.

“Anton was completely with me,” he says. “He’s done nothing but support me through a lot of traumatic times over the last couple of years. He was very positive that we should be moving into a different area, and felt that the songs we were writing were demanding different things from the band. That we shouldn’t just be sitting on our arses and waiting for somebody else to do it for us. That we should take control.

“Daniel Miller at Mute was the same. Several times when I’d hit London, mostly to see Jack, my son, I’d go out to dinner with him and he’d say, ‘Look, I know you’re going through a lot of stuff at the moment, but you’ve got to keep going and you’ve got to keep pushing.’ I think everyone knew I wasn’t trying to destroy the band, I was just trying to push us a bit harder.”

 

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ALSO for the first time ever, the band brought other musicians into the studio for “Songs”. While the guest contributions might seem modest – a choir, some strings and the odd tambourine – it was, nonetheless, further proof of a shift in attitude.

Specifically, it’s the soul-drenched atmosphere of “Condemnation” that’s the real key to the changes Depeche Mode have been through. Its heartfelt, I-stand-accused dramatics would be a meaty delight to any torch singer; Gahan sings his heart out and calls it “by far my finest vocal performance.”

“Some of the lines like, ‘I’m not asking for absolution / Forgiveness for the things I do’ – there are a lot of words in there that were entirely apt to the way I was feeling. [1] And I really felt, for the first time, the words flowing through me as if I had written them.”

Hmmm, not bad for a performance done in a garage.

“It was under the studio in Madrid, a low-ceilinged place, very concrete and metal and echoey and cold, and it had a great sound and a great ambience,” says Gahan.

Not surprisingly, his star turn didn’t go unnoticed.

Remembers Gahan, “When I came out, everybody in the control room went all quiet and turned around, and suddenly Flood said, ‘That was f***ing great!’ And Alan and everybody said, ‘That’s probably the best vocal you ever did’ – and I thought, yeah, it was. It was completely breaking me up inside, and, at the same time, it was really optimistic and uplifting.

“I think you hear it all over the record, you know,” he confides. “The album’s got much more emotion and feeling than any other Depeche Mode record. We managed to marry the hard electronics, sampling – all that side of things – with acoustic instruments and a real band playing together; things coming from bodies rather than coming from machines.”

So much so, in fact, that the next Depeche Mode tour will reflect a new, more “live” approach.

“I want there to be more performance from the band,” decides Gahan. “I definitely won my battles, to be quite honest – cos when we began this record, I knew it would be good for us to get a drummer.

“We’ve done this for so long, I thought, why not add another element to our sound? So I kept pushing and pushing and, in the end, Alan (Wilder) got on the drumkit and said, ‘Well, I’ll f***ing do it, then!’”

I’M down to the two-minute warning, and Dave Gahan is still opening his heart.

“Making ‘Songs Of Faith And Devotion’ was really quite a healing process for me,” he reveals, getting up to stretch his legs around the room.

It sounds like you like your job, I say, and he blurts out. “I do! I do now. I’ve only just really realised over the last couple of years how much I love my job.

“I think you’ve got to challenge yourself and challenge the people coming to see you,” he leans forward with a sense of urgency. “It’d be incredibly boring if we just went out and presented the same kind of show and the same kind of visuals again. For us and our audience, I think. All I’ve been trying to do over the last couple of years is just push for the band to move on and get better at what we do. I never wanted to destroy the band.”

Dave Gahan smiles, and adds, “This is still a Depeche Mode record, you know. Absolutely.”

‘Songs Of Faith And Devotion’ is out now on Mute

[1] - It sounds as if Dave has, typically, got over-excited, gone off at a tangent and accidentally confused the interviewer, because in the middle of a discussion about "Condemnation" he is quoting "Walking In My Shoes".