‘Don’t give up. I’m testament to that’
As Depeche Mode release a new album, singer Dave Gahan tells Neil McCormick about drugs, depression and fans from the far Right
‘Where’s the revolution? Come on people, you’re letting me down!” croons Dave Gahan, eyes shut. It sounds like he’s addressing an angry mob, but, in fact, the Depeche Mode frontman is in a wood-panelled rehearsal studio in Manhattan.
As his bandmates focus on their own instruments, filling the air with a fizzing, brain-melting wall of sound, and road crew peer into laptops, Gahan sways his wiry frame from side to side and clambers higher on his imaginary soap box. “You’ve been kept down, you’ve been pushed round, you’ve been lied to,” he sings.
With pencil moustache and goatee, dressed like a Thirties gigolo and swishing his behind with rock star flamboyance, Gahan makes an unlikely rabble-rouser. But there is no denying his passion as the British electronic group blast through their latest single in rehearsal for a summer stadium tour.
Depeche Mode’s 14th album, Spirit, comes across as a howl of synthpowered outrage, featuring songs about violent racism ( The Worst Crime), rampant corporate greed ( Poorman) and sociopathic selfishness ( Scum).
“It is a bit apocalyptic,” admits Gahan. “It seems to fit the mood of the moment. But there’s also levity, sarcasm, love. It is about the same kind of things that all our records have been about: humanity. You can’t lose hope. I’m a testament to that.”
Depeche Mode’s journey has certainly been a curious one. Coming to prominence in the early Eighties as part of a wave of New Romantic bands including Spandau Ballet and Heaven 17, the boys from Basildon, Essex, became famous for bouncy pop songs such as Just Can’t Get Enough and
People Are People, before transforming themselves into dark, leather-clad Goths and developing serious alcohol and drug addictions. Over four decades, they have sold more than 100 million albums.
Martin Gore, the band’s chief songwriter, believes he would be dead if he hadn’t given up drink 11 years ago. “I was out of control,” he says. Gahan, meanwhile, had a heroin and cocaine addiction that reached a peak in the mid-Nineties, leading to divorce from his second wife, a suicide bid in 1995 and several overdoses.
In May 1996, he was arrested after a cocaineinduced heart attack in a Los Angeles hotel. Finally facing up to his demons (spurred on by a suspended two-year jail sentence), Gahan has been clean for 20 years. During that time, his singing has grown more confident and he has started writing songs, contributing four to the new album. Not as overtly political as Gore’s, songs like
Poison Heart and Cover Me tend to chip away at his own failings. “A lot of darkness is self-inflicted. If you are going to point the finger, maybe you have to point it at yourself first,” he says. Gahan is a compelling character, animated and gregarious, while Gore seems far more cautious and nervous. The 54-year-old, who lives in New York with his third wife Jennifer, 17-year-old daughter Stella Rose and son Jimmy, has matured since I last encountered him, in 1998, at the start of his clean-up. “I do dwell in the darkness quite often, I just don’t stay there as long as I used to,” he says, trying to explain the appeal of the dark subject matter that runs through most of Depeche Mode’s work. “I find it a creative space. It’s more truthful somehow… What’s interesting to me is that I don’t need anything to get there now. I don’t need booze or drugs. I just need life. I can go there, and come back.” That dark subject matter, however, combined with Depeche Mode’s Teutonic rigidity and Kraftwerk-like dystopian electronica, has attracted the attentions of the far Right. In February, controversial American white nationalist Richard Spencer claimed in an interview that “Depeche Mode is the official band of the alt-Right”. He also tweeted that the band “have written all the anthems that the alt-Right needs”.
“Honestly, I don’t know where he gets that from,” says Gore. “Does he even listen to our lyrics? It’s the polar opposite, if anything.” He felt, he says, like he was “living in a computer simulation” the day Spencer’s remarks hit the headlines. Gahan expresses his distaste for the whole episode with even less amusement. “He’s a dangerous person promoting hate and fear,” he says of Spencer, who was notoriously attacked by a bystander while giving a TV interview at the inauguration of President Trump. “I saw the video of him getting punched. He deserved it.”
The new album does sound rather like a protest against Trump and also Brexit voters. Gore, who has lived in Santa Barbara, California, for 17 years, says he feels “depressed” about politics.
“I’ve never seen America more divided than it is now. The polarising effect of Trump is crazy. Calling for a revolution in a pop song is a little bit tongue-in-cheek but I think we are going to see more and more mass protest, and that is a kind of revolution.”
Nevertheless, the band is reluctant to define the album in terms of its politics and they point out that it was written before the EU referendum and recorded before Trump’s election.
“You know, most of these songs were written over 18 months ago. Everything started to take on a different meaning after Brexit,” says Gore.
The band’s Global Spirit Tour begins in Stockholm in May and the multi-instrumentalist says he is excited about taking the new songs on the road. “I can’t wait to get out of this country, to be honest,” he laughs.
In June, they will play the London Olympic Stadium, their biggestever UK concert, a triumphant homecoming to a country that has not always shown them as much love as they deserve (Depeche are far more critically admired in America and Europe than back home).
During rehearsals, the five-piece band (comprising three original Depeche members, Gahan, Gore and keyboard player Andy Fletcher, plus two long-serving session musicians, drummer Christian Eigner and keyboard player Peter Gordeno) dive into a version of David Bowie’s Heroes. Gahan becomes utterly immersed in his performance, tears glistening as he brings the full weight of his gritty baritone to bear.
Afterwards, his bandmates nod and smile, congratulating him. This was the very song that Gore, Fletcher and founding member Vince Clarke (who left in 1981 to form Yazoo and Erasure) heard Gahan sing in a Basildon rehearsal room in 1980, subsequently inviting him to join their band.
“I got a little choked up,” he admits, afterwards. “I feel like I’m carrying a song that’s important to all of us. The one thing we’ve had in common from the very beginning was loving Bowie. He is probably the reason why we all wanted to make music.”
Gahan admits he wept when he heard Bowie had died in January last year. His daughter attended the Little Red School House in Greenwich Village with Bowie’s daughter Lexi, so the expat rock stars would occasionally run into each other at school functions.
“I regret not telling him how important his music was to me. I’m sure he knew. I was a bit in awe of him but he was the nicest guy. He kind of got me, somehow. He talked to me like, ‘I know you’. I don’t think it was just about the music, it was this feeling of being a little bit odd in the world. Bowie’s music was something that really carried me when I was young. His death was much more huge to me than I would have ever imagined.”
It has been another reminder of his own mortality.
“I’m getting older, and things start creeping up. Everything gets a little bit harder, and hurts a little bit more. I’m surprised I’m as intact as I am.” He had an operation to remove a cancerous tumour on his bladder in 2009 and still needs regular check-ups.
“I’ve had a few brushes with the Grim Reaper. It is what it is. I’m OK with it, I really am.” He is looking forward to getting back on tour.
“It’s a bit daunting at first. You feel like you’re carrying the whole thing as the front guy, and that can be nerveracking. But when the voice is working and the body’s moving right, it’s like a sportsman, you start to get into the zone, and then I have a ball with it.” Spirit (Mute) is out now. They play the London Olympic Stadium on June 3
‘David Bowie got me. It was something about this feeling of being a little bit odd in the world’