The darkness of Depeche Mode
Martin Gore, who now represents 50 percent of Depeche Mode, worked in a studio on a hill near Santa Barbara.
On a Tuesday morning in January, I sat by the console in the center of the control room, which was wide and tidy and full of California winter sun—a clean, well-lit place to make songs about power. , desire, faith and the world spinning ever further away from its axis.
Gore was wearing black clothes and boots. He looked like an Englishman who had spent decades in California – tanned skin, straight white teeth. There was the haircut you can get if you ask a knowledgeable barber to give you the “Martin Gore” look.
Two years ago, Gore turned 60, and “it hit me,” he said with a morbid chuckle. “I don’t feel very much like 60 years old, but you have to accept the facts. It seems as if you have at least one finger in the grave”.
This Friday, Depeche Mode will release the 15th album, mostly recorded in this studio, by a pandemic-era team: Gore, vocalist Dave Gahan, producer James Ford, and engineer and co-producer Marta Salogni. As always, the sound is soulful.
The title is Memento Mori and the overriding theme is mortality—which is not, in itself, an avoidance. Death is everywhere, Gore wrote years ago, in a song called Fly on the Windscreen, whose narrator goes on to warn with Come here, kiss me now, because you never know.
However, Memento Mori is obsessed with death even by the band’s standards, with lyrics full of ghosts, angels and funeral flowers. Gore has said that mortality has been on his mind at the time of the coronavirus that was cutting off a generation of the world’s population – as he wrote in 2020.
But Gore knows that the album and its title are meant to be read differently. In May 2022, Andy Fletcher, known as Fletch, died at the age of 60, suddenly and quickly from an aortic dissection. Fletcher was a founding member of the band; he and Gore have been friends since high school.
As a keyboard player, Fletch’s true role in the band was nebulous but spiritually necessary – somewhere between manager, quality control supervisor and super-fan.
“Without Andy, there would be no Depeche Mode,” radio announcer and band fan Richard Blade said in a video interview. “He wasn’t the one who composed the music, but he was the one who put it together.”
Gore last saw Fletcher in person in 2019, at a wedding in England. He died a few weeks before the group had made the schedules for the recording Memento Mori, the band’s first collection of songs he’ll never hear.
Gore and Gahan said they both questioned whether they could or should continue without him. But Depeche Mode has survived events that could have killed the group before – starting with the departure of founding member Vince Clarke, who left the group in 1981 after the release of its debut album Speak & Spell, in which he was the main singer-songwriter.
In the 1990s, the band weathered the rise of grunge music – which made synthesizers and drum machines taboo – as well as the departure of member Alan Wilder and Gahan’s struggle with heroin addiction (technically, Gahan is the first band member to die ; in 1996, after an overdose, he passed out for two minutes before doctors revived him; he has been clean ever since).
Derided early on by the British rock press, Depeche Mode found themselves in America. Breakthrough in the US came with the platinum album Some Great Reward in 1984 and the song People Are People, a backlash against prejudice that became a hit, as well as a gay club anthem.
The gay community was just one of many subcultures where Depeche Mode built a fan base. On the West Coast, the band fit in among the “white kids who surfed,” but also connected with Latino listeners who saw it as a reflection of their own experience.
Gore agrees that the group was a common language for those who felt they didn’t belong. “I think humanity is made up of a lot of aliens and that’s one of the reasons we’ve managed to make it.”
By 1988, the group was famous enough for a busy concert in Pasadena, documented by filmmaker DA Pennebaker with the project Depeche Mode 101; then comes the triple platinum album rapist, and hit songs like Personal jesus and Enjoy the silence which pulsed like techno, but which brought the guitars to the fore – for the first time.
That album was the band’s commercial peak in America; with the exception of a 2005 compilation, no new Depeche Mode album has been certified gold in the US – for 22 years. But as long as there are young teenagers, there will always be young fans inclined to respond to texts like Everything seems so foolish that it makes me give up / But why should I give up when everything seems so foolish?
But Gahan said that even before Fletcher’s sudden death, he wasn’t sure he would make another album with Depeche Mode.
During the coronavirus, he said, he enjoyed being at home, surrounded by family and friends. “Why would I ruin all that, and get into a new album with Depeche Mode that will take me away from this for the next three years”?
The recording sessions for Depeche Mode’s previous album, Spirit, were controversial. Since Member Clarke’s departure, there has been a clear division of labor in the group. Gore wrote almost all the lyrics and Gahan sang his words. But in the early 2000s, Gahan started making solo albums and bringing his own songs to the band’s sessions as well.As Gahan says, he’s always been the member who pushed the band outside of its comfort zone. After Nirvana broke up in the early 1990s, it was Gahan who was on the album Songs of Faith and Devotion appeared with long hair and a harsher sound. Without it, you might never have heard the actual drums or chorus on any of the band’s songs. “They were all considered threats,” says Gahan.
But when Gahan pushed, it was Fletcher who attacked. “It was always about Martin,” says Gahan. “If there was a vote, I would lose.”
In the album sessions Spirit in 2016, those creative tensions reached what Gahan called a “boiling point.”
“Martin wasn’t keen on some of his songs,” says producer Ford, “and Dave was trying very hard to get them on the album. It was very, very difficult.”
The project was in jeopardy. The solution was to fire everyone, while only Gahan and Gore were in the studio. “Fletch didn’t like that,” Gahan said. “In the end, our manager Jonathan had to take him out – by force.”
Ford said the next day was like a marriage counseling session. Gahan remembers that the match “was really difficult. After all those years – he said a few things. I said some things.”
They clarified enough to finish the album Spirit, released in 2017. And, Gahan said any reservations he had about making the next album disappeared the moment he heard Gore’s demo of the song Ghosts Again. “I was like, ‘I can’t wait to sing this song.'”
Then, it was May and suddenly Andy Fletcher died.
“I immediately felt like a supporter of Martin,” Gahan said. “I have to look after him – it’s a lot harder for Martin than it is for me.”
They decided to continue Memento Mori — and, as Gore and Gahan say, Fletcher’s death fostered an intimacy they’d never experienced in their 40 years as bandmates.
“Every decision now has to be made by the two of us,” Gore said. “So we have to discuss things when we disagree.”
Salongi, the Italian producer and engineer who has worked with household names – and a rare woman in this male orbit – said it was “wonderful” to witness the budding friendship between them. “Andy was the filter – after he died, the filter unfortunately disappeared and suddenly the curtain fell and they were there to face each other,” she said.
The mood at the hearings, said Ford, “was very gloomy.” But there were also many memories – Fletcher stories told over long lunches. “It was a beautiful experience,” he said.
Depeche Mode, says Gahan, has always survived by evolving. “Sometimes we’ve changed naturally, and sometimes change has been forced,” he said, “and I think that’s what’s happening now. We lost an integral part of the group, which is irreplaceable. Circumstances forced us to be different, to think about each other in a different way. We need each other in a different way.” /Telegraph/