Depeche Mode: Some Great Reward. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.Depeche Mode: Some Great Reward

Chapter 1

Which One of Those Drugs Do You Want?

SEATTLE, NOVEMBER 1993: Six months of near-solid touring affects different people in different ways. Some--most--simply look burned out, their skin a sallow cloud which needs that little bit more makeup every time they step out in front of another television camera, their eyes darting in search of shades when the public gets too close.

For Dave Gahan, the opposite appears true. Three years of living left him looking like death. Six months of the road's living death, however, have rejuvenated him beyond recognition.

Eighteen months ago, a friend spotted him in Madrid. He looked "scary, painfully thin ... almost blue."

Now even the scratches and bruises on the insides of the singer's skinny arms, innocently acquired, have faded. His skin glowswith ruddy vigor; his voice is stronger, even when he comes offstage, and it no longer threatens to croak into mid-set silence.

At the beginning of Depeche Mode's European tour, in early summer in Budapest, Dave admitted in print that he had suffered certain "problems"; that he meant to "sort them out." "[But] everyone knows a rock 'n' roll tour isn't really the place to start sorting things out," NME journalist Gavin Martin shot back.

As Depeche Mode busy themselves around the massive Seattle Arena, however, killing time while their road crew kills gremlins in their gear, Dave Gahan not only appears to have "sorted them out"--he might have exorcised them completely.

He didn't achieve the transformation alone, of course. "When you've been in a band for thirteen years," he imparts, four "weird energies" work together. So far as he's concerned, Depeche Mode's latest album, Songs of Faith and Devotion, was the focus of those energies. "Every single song on the album were the best things Martin could have done for me. As a friend to a friend, he helped me heal a lot of my personal problems, and he wasn't even trying."

Beside him, Martin Gore smiles behind his latest made-up mask. Maybe he wasn't trying, the smile agrees. Or maybe he was. He has never been one for discussing his songs too deeply. But Dave is a friend, and if there's one thing that has kept Depeche Mode together all these years, it is friendship--recognizing it, and working for it.

People had been saying things about Dave for a couple of years now, ever since he ran out on his wife and five-year-old son and moved to L.A., had a daughter by Depeche Mode's former PR officer, and spent his time living out of a suitcase, living out the Rock God dream.

The vast computer network through which Depeche Mode's fan base keeps in touch with one another hummed with the latest street rumors. These rumors were powerful, andwhen Depeche Mode did return to action, in 1993, the journalists who caught up with the band in Hungary only added to the confusion.

THE TRUE CONFESSIONS OF DAVE GAHAN, screamed British rock weekly Melody Maker. PENANCE EXTRA, countered archrival New Musical Express. Even when the fuss died down, and Dave had survived unscathed through two-thirds of the band's latest American tour, Rolling Stone could not resist hauling him over the coals of retribution once more. Dave, however, was not playing ball.

"Religion, drugs--which one of those fucking drugs do you want to talk about?" he queried innocently. "They're all so closely knit: good, evil, drugs, alcohol, honesty, guilt ..." Only when his eyes flickered away did it even seem possible that he knew, after all, what his interrogator really meant.

To a pop psychologist, Dave's was a textbook case. Sadly, pop psychologists only turn up after the event, waiting till things are either too weird ... or too late. "No one can understand what it's like to be a young man and you get all that money, all that fame," a "camp insider" mourned to NME. No one, that is, except those to whom it's already happened.

Depeche Mode were never party animals in the accepted sense of the phrase--have never numbered amongst that elite coterie of musicians who spend their careers living out one long lost weekend.

Even today, people turn a blind eye to their indiscretions. When the band members confessed their own proclivities, when Dave spoke openly of an alcohol problem that had scarcely even been hinted at in the past, but which came close to destroying him anyway, outsiders simply shrugged, and Depeche Mode didn't push the point.

"Going out is enjoyable," Martin once laughed. "Drinking is enjoyable, and collapsing is enjoyable." Still, in 1985 the band vigorously denied the report in Germany's Bravo magazine that after every performance Dave was carried to his dressing room and kept supplied with constant fluids.

In Quebec in September 1993, Dave and his longtime friend and road manager, Daryl Levy, were arrested for scuffling with a hotel employee. They were released without being charged because the witnesses could not agree on what they saw. And that's always been Depeche Mode's story--people cannot agree on what they see or hear.

Depeche Mode has long remained reluctant to join the superstar circuit. It was never Depeche Mode who were caught on candid camera--drunk, disorderly, and drained outside London's liveliest nightclubs--not they whose evening escapades became their breakfast-time embarrassments. That, then, was when the first alarm bells began ringing among Depeche Mode's contemporaries--when Dave and his new girlfriend, Teresa, started showing up at their parties.

Seven years previous, Dave jokingly described Martin Gore as "going through the same sort of things as I went through in my teens." Martin had just broken up with his childhood sweetheart and fled abroad with a new lady friend. Now he lived in Berlin and wore dresses in public, but the rest of the group simply laughed indulgently. "He's just trying to get attention."

In 1992 it was Dave's turn to relive other people's youths, to try and get attention, to make one last, desperate grab for the wild life that his own early engagement and young marriage had deprived him of. Outsiders, willingly admitting that their imaginations played as great a part in the equation as the evidence of their own eyes, described the process.

"It was like watching someone build a Frankenstein pop star. He grew Al Jourgensen's old beard, got Anthony Kiedis's old tattoos ... and developed Kurt Cobain's old habit." Rock 'n' roll in the Nineties has yet to produce an unholier trinity!

What these outsiders didn't know--the thing that nobody outside Depeche Mode's closest circles could have known--was that by the time the Frankenstein became public,and the writers lined up to quiz the creature, the worst was already over.

The scratches and bruises on Dave's arms came from one night in Mannheim, poised on the edge of a seething German audience--tottering, falling, and being torn to shreds by his fans before he landed. The tattoos simply augmented a tapestry he had started half a lifetime before, and as for the goatee--once again, Depeche Mode has grown up.

Not that that had ever really been in question, not over the last few years, anyway. Musically, Depeche Mode has set a pace that few other artists could ever match, pioneering technologies that rock 'n' roll is still struggling to fully assimilate.

It was Depeche Mode who opened the doors through which an endless stream of modern industrial bands now revolve, taking the harsh extremes of a lunatic art-noise experiment and making palatable music for the masses. It was Depeche Mode, too, who demonstrated the potential and the possibilities of the technology now on display. Without them, the sampler might still be the preserve of academics...