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Depeche Mode Never Let Me Down Again (Q, 2005)
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- 2005 never let me down again q
Drugs, despair and a near death experience blighted Depeche Mode’s meteoric rise in the ’90s. But they’ve finally achieved some kind of peace.
“For nearly 10 years we never put a foot wrong, we made practically perfect progress,” says Andy Fletcher, his measured baritone edged with rue as he recalls Depeche Mode’s mid-’90s tumble straight out of electro-rock’n’roll grace and into the slough of despond.
It was the Songs Of Faith And Devotion world tour that did it. Since 1981 they’d been stacking up hits and enjoying a non-stop universal party. Until, one by one, they started falling over.
Apparently sober and business-like, Fletcher was the first to go. Hospitalised for depression before the tour, he discharged himself too early then sank into black depths of fatigue and miserable delusions.
“When I got stressed, I thought I had a brain tumour,” he says, with an apologetic laugh. “You’ve got this headache that won’t go away, you can’t think, you can’t sleep. You have tests and they can’t find anything. It’s a mental breakdown.”
It was a sure sign of Depeche Mode’s withering morale that, when they reached Hawaii in May 1994, instead of rallying fraternal support, Dave Gahan and Alan Wilder deemed Fletcher no fun anymore and persuaded Martin Gore that he should be sent home. Fletcher missed the last four months of the tour. [1]
Gore never felt comfortable with his decision, but then he was hardly in the pink himself. The “party-load” caught up with him during another crisis meeting at the Sunset Marquis hotel, Los Angeles. By Gahan’s account, “suddenly Mart’s just keeled over and he’s banging his head on the floor, making these weird noises.”
“It was a seizure,” says Gore. “A big stressful meeting after two hours’ sleep: your brain overloads.” When he came round, the doctors advised he should never drink again. He recalibrated that into 10 pints rather than 12.
Gahan was so upset by Gore’s illness that he went to his room and shot up. By then he was a full-on heroin addict but still in the no problem, why-worry, gung-ho phase. His comedown started after the tour when he suddenly realised he had lost control of his life. He tried rehab. Twice. When he emerged the second time, on 17 August 1995, he found his LA home had been looted: “My two Harleys, the studio, everything down to the cutlery.” He decided to kill himself. “I went back to the Sunset Marquis, got loaded, drank a lot of wine, took a handful of pills, went into the bathroom and cut my wrists with a razor.”
Mulling over the ghastly memory, he remembers that he did this while in the middle of a phone call to his mother back home in Essex. “I cut my wrists, then I said, Mum, I’ve got to go, I love you very much…” Meanwhile, a friend was waiting for him in the lounge. Gahan wrapped towels round his wrists and sat with her until she noticed blood dripping on the carpet and dialled 911.
“That’s how pathetic I was,” he says. “Anyway, I woke up in a psychiatric ward, this padded room, and a psychiatrist informed me that I’d committed a crime under local law by trying to take my own life. Only in fuckin’ LA, huh?”
How strange, how wonderful then, that this story will reach its current conclusion in late 2004 with Gahan, Gore and Fletcher in their 40s, together, healthy and starting work on their 11th studio album, “in good spirits, confident – really, we’re up for it!”
For Depeche Mode, the innocence – albeit an innocence featuring plenty of drugs and sex – had ended with the release of Violator in 1990. “Till that point, we’d been ticking along nicely, selling well, never too much attention paid to us,” says Gore, his speaking voice Mr Bean-ish as ever. “Then suddenly Violator took off. It went over the edge in America. Pressures immediately doubled or tripled.”
The 65,000 crowd and million-dollar T-shirt receipts at the Pasadena Rose Bowl a couple of years earlier had proclaimed the USA’s appreciation of the band (see story beginning page 78). But, on 20 March, Violator launched quite crazily with a riot outside LA’s Wherehouse record store on La Cienega. Ten thousand queuing down the block. Hundreds of police standing by. Ambulances ferrying the injured to the nearest ER.
The album reached Number 7 in America, Number 2 in the UK, en route to seven million worldwide sales. Not least because it was very good, Gore having let the others back into the creative process after his misbegotten attempt to appropriate it all on Music For The Masses. Industrial noises combined with a new interest in guitars and their usual easeful mastery of electro-pop. Gahan sang with a fresh Jim Morrison-ian richness. The lyrics of songs such as Personal Jesus, The Sweetest Perfection and Clean teased and tantalised around murky matters of obsession – religious, sexual, maybe narcotic.
In terms of adulation and sales, Violator was their apotheosis. In terms of real life, it did them no good at all.
“You go into a city and take it over for the night,” says Fletcher. “You are the kings. Everyone wants to film you, photograph you, scream at you.”
“Everyone wants to take you out,” says Gore. “It’s very hard to say, Actually, I’m going to bed early.”
“Our egos got out of control,” concludes Gahan, well aware that he led the way, undergoing a strange, self-willed character transformation. Splitting with his first wife, Joanne, and getting together with his second, Teresa, as the tour moved on he “decided to become a monster”. A rock’n’roll monster.
“For nearly 10 years we never put a foot wrong, we made practically perfect progress,” says Andy Fletcher, his measured baritone edged with rue as he recalls Depeche Mode’s mid-’90s tumble straight out of electro-rock’n’roll grace and into the slough of despond.
It was the Songs Of Faith And Devotion world tour that did it. Since 1981 they’d been stacking up hits and enjoying a non-stop universal party. Until, one by one, they started falling over.
Apparently sober and business-like, Fletcher was the first to go. Hospitalised for depression before the tour, he discharged himself too early then sank into black depths of fatigue and miserable delusions.
“When I got stressed, I thought I had a brain tumour,” he says, with an apologetic laugh. “You’ve got this headache that won’t go away, you can’t think, you can’t sleep. You have tests and they can’t find anything. It’s a mental breakdown.”
It was a sure sign of Depeche Mode’s withering morale that, when they reached Hawaii in May 1994, instead of rallying fraternal support, Dave Gahan and Alan Wilder deemed Fletcher no fun anymore and persuaded Martin Gore that he should be sent home. Fletcher missed the last four months of the tour. [1]
Gore never felt comfortable with his decision, but then he was hardly in the pink himself. The “party-load” caught up with him during another crisis meeting at the Sunset Marquis hotel, Los Angeles. By Gahan’s account, “suddenly Mart’s just keeled over and he’s banging his head on the floor, making these weird noises.”
“It was a seizure,” says Gore. “A big stressful meeting after two hours’ sleep: your brain overloads.” When he came round, the doctors advised he should never drink again. He recalibrated that into 10 pints rather than 12.
Gahan was so upset by Gore’s illness that he went to his room and shot up. By then he was a full-on heroin addict but still in the no problem, why-worry, gung-ho phase. His comedown started after the tour when he suddenly realised he had lost control of his life. He tried rehab. Twice. When he emerged the second time, on 17 August 1995, he found his LA home had been looted: “My two Harleys, the studio, everything down to the cutlery.” He decided to kill himself. “I went back to the Sunset Marquis, got loaded, drank a lot of wine, took a handful of pills, went into the bathroom and cut my wrists with a razor.”
Mulling over the ghastly memory, he remembers that he did this while in the middle of a phone call to his mother back home in Essex. “I cut my wrists, then I said, Mum, I’ve got to go, I love you very much…” Meanwhile, a friend was waiting for him in the lounge. Gahan wrapped towels round his wrists and sat with her until she noticed blood dripping on the carpet and dialled 911.
“That’s how pathetic I was,” he says. “Anyway, I woke up in a psychiatric ward, this padded room, and a psychiatrist informed me that I’d committed a crime under local law by trying to take my own life. Only in fuckin’ LA, huh?”
How strange, how wonderful then, that this story will reach its current conclusion in late 2004 with Gahan, Gore and Fletcher in their 40s, together, healthy and starting work on their 11th studio album, “in good spirits, confident – really, we’re up for it!”
For Depeche Mode, the innocence – albeit an innocence featuring plenty of drugs and sex – had ended with the release of Violator in 1990. “Till that point, we’d been ticking along nicely, selling well, never too much attention paid to us,” says Gore, his speaking voice Mr Bean-ish as ever. “Then suddenly Violator took off. It went over the edge in America. Pressures immediately doubled or tripled.”
The 65,000 crowd and million-dollar T-shirt receipts at the Pasadena Rose Bowl a couple of years earlier had proclaimed the USA’s appreciation of the band (see story beginning page 78). But, on 20 March, Violator launched quite crazily with a riot outside LA’s Wherehouse record store on La Cienega. Ten thousand queuing down the block. Hundreds of police standing by. Ambulances ferrying the injured to the nearest ER.
The album reached Number 7 in America, Number 2 in the UK, en route to seven million worldwide sales. Not least because it was very good, Gore having let the others back into the creative process after his misbegotten attempt to appropriate it all on Music For The Masses. Industrial noises combined with a new interest in guitars and their usual easeful mastery of electro-pop. Gahan sang with a fresh Jim Morrison-ian richness. The lyrics of songs such as Personal Jesus, The Sweetest Perfection and Clean teased and tantalised around murky matters of obsession – religious, sexual, maybe narcotic.
In terms of adulation and sales, Violator was their apotheosis. In terms of real life, it did them no good at all.
“You go into a city and take it over for the night,” says Fletcher. “You are the kings. Everyone wants to film you, photograph you, scream at you.”
“Everyone wants to take you out,” says Gore. “It’s very hard to say, Actually, I’m going to bed early.”
“Our egos got out of control,” concludes Gahan, well aware that he led the way, undergoing a strange, self-willed character transformation. Splitting with his first wife, Joanne, and getting together with his second, Teresa, as the tour moved on he “decided to become a monster”. A rock’n’roll monster.
“I wanted to live that very selfish lifestyle without being judged,” he said. “It was something I read in a book: The Stones by Philip Norman.” He moved to LA, grew his hair, added a goatee, got into tattoos – 10 hours of pain for the wings on his back – and started injecting heroin (future wife and former Jane’s Addiction PR Teresa was a user too).
Gahan has no rational explanation for this “insanity”. Maybe there was an element of guilt to it. “I felt like shit because I constantly cheated on my wife and went back home and lied. My soul needed cleansing,” he said in 1991, adding grandly, “I’ve been able to breathe, really take control. I have a lot more perspective on what I want from life.” Then he left Joanne and his five-year-old son, Jack, just as his own father had left him at the same age.
But there was still no stopping him. “I jumped into the fire head-first and thought it would be fun. I’d found my drug of choice. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make me feel… like I’d never felt before. Like I belonged. To what, I’ve no idea. I just felt nothing was gonna hurt me. That was the euphoria. It disappears very quick. After that, for six years, I was chasing that high. But it completely stopped working and then I maintained a very sad existence. Just to function I wound need my fix. In the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening. On schedule, the chills would come and I’d start shaking.”
In March 1992, Depeche Mode flew to Madrid to start recording Songs Of Faith And Devotion. It was the first time for several months the others had seen Gahan and he remembers how they just stood and stared: “I’d changed, but it was my honeymoon period, I didn’t really understand it until I saw Al, Mart and Fletch. The looks on their faces… battered me.”
Although Gore and Fletcher say they didn’t realise what was going on until a little later – when Wilder saw Gahan’s drug paraphernalia in a hotel room – for the first time the band found they couldn’t work together.
They took a break, then reconvened in Hamburg. The shock of the new Gahan had worn off to a degree. They adjusted, moved on, and produced the album, released in March 1993, which both expressed and transcended their internal turmoil. I Feel You, Mercy In You and Judas brought a discomfiting emphasis on themes of guilt and conscience, matched by their harshest industrial sounds and heaviest guitars. Gore called it “a quirk, our pseudo-rock album”. Regardless, their accrued fan base approved: it entered both UK and US charts at Number 1, a triumph.
At which, it seems, they set out to test themselves to destruction on “that tour”.
Musically, it was fine. Personally, it was hellish. Togetherness began to fragment. Insularity ruled. When they weren’t out being feted by the city du jour – an activity they pursued so zealously that even support band Primal Scream took to retiring early for self-preservation’s sake – they sat alone in hotel rooms: Gahan shooting up, Gore drinking, Fletcher feeling depressed, Wilder probably making lists.
Things got so bad they really did employ a tour psychotherapist. “The idea was to help us all communicate,” says Gore, with his apple-cheeked droll grin. “In fact, me, Dave and Alan never saw him. I think Fletch did occasionally. After six weeks, we knocked it on the head.”
They did survive. Up to a point. On his early return home, Fletcher spent a month in hospital and convalesced – much abetted by a spell of domesticity with his wife, Grainne, and two young daughters, plus ample distraction from running the restaurant he’d bought a couple of years earlier in St John’s Wood, London. [2] Gore, by then practising at least a modicum of moderation he says, married his long-time girlfriend Suzanne and, in 1995, they too had a second daughter. Wilder left the band that same year, perhaps feeling under-appreciated by the others, perhaps merely laid low by gallstones – his unglamorous entry in Depeche Mode’s voluminous medical records.
Gahan has no rational explanation for this “insanity”. Maybe there was an element of guilt to it. “I felt like shit because I constantly cheated on my wife and went back home and lied. My soul needed cleansing,” he said in 1991, adding grandly, “I’ve been able to breathe, really take control. I have a lot more perspective on what I want from life.” Then he left Joanne and his five-year-old son, Jack, just as his own father had left him at the same age.
But there was still no stopping him. “I jumped into the fire head-first and thought it would be fun. I’d found my drug of choice. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make me feel… like I’d never felt before. Like I belonged. To what, I’ve no idea. I just felt nothing was gonna hurt me. That was the euphoria. It disappears very quick. After that, for six years, I was chasing that high. But it completely stopped working and then I maintained a very sad existence. Just to function I wound need my fix. In the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening. On schedule, the chills would come and I’d start shaking.”
In March 1992, Depeche Mode flew to Madrid to start recording Songs Of Faith And Devotion. It was the first time for several months the others had seen Gahan and he remembers how they just stood and stared: “I’d changed, but it was my honeymoon period, I didn’t really understand it until I saw Al, Mart and Fletch. The looks on their faces… battered me.”
Although Gore and Fletcher say they didn’t realise what was going on until a little later – when Wilder saw Gahan’s drug paraphernalia in a hotel room – for the first time the band found they couldn’t work together.
They took a break, then reconvened in Hamburg. The shock of the new Gahan had worn off to a degree. They adjusted, moved on, and produced the album, released in March 1993, which both expressed and transcended their internal turmoil. I Feel You, Mercy In You and Judas brought a discomfiting emphasis on themes of guilt and conscience, matched by their harshest industrial sounds and heaviest guitars. Gore called it “a quirk, our pseudo-rock album”. Regardless, their accrued fan base approved: it entered both UK and US charts at Number 1, a triumph.
At which, it seems, they set out to test themselves to destruction on “that tour”.
Musically, it was fine. Personally, it was hellish. Togetherness began to fragment. Insularity ruled. When they weren’t out being feted by the city du jour – an activity they pursued so zealously that even support band Primal Scream took to retiring early for self-preservation’s sake – they sat alone in hotel rooms: Gahan shooting up, Gore drinking, Fletcher feeling depressed, Wilder probably making lists.
Things got so bad they really did employ a tour psychotherapist. “The idea was to help us all communicate,” says Gore, with his apple-cheeked droll grin. “In fact, me, Dave and Alan never saw him. I think Fletch did occasionally. After six weeks, we knocked it on the head.”
They did survive. Up to a point. On his early return home, Fletcher spent a month in hospital and convalesced – much abetted by a spell of domesticity with his wife, Grainne, and two young daughters, plus ample distraction from running the restaurant he’d bought a couple of years earlier in St John’s Wood, London. [2] Gore, by then practising at least a modicum of moderation he says, married his long-time girlfriend Suzanne and, in 1995, they too had a second daughter. Wilder left the band that same year, perhaps feeling under-appreciated by the others, perhaps merely laid low by gallstones – his unglamorous entry in Depeche Mode’s voluminous medical records.
Meanwhile, Gahan really hit the skids.
“After the tour, I spent a few months in London and that’s when my habit got completely out of hand. Teresa decided that she wanted to have a baby and I had to say to her, Teresa, we’re junkies! ’Cos when you’re a junkie, you can’t shit, piss, come, nothing. Those bodily functions go. You’re in this soulless shell.”
When they returned to LA (only to split up within a few months), his mother brought his son Jack over for a visit, It went appallingly wrong. Still desperately trying to conceal his addiction from them, one morning Gahan ended up collapsed on the bathroom floor, his mother standing over him while he babbled lies about throat problems and steroids: “Then I looked at my mum’s eyes and I said, Mum, I’m a junkie, I’m a heroin addict. She said, I know, love. Jack took my hand and led me into his bedroom and knelt me down on the floor and said to me, Daddy, I don’t want you to be sick any more. And that didn’t stop me. Even that didn’t do it…”
Repeatedly, over the next couple of years, Gahan tried and failed to break with his addiction. He slashed his wrists. He contemplated “going out on a big one, just shoot the big speedball to heaven. I couldn’t face myself, let alone face the world. It was a vision of just stopping. I wanted to stop being myself, to stop living in this body. My skin was crawling. I hated what I’d done to myself and to everyone around me.”
But even his oldest friends couldn’t help him. They had no idea what to do.
“You’d go up to him and say, Come on Dave, sort yourself out, you’re gonna kill yourself here,” Fletcher recalls. “He’d say, Let me do what I like.”
“Every time the phone went and someone said, It’s about Dave, my first thought was always, This is it, he’s dead,” says Gore. “Which is not very nice.”
In accordance with their usual disorderly strategy of recording another album “when Martin’s written enough songs”, Depeche Mode reconvened at Electric Lady Studios, New York, in spring 1996.
Of course, they were wondering what shape Gahan would be in. Well, he said he was clean, reinforcing his point with remarks like, “I see Alice In Chains are in town next week and they’re friends of mine, but they won’t want to hang around with me – now I’m clean.” Once they put him in the vocal booth, though, says Gore, “something was badly amiss”. Gahan croaked away for four weeks and completed one usable track (Sister Of Night – Gahan says he was high when he did it). [3]
“We told him, We think we should spend the next couple of weeks focusing on the music because we’re not getting anywhere with the vocals,” says Gore. “You should go back to LA and really sort yourself out, get a vocal coach. We said we’d record him later in the year. I did feel sympathy for him, but it made you angry as well to realise that he’d been lying to you so much.”
Fletcher’s recollection of the occasion is rather more pungent: “We told him he had lost everything else in his life and now he was going to lose Depeche Mode as well. And when he got to LA he just went on a binge…”
Gahan, by now toting a .38 at all times because of the company he needed to keep, returned to his ill-starred lodgings at the Sunset Marquis and bought a stash of Red Rum heroin. He imagined it was named after the great steeplechaser until he realised it spelt “murder” backwards. “I remember saying to the guy, Don’t fill the rig up, and don’t put too much coke in, because there was something weird about it. Next thing, I woke up in hospital with a paramedic saying, I think we lost him. Apparently I sat up and said, No you fuckin’ haven’t. My heart had stopped for two minutes. They’d done the full Pulp Fiction [shot of adrenaline straight into the heart].”
Back in London, Gore heard the news on the radio: “For me that was the low point in the band’s whole career. I thought, We’re slogging away getting the music right and he’s obviously so… ill, he’s never gonna be fit to carry on. I thought Depeche Mode were over.”
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“After the tour, I spent a few months in London and that’s when my habit got completely out of hand. Teresa decided that she wanted to have a baby and I had to say to her, Teresa, we’re junkies! ’Cos when you’re a junkie, you can’t shit, piss, come, nothing. Those bodily functions go. You’re in this soulless shell.”
When they returned to LA (only to split up within a few months), his mother brought his son Jack over for a visit, It went appallingly wrong. Still desperately trying to conceal his addiction from them, one morning Gahan ended up collapsed on the bathroom floor, his mother standing over him while he babbled lies about throat problems and steroids: “Then I looked at my mum’s eyes and I said, Mum, I’m a junkie, I’m a heroin addict. She said, I know, love. Jack took my hand and led me into his bedroom and knelt me down on the floor and said to me, Daddy, I don’t want you to be sick any more. And that didn’t stop me. Even that didn’t do it…”
Repeatedly, over the next couple of years, Gahan tried and failed to break with his addiction. He slashed his wrists. He contemplated “going out on a big one, just shoot the big speedball to heaven. I couldn’t face myself, let alone face the world. It was a vision of just stopping. I wanted to stop being myself, to stop living in this body. My skin was crawling. I hated what I’d done to myself and to everyone around me.”
But even his oldest friends couldn’t help him. They had no idea what to do.
“You’d go up to him and say, Come on Dave, sort yourself out, you’re gonna kill yourself here,” Fletcher recalls. “He’d say, Let me do what I like.”
“Every time the phone went and someone said, It’s about Dave, my first thought was always, This is it, he’s dead,” says Gore. “Which is not very nice.”
In accordance with their usual disorderly strategy of recording another album “when Martin’s written enough songs”, Depeche Mode reconvened at Electric Lady Studios, New York, in spring 1996.
Of course, they were wondering what shape Gahan would be in. Well, he said he was clean, reinforcing his point with remarks like, “I see Alice In Chains are in town next week and they’re friends of mine, but they won’t want to hang around with me – now I’m clean.” Once they put him in the vocal booth, though, says Gore, “something was badly amiss”. Gahan croaked away for four weeks and completed one usable track (Sister Of Night – Gahan says he was high when he did it). [3]
“We told him, We think we should spend the next couple of weeks focusing on the music because we’re not getting anywhere with the vocals,” says Gore. “You should go back to LA and really sort yourself out, get a vocal coach. We said we’d record him later in the year. I did feel sympathy for him, but it made you angry as well to realise that he’d been lying to you so much.”
Fletcher’s recollection of the occasion is rather more pungent: “We told him he had lost everything else in his life and now he was going to lose Depeche Mode as well. And when he got to LA he just went on a binge…”
Gahan, by now toting a .38 at all times because of the company he needed to keep, returned to his ill-starred lodgings at the Sunset Marquis and bought a stash of Red Rum heroin. He imagined it was named after the great steeplechaser until he realised it spelt “murder” backwards. “I remember saying to the guy, Don’t fill the rig up, and don’t put too much coke in, because there was something weird about it. Next thing, I woke up in hospital with a paramedic saying, I think we lost him. Apparently I sat up and said, No you fuckin’ haven’t. My heart had stopped for two minutes. They’d done the full Pulp Fiction [shot of adrenaline straight into the heart].”
Back in London, Gore heard the news on the radio: “For me that was the low point in the band’s whole career. I thought, We’re slogging away getting the music right and he’s obviously so… ill, he’s never gonna be fit to carry on. I thought Depeche Mode were over.”
[1] - This is quite an unfair slant on the whole matter - Fletch at the time was at breaking point and probably physically unable to continue the tour. Previously, he had been strongly against the final leg of the tour happening at all. Martin was uncomfortable with the decision (next paragraph) not so much with guilt at kicking Fletch off the tour, but because his closeness to Fletch compared with the emotional distance between the other two - especially Dave - left him effectively without a mate for the remainder of the tour.
[2] - Fletch in fact has one daughter (Megan, aged 3 at the time) and one son, Joseph, who was born that summer.
[3] - The vocal track to Sister Of Night was in fact recorded in several takes, which then had to be spliced together - such was the frailty of Dave's voice at the time that he couldn't perform satisfactorily even for the length of one song.
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