The 80s electro-pop weirdos from Basildon have – against all the odds – survived, thrived and built up a global fanbase. What exactly keeps them going?
For a band that has sold more than 100m albums and had dozens of top 40 hits, Depeche Mode rarely trouble the tabloids. But last November songwriter Martin Gore caused a minor fuss when he jokingly told Music Week: "I think somebody should shoot Simon Cowell." The grand poobah of primetime karaoke took great exception to this. "Why I am angry about weirdo Gore is a ton of people have got shot this year and people like weirdo Gore encourage this," he tweeted from his fainting couch.
I suggest to Gore that this wasn't quite the crushing riposte Cowell thought it was. "Absolutely," he hoots. "I don't think I've ever tried to be anything other than a weirdo. That's the sad thing today. Most people who get involved in music are so normal. It's supposed to be full of weirdos."
Depeche Mode formed in 1980 during a golden age of weirdos, made possible by punk rock and cheap synthesizers. But as the 80s wore on, most of them grew either less weird or less successful. Only Depeche Mode and the Cure evolved into cult megastars with a fervent fanbase stretching from Monterey to Moscow. Depeche Mode's evolution from gauche synth-poppers to brooding electro-rock giants (their songs have been covered by Johnny Cash and the Saturdays) was unforeseeable, unrepeatable and inexplicable even to them.
"We're pessimists. We're always unsure," says Gore, his Cheshire-Cat grin at odds with his Eeyoreish tone. "We've been saying since Black Celebration [1986] that we can't guarantee there'll be another record. When it comes to communication we're still not the best. We're still slightly dysfunctional but maybe that's what makes us tick."
Gore lives in Santa Barbara, frontman Dave Gahan in New York and keyboardist Andy Fletcher (aka the Sensible One) in London. Today they have converged on Berlin, where the grandeur of the Hotel du Rome, its high-ceilinged corridors thronged with journalists and TV crews, affirms that Depeche Mode aren't in any danger of downsizing. Their 13th album, Delta Machine, is their most vigorous and urgent in years and yet another world tour is almost sold out.
Outside, Berlin is solemn with snow. "We've made records here when it's been like this," Gahan says fondly, peering out of the window of an enormous drawing room adjacent to Gore's. Despite myriad health issues during the last Depeche Mode tour, he's fizzing with energy, holding forth in an accent that's one part Manhattan to four parts Basildon. His earliest ambition, he says, was simply to get out of Essex. "We started very young, and thank God, because I'd probably be digging ditches in Basildon right now. We dug our way out of that town."
At 17 he was a hard-core David Bowie fan who earned his place in Depeche Mode with a rendition of Heroes; now, he says with some amazement, his children attend the same school as his idol's and they see each other at school plays. They met properly a few years ago when Gahan was summoned backstage after a Bowie concert in New York. "I sheepishly looked at him and he said: 'I know you.'" Gahan mimics a knowing grin. "I think it was more than a reference to music. It was something to do with our personalities – constantly trying to find something outside of yourself so you can be yourself."
Unlike Bowie, Gahan didn't christen his rock star alter ego but he certainly developed one after the staggering success of 1990's Violator. Relocated to Los Angeles, he arrived at sessions for 1993's torturous Songs of Faith of Devotion looking like a Russell Brand impersonation of an expat hellraiser, all hair, tattoos and trackmarks. Initially concealed from his bandmates, his burgeoning heroin habit became unignorable during a nightmarishly long tour and culminated in a near-fatal overdose in 1996. At this remove the gory details no longer interest him, but the psychology does – how he ended up acting out Gore's songs of sin, guilt and redemption.
"Martin's words were like an internal dialogue that helped me to recognise myself, to the point where I lost myself in the character within the songs," says Gahan. "That whole redemption thing, the collapsing and rising out of the ashes: we will be saved. But I wasn't getting saved. I was drowning." He laughs. "I got the first bit but not the second!"
Gahan's public unravelling gave the impression that the quieter Gore had been drawing lyrical inspiration from his bandmate's life, but Gore denies this with a twinge of embarrassment. "I had a lot of things to feel guilty about. I was a horrible alcoholic for years. I knew at quite a young age that I had an issue with drinking."
Yet his problems attracted far less attention than Gahan's. "Well, it's accepted, isn't it? More than accepted, it's encouraged for rock stars to be out of control. It's funny for people if they see their idols completely drunk, singing in hotel bars. It's fun. And, up to a point, it is, and then you cross a line and it's not so much fun any more. When you're waking up to two double vodkas for breakfast it's gone beyond the point of fun." He laughs so often as he says this that I can't tell if he finds the memory perversely comical or mortifyingly uncomfortable.
He's proud that he never missed a show ("probably trying to appear normal when you're not") but his drinking worsened while making 2005's Playing the Angel in the midst of a divorce. "He'd just become stupid," remembers Gahan. "When Martin came in the studio we knew we had a few hours: he's a little drunk right now, he's going to get drunker. [Producer] Ben Hillier put a guitar around his neck and ran around getting as much out of him as he could."
Afterwards, equilibrium was finally restored. Gore sobered up while Gahan, after initially broaching the subject in "a very fucked up way", established himself as a songwriter as well as a singer. The most recent threat to Depeche Mode's existence was, for once, not a self-inflicted wound.
In May 2009, during the tour for their Sounds of the Universe album, a tumour was discovered in Gahan's bladder and he flew home for treatment. "For a while there I almost turned to my manager and said I'm not coming back," he admits. "I spent a lot of time with my wife and kids. It was beautiful in New York, the blossom was on the trees, everything seemed a little brighter. It was similar to the feeling of waking up after a week or two in rehab. You notice shit. I was noticing a lot of stuff that I liked in my life and I was afraid to leave it in case I didn't get the chance to come back to it."
But the fear passed and Gahan convinced his oncologist to let him resume the tour, arranging treatment en route. "It was an uphill battle. I had numerous sicknesses, I lost my voice a lot, I blew out my calf on stage. I felt like I was always repairing something. It was the first tour I felt like: I can't do this any more. This is fucking hard." But, he says after a rare pause, "I was very lucky. The cancer hadn't spread through the walls of my bladder so all the chemo was localised. It still made me sick but I didn't lose all my hair. I think my denial about what was really going on in my life was firmly in place, as usual, but it was quite useful."
Carried this far by fruitful amounts of denial and dysfunction, both men describe making Delta Machine as an unusually "joyous" experience. "I don't know if people expect us to be gloomy bastards but we have a lot of fun in the studio," insists Gore. "We're actually starting to feel quietly optimistic about this record." He grins, struck by a novel proposition. "I think, after 33 years, we should stop worrying."
via The Guardian World News http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2013/mar/28/depeche-mode-interview-delta-machine-dysfunctional
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