Andy Fletcher Sing When You're Winning: Andy Fletcher of Depeche Mode (Four Four Two, 2001)
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It must be tough being a parent. There's those endless sleepless nights, and the trials and tribulations of play school. Before you know it, you're taking your child to the school playground and exposing them to the harsh realities of peer group pressure. It's something that has clearly worried Depeche Mode keyboardist Andy Fletcher (or "Fletch" as he's nicknamed). He has recently watched his son switch allegiance from his beloved Blues to a team from north London.
"I'm having terrible trouble with him at the moment," says Fletcher as we sit in a swanky West End hotel. "You've never seen brainwashing like it. Since he was one week old I've pushed Chelsea at Joe and now he's trying to tell me he supports Arsenal.
"It all started in this restaurant we go to in St Johns Wood," he says, clearly distraught at the change of devotion. "The chef, who he really likes, told him Chelsea were rubbish, so he's tried to go over to Arsenal. Four weeks ago he came to me and said, 'Daddy, I'm not a Chelsea fan anymore. I want to support Arsenal.'
"I thought, Fair enough, I'll wait my time he'll come around. The other day I said to him, 'Look Joe, if you want to become an Arsenal fan then that's up to you, but Megan (my daughter) and mummy are going to watch Chelsea on Saturday. Because you're an Arsenal fan you can't really go now. It's not really on is it?' And he told me he was a Chelsea fan, so I'm quite relieved. I'm worried about how long it will last, though."
Fletcher and I are talking football as Depeche Mode embark on a gruelling promotional tour of their new album 'Exciter' (available on Mute Records). Lead singer Dave Gahan and song writer Martin Gore have divided the interviews amongst themselves and the topics of conversation with the music press have ranged from Gahan's heroin addiction to rifts within the band. It's little surprise Fletcher is happy to be talking football.
"That's the problem about touring," he says. "I spend my whole time talking about music and by the end of the third month, all you want to do is talk about football. One of the wonderful things about the game is meeting people from different walks of life with one interest. You can get away from all your troubles and it doesn't matter whether you're a plumber or a musician, you can talk on the same level. You're all equal.
"I'm quite a good friend of Graeme Le Saux and when we meet up after games all I want to do is talk about football and all he wants to do is talk about music. I find it weird when I meet footballers because I still get a little bit starstruck because all my heroes are sportsmen. I see musicians as my equal, so they're not heroes. But when I meet footballers I'm so over-awed because they can do things that I could never do."
But why does the average footballer have such an appalling taste in music? I mean, would you admit the first record you ever bought was by Phil Collins? At the age of 23?
Fletcher laughs. "I don't know why," he says, "I think it's because from the age of eight or nine all they do in the evenings and weekends is play football, so they actually mature later in life because they're not going out with their friends so much. Their whole life is based on football. Everyone else is discovering music or whatever, I think they're a bit cocooned. There have been a few players who've come to see us over the years like Stuart Pearce and Steve Hodge, so they haven't all got a shocking taste in music.
"In the old days all the footballers used to be into stuff like George Benson and Luther Vandross," he says. "But then, that's what all my mates from Essex like."
Fletcher and his band mates grew up in Basildon. He's the first to admit the town isn't really in the Chelsea catchment area, but he's keen to point out his passion hasn't come from a desire to be associated with success.
"We weren't really a great team when I first started following Chelsea," he says. "Terry Venables, George Graham and Ronnie Harris were playing and it was a really exciting team. I was only five or six at the time and I would go along with my dad and all my uncles. One of my earliest memories of my whole life is learning the alphabet by the letters that were printed around the ground. They were there to help people read the half time scores and the lotto and I would look up at them and read them out when I was really young."
Despite the educational advantages that came with supporting the Stamford Bridge outfit, Fletcher soon found travelling to West London from Essex was fraught with danger.
"It was really difficult as I grew older being a Chelsea fan and living in Basildon," he says. "I used to have to go from Basildon and get on the District Line at Upton Park and it was during the 70s when there was a lot of trouble and we would have to hide our scarves until we got out of West Ham country. Then we had to get through Mile End with all the Millwall fans, so we never actually felt safe until we got to Victoria station. Then we had the journey back as well, so it was always quite a stressful day."
While Fletcher and Dave Gahan are Chelsea fans ("Dave has kind of lost touch since he's moved to the USA. But he's still Chelsea at heart.") Martin Gore is a Gooner. But it's not caused any tension on tour.
"We'll go to any lengths to get the results when we've been away or on tour," says Fletcher. "It's strange, but I've actually got more involved as I've got older. It's the sort of thing you'd expect of someone a lot younger than me, but I've got worse. Martin's a really avid Arsenal fan and he's always trying to find out their result. There was one time when we were in a hotel suite and he had one television on watching the Arsenal game and I had the other one on watching Chelsea. We were shouting commentary at each other across the hotel room." [1]
With an imminent world tour and more promotional commitments, Fletcher will find it increasingly difficult to visit Stamford Bridge. Unsurprisingly, he's not that bothered at the moment, given the transitional nature of the team.
"I can't really complain about what's happened this season because we've been chasing Europe all year," he says. "But we've had a really mediocre time and it does affect you. A bad result ruins my whole weekend. I know I can't watch Match of the Day. I can't read the Sunday papers the next day. It's bloody awful."
He'll be hoping young Joe shares his depression should Chelsea struggle in the coming years.
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