Build your own rock star: how Dave Gahan died three times in the name of Depeche Mode - Document (2024)

Date: June 2, 2017

From: New Statesman(Vol. 146, Issue 5369)

Publisher: New Statesman, Ltd.

Document Type: Interview

Length: 2,988 words

Lexile Measure: 940L

When Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys was the assistant editor of Smash Hits, he made the following observation:

Dave Gahan has become an accomplished bum wiggler on stage, as well as shaking his pelvis in a very suggestive way. If you think that Depeche Mode are a hunch of solemn, synthesiser-programming boffins, you'd be amazed at the waves of screaming that they arouse. A lot of the credit must be taken by Dave whose energetic performance is one of the most sexy to be seen on a stage anywhere.

Tennant's words might not have helped the cause of a band roundly mocked by the so-called serious music press and trapped in a world of suburban, teenage, sticky-floor synthpop. But he put a finger on something about the man the critics once called Plain Dave from Basildon. He was sexy, but he hadn't always been.

Gahan sits facing me in the windowless conference room of a Knightsbridge hotel, elbows on the table, his flexible wrists sprouting out of his leather jacket and whirling about like two little trees in a strong wind. He has silver chains, hair like a spiv, eyes creased by years of chemical abuse, and sudden, explosive smiling. Somewhere under his singlet there is a giant tattoo of angel wings which took ten hours to complete. There are piercings on him, too, not visible. One goes through his "guiche", or perineum; he once said he had so many holes in his male apparatus that he weed like a watering can. Gahan has nearly died three times. The first was a heart attack on stage in 1993. As he was stretchered off, his bandmates finished the encore.

Two nights before we met, the accomplished bum wiggler, bathed in blue light, wearing a leather waistcoat over his naked torso, played a special gig at Glasgow Barrowlands, Depeche Mode's smallest, most exclusive crowd in thirty years. He instinctively scanned the front row for a particular fan he sees at fifty European shows a year, and eventually spotted him. "My sight!" he mourns. "All my sunglasses are prescription. I can see the stars at night but nothing else. We have a house way out on Long Island, and in the summer you can lay in the garden and the stars are just--bang." His fingers flash in a re-creation of astral beauty.

He speaks and thinks at the accelerated pace of an ex-addict, and his Essex accent is spiced with American Rs. Across London, his bandmates Martin Gore and Andrew Fletcher do a joint interview at a different hotel. Because Depeche Mode and Dave Gahan don't get on.

No one could have known, when Tennant wrote his ode, that the band would outgrow Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet or Culture Club. Today, Gore and Gahan live on opposite sides of America. They meet only when they have to--coming together to roll out their vast electronic rock show around the world, playing to stadium crowds of 60,000 a time.

Depeche Mode fans aren't...

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