Post by miniluv86 on Sept 29, 2007 7:43:04 GMT -8
Sat 29 Sep 2007
'I don't want to lose what I have'
PAUL LESTER
THERE HAVE BEEN FEW transformations in pop history as dramatic as Dave Gahan's. When you're interviewing him you have to pinch yourself that this is the same man who emerged, a frilly-shirted fresh-faced pretty-boy, as singer with Basildon's clean-cut computer poppers Depeche Mode, back in 1981. The same Dave Gahan who then proceeded to morph into one of the most drugged-out, suicidally debauched musicians of his generation. The heavily tattooed, leather-clad rocker - the Axl Rose of electronica, if you like - who, in May 1996, overdosed on a heroin and cocaine "speedball" in a Los Angeles hotel room and, on the way to the hospital, had to be revived by paramedics after being pronounced clinically dead for two minutes. That Dave Gahan.
Gahan had to make a further transformation in the wake of these events. Today, as he prepares to release his second solo album, he's a reformed alcoholic and heroin junkie. Now all he's got to keep in check is his rampant egomania.
"We finished the tour for Playing the Angel (Depeche Mode's 2005 album) around this time last year, and when I went home (to New York) I went nuts for about a month," says Gahan, immaculate in a designer dark grey suit and white vest, smoking and drinking coffee in his West London hotel room. "I thought I could treat my wife like I treat the people that work for me on tour. I was completely unaware of it, but apparently I was acting like an egomaniac. So she promptly grabbed the kids and left."
Most musicians have to have this sort of information teased out of them after several hours and some subterfuge. But Gahan is different to most musicians: the above was his first sentence, after a firm handshake and polite how-are-you? This is his second.
"It got to the point where I was just unbearable to be around. So Jen grabbed the kids," he says, referring to his third wife Jennifer, their eight year old daughter Stella Rose and his wife's 15-year-old son Jimmy (he also has a son, Jack, 20, from his first marriage). "It happens after a tour. It's like you get locked into this - well, I do, anyway - type of personality that functions pretty well in the performance mode, but is not what you want to take home. It's like, 'I want it all, I want it now, I'm going to take it whenever I want it, and I don't really care what you think about it.' Even Jimmy was like, 'You know what? I'm getting on the train and going back into town to Grandma's.' He went crazy because we were fighting a lot."
Gahan uses the interview process like some people use therapists - not that he's short on therapy. "Well, I'm not in therapy - I actually now have a run-of-the-mill psychiatrist. I've moved away from the 'be gentle with yourself' kind to, like, getting down to the nitty-gritty. I actually find it a lot more ordered. With a psychiatrist, it's more like, 'So, what do you think that means, David?' That kind of stuff. 'I don't know, I'm paying you to tell me what it f***ing means!'"
Gahan and his psychiatrist have a lot to work out. He was six months old when his father left the family. He grew up assuming his mother's second husband was his real dad. One day, aged ten, he came home from school to find the man he believed to be his father had died and his biological father was back in the house, only for the latter to disappear out of his life again within a year, this time for good. Gahan's response to this abandonment, combined with a deep yearning for attention from his mum, was sudden, and dramatic: he fell in with Basildon's criminal fraternity, becoming "a real wide boy with a chip on my shoulder". He stole cars, vandalised property, and spray-painted graffiti on walls. He visited juvenile court three times before he turned 14. Being a yob didn't suit him.
"The criminal thing was hopeless," he says. "I was no good at it. I wasn't tough enough to be the classic Essex boy. If there was a fight going on in a pub, and there more often than not was, I would join in a bit but pretty much hide under a table somewhere as the glasses started flying around. My mates were much better at it. They'd be like, 'Go on, hit him!'"
Meeting local arty types Andy Fletcher, Vince Clarke and Martin Gore saved him from himself. "Suddenly, I was given some kind of direction," he admits. "Because I was really going nowhere."
I ask him whether Depeche Mode became a sort of surrogate family, with band members assuming the various roles. "You know, it's interesting," he says, "I've never looked at it like that. But I think Fletch would be the dad and Mart would be the mum, with me wanting to make her feel good about me."
Apart from hacks and shrinks, the other method Gahan uses to exorcise the demons accumulated during his decade-and a-half-long lost weekend (he started to go off the rails fairly early in Depeche Mode's career, around their own musical metamorphosis from bouncy synthpop to harder, darker industrial-inflected electronic rock) is his solo work.
On Hourglass, his follow-up to 2003's solo debut Paper Monsters, he channels all of his anger and residual negative urges to powerful, even draining, effect. It's an album of slow, grinding electronic blues, all dirty beats and filthy hollers. It sounds as though Gahan is sweating all of the dark stuff out of his system.
"There's definitely a theme musically and lyrically running through the album," he says. "I started seeing this pattern that I was writing about those frustrations of not having enough time to be understood, somehow, or to be heard. And I think that stemmed from coming home from the tour and more or less being booted out of my house - and, rightly so, I might add!"
So the album is an act of contrition? "Redemption, again!" he laughs, because much of Depeche's work addresses that very subject, albeit via the pen of Mode songwriter Martin Gore. "It's taken me, as usual, a while to realise that my own actions are solely responsible for the position I've found myself in. Years ago, though, it would have taken a lot longer. It seems now, because I don't have any kind of narcotic or alcohol to sort of disguise that, it happens faster. It's like, 'Oh, I've got myself into trouble here again.'
"I've learnt to be uncomfortable with myself for long periods of time," he adds. "I seem to be able to actually do something creative out of it, rather than be destructive and make things worse by sabotage. I'm able to write my way out of it. That's what happened with this record. Finally, at 45 years old, I'm learning about myself. I don't want to lose what I have, the wonderful relationship that I have with my wife, my children, the things that are now very precious to me. I can see that I can very easily, in one fell swoop, destroy that. I still can be the kind of person that's like, 'F*** it! You know what? This ain't working, it's over.' I jump straight to that rather than, 'Let's talk about this.' It's very childish. My wife often says to me, 'God, you're like Jimmy! You're acting like a teenager!' And I'll stomp around the room saying, 'So what?!' But it doesn't work."
I wonder how many issues from his childhood he's still trying to resolve through his music. "Quite a lot, probably," he replies. "Throughout the years of working with Depeche, for a long time, I was constantly trying to be noticed; trying to find some fantasy world that I could live in, like the one that I created for myself as a very young child, probably when I lost my stepfather.
"This is very therapeutic, I know," he smiles, realising that he's back on the couch. Then he continues. "I went on the run from a very early age. And I think becoming a member of a band at a very early age is a way of somehow creating an adopted family. I remember overhearing my mum, when I was really young, saying once to her friends, 'David's a little different. He needs a lot of love.' And it kind of bothered me. I remembered thinking, 'Wow, she's onto me!'"
So he reinvented himself - Basildon Dave became Dave Gahan, pop star. And the fantasy world he'd created as a child became a reality as he achieved success and fame. These in turn took him first to New Romantic 1980s London where, as he says, "I found myself in some pretty weird places", then to grungy 1990s LA where the strategy was to "find people that I could get drugs off, or that could connect me to people who could", and where he began "hanging out with a bunch of people that weren't really my friends, feeling alienated".
It was only when Gahan decided he'd rather express his more adventurous, even dangerous and experimental, side in the recording studio and onstage, that he began to wean himself off of booze and drugs and found some inner peace.
He's finally managed to separate his home and work lives, give or take the odd pampered-rock-star tantrum. He even played Deeper & Deeper, one of the heavier, more explosively personal tracks from Hourglass, to his wife - after he'd apologised for his post-tour egomania, of course - and she was accepting, his favourite response of all.
"It's really sexual and aggressive and dark, and she said, 'Hey, that's OK, that's you.'" He beams with delight. "It's weird," he says with another firm handshake and a bright smile, "but over the last few years, I've really begun to feel so much better about myself. It's like night and day. I can't describe it. The need to be wanted, to be accepted, to be good enough and all that kind of stuff - all of a sudden, it's like a lot of that stuff has fallen off my shoulders."
• Hourglass is released by Mute on 22 October.
From Depeche Mode to solo mode
1962 Gahan is born in Essex.
1980 Vince Clarke invites Gahan to join his band, Composition of Sound. At Gahan's suggestion, they change their name to Depeche Mode.
1981 The band (Clarke, Gahan, plus Andy Fletcher and Martin Gore) release debut album, Speak and Spell. Clarke leaves soon afterwards to form Yazoo, and later Erasure.
1986 The band's music takes a darker direction with the release of Black Celebration.
1988 Depeche Mode play to 90,000 people at the Pasadena Rose Bowl, a show recorded in the film and album, 101.
1990 Violator, widely regarded as the band's best album, is released.
1996 Gahan goes into rehab. Released amid ongoing band tension, subsequent Mode albums Ultra and Exciter are less well received.
2003 Gahan releases first solo album, Paper Monsters.
2005 Playing the Angel, DM's latest album, is mostly praised as a return to form.
This article: living.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1555372007
Last updated: 28-Sep-07 00:58 BST
'I don't want to lose what I have'
PAUL LESTER
THERE HAVE BEEN FEW transformations in pop history as dramatic as Dave Gahan's. When you're interviewing him you have to pinch yourself that this is the same man who emerged, a frilly-shirted fresh-faced pretty-boy, as singer with Basildon's clean-cut computer poppers Depeche Mode, back in 1981. The same Dave Gahan who then proceeded to morph into one of the most drugged-out, suicidally debauched musicians of his generation. The heavily tattooed, leather-clad rocker - the Axl Rose of electronica, if you like - who, in May 1996, overdosed on a heroin and cocaine "speedball" in a Los Angeles hotel room and, on the way to the hospital, had to be revived by paramedics after being pronounced clinically dead for two minutes. That Dave Gahan.
Gahan had to make a further transformation in the wake of these events. Today, as he prepares to release his second solo album, he's a reformed alcoholic and heroin junkie. Now all he's got to keep in check is his rampant egomania.
"We finished the tour for Playing the Angel (Depeche Mode's 2005 album) around this time last year, and when I went home (to New York) I went nuts for about a month," says Gahan, immaculate in a designer dark grey suit and white vest, smoking and drinking coffee in his West London hotel room. "I thought I could treat my wife like I treat the people that work for me on tour. I was completely unaware of it, but apparently I was acting like an egomaniac. So she promptly grabbed the kids and left."
Most musicians have to have this sort of information teased out of them after several hours and some subterfuge. But Gahan is different to most musicians: the above was his first sentence, after a firm handshake and polite how-are-you? This is his second.
"It got to the point where I was just unbearable to be around. So Jen grabbed the kids," he says, referring to his third wife Jennifer, their eight year old daughter Stella Rose and his wife's 15-year-old son Jimmy (he also has a son, Jack, 20, from his first marriage). "It happens after a tour. It's like you get locked into this - well, I do, anyway - type of personality that functions pretty well in the performance mode, but is not what you want to take home. It's like, 'I want it all, I want it now, I'm going to take it whenever I want it, and I don't really care what you think about it.' Even Jimmy was like, 'You know what? I'm getting on the train and going back into town to Grandma's.' He went crazy because we were fighting a lot."
Gahan uses the interview process like some people use therapists - not that he's short on therapy. "Well, I'm not in therapy - I actually now have a run-of-the-mill psychiatrist. I've moved away from the 'be gentle with yourself' kind to, like, getting down to the nitty-gritty. I actually find it a lot more ordered. With a psychiatrist, it's more like, 'So, what do you think that means, David?' That kind of stuff. 'I don't know, I'm paying you to tell me what it f***ing means!'"
Gahan and his psychiatrist have a lot to work out. He was six months old when his father left the family. He grew up assuming his mother's second husband was his real dad. One day, aged ten, he came home from school to find the man he believed to be his father had died and his biological father was back in the house, only for the latter to disappear out of his life again within a year, this time for good. Gahan's response to this abandonment, combined with a deep yearning for attention from his mum, was sudden, and dramatic: he fell in with Basildon's criminal fraternity, becoming "a real wide boy with a chip on my shoulder". He stole cars, vandalised property, and spray-painted graffiti on walls. He visited juvenile court three times before he turned 14. Being a yob didn't suit him.
"The criminal thing was hopeless," he says. "I was no good at it. I wasn't tough enough to be the classic Essex boy. If there was a fight going on in a pub, and there more often than not was, I would join in a bit but pretty much hide under a table somewhere as the glasses started flying around. My mates were much better at it. They'd be like, 'Go on, hit him!'"
Meeting local arty types Andy Fletcher, Vince Clarke and Martin Gore saved him from himself. "Suddenly, I was given some kind of direction," he admits. "Because I was really going nowhere."
I ask him whether Depeche Mode became a sort of surrogate family, with band members assuming the various roles. "You know, it's interesting," he says, "I've never looked at it like that. But I think Fletch would be the dad and Mart would be the mum, with me wanting to make her feel good about me."
Apart from hacks and shrinks, the other method Gahan uses to exorcise the demons accumulated during his decade-and a-half-long lost weekend (he started to go off the rails fairly early in Depeche Mode's career, around their own musical metamorphosis from bouncy synthpop to harder, darker industrial-inflected electronic rock) is his solo work.
On Hourglass, his follow-up to 2003's solo debut Paper Monsters, he channels all of his anger and residual negative urges to powerful, even draining, effect. It's an album of slow, grinding electronic blues, all dirty beats and filthy hollers. It sounds as though Gahan is sweating all of the dark stuff out of his system.
"There's definitely a theme musically and lyrically running through the album," he says. "I started seeing this pattern that I was writing about those frustrations of not having enough time to be understood, somehow, or to be heard. And I think that stemmed from coming home from the tour and more or less being booted out of my house - and, rightly so, I might add!"
So the album is an act of contrition? "Redemption, again!" he laughs, because much of Depeche's work addresses that very subject, albeit via the pen of Mode songwriter Martin Gore. "It's taken me, as usual, a while to realise that my own actions are solely responsible for the position I've found myself in. Years ago, though, it would have taken a lot longer. It seems now, because I don't have any kind of narcotic or alcohol to sort of disguise that, it happens faster. It's like, 'Oh, I've got myself into trouble here again.'
"I've learnt to be uncomfortable with myself for long periods of time," he adds. "I seem to be able to actually do something creative out of it, rather than be destructive and make things worse by sabotage. I'm able to write my way out of it. That's what happened with this record. Finally, at 45 years old, I'm learning about myself. I don't want to lose what I have, the wonderful relationship that I have with my wife, my children, the things that are now very precious to me. I can see that I can very easily, in one fell swoop, destroy that. I still can be the kind of person that's like, 'F*** it! You know what? This ain't working, it's over.' I jump straight to that rather than, 'Let's talk about this.' It's very childish. My wife often says to me, 'God, you're like Jimmy! You're acting like a teenager!' And I'll stomp around the room saying, 'So what?!' But it doesn't work."
I wonder how many issues from his childhood he's still trying to resolve through his music. "Quite a lot, probably," he replies. "Throughout the years of working with Depeche, for a long time, I was constantly trying to be noticed; trying to find some fantasy world that I could live in, like the one that I created for myself as a very young child, probably when I lost my stepfather.
"This is very therapeutic, I know," he smiles, realising that he's back on the couch. Then he continues. "I went on the run from a very early age. And I think becoming a member of a band at a very early age is a way of somehow creating an adopted family. I remember overhearing my mum, when I was really young, saying once to her friends, 'David's a little different. He needs a lot of love.' And it kind of bothered me. I remembered thinking, 'Wow, she's onto me!'"
So he reinvented himself - Basildon Dave became Dave Gahan, pop star. And the fantasy world he'd created as a child became a reality as he achieved success and fame. These in turn took him first to New Romantic 1980s London where, as he says, "I found myself in some pretty weird places", then to grungy 1990s LA where the strategy was to "find people that I could get drugs off, or that could connect me to people who could", and where he began "hanging out with a bunch of people that weren't really my friends, feeling alienated".
It was only when Gahan decided he'd rather express his more adventurous, even dangerous and experimental, side in the recording studio and onstage, that he began to wean himself off of booze and drugs and found some inner peace.
He's finally managed to separate his home and work lives, give or take the odd pampered-rock-star tantrum. He even played Deeper & Deeper, one of the heavier, more explosively personal tracks from Hourglass, to his wife - after he'd apologised for his post-tour egomania, of course - and she was accepting, his favourite response of all.
"It's really sexual and aggressive and dark, and she said, 'Hey, that's OK, that's you.'" He beams with delight. "It's weird," he says with another firm handshake and a bright smile, "but over the last few years, I've really begun to feel so much better about myself. It's like night and day. I can't describe it. The need to be wanted, to be accepted, to be good enough and all that kind of stuff - all of a sudden, it's like a lot of that stuff has fallen off my shoulders."
• Hourglass is released by Mute on 22 October.
From Depeche Mode to solo mode
1962 Gahan is born in Essex.
1980 Vince Clarke invites Gahan to join his band, Composition of Sound. At Gahan's suggestion, they change their name to Depeche Mode.
1981 The band (Clarke, Gahan, plus Andy Fletcher and Martin Gore) release debut album, Speak and Spell. Clarke leaves soon afterwards to form Yazoo, and later Erasure.
1986 The band's music takes a darker direction with the release of Black Celebration.
1988 Depeche Mode play to 90,000 people at the Pasadena Rose Bowl, a show recorded in the film and album, 101.
1990 Violator, widely regarded as the band's best album, is released.
1996 Gahan goes into rehab. Released amid ongoing band tension, subsequent Mode albums Ultra and Exciter are less well received.
2003 Gahan releases first solo album, Paper Monsters.
2005 Playing the Angel, DM's latest album, is mostly praised as a return to form.
This article: living.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1555372007
Last updated: 28-Sep-07 00:58 BST