David Gahan discusses moving Depeche Mode forward without Andy Fletcher
In 2023, Depeche Mode will enter their next phase of life as a duo. With the passing of keyboardist and founding member Andy Fletcher earlier this year, Martin Gore and David Gahan have already announced their intentions to continue the group. A new album, Memento Mori, will be released in March of next year, followed by a new tour.
While Fletcher’s death came as a shock to Gore and Gahan, the process of recording Memento Mori had already begun at the time of his passing. When Gahan recently sat down with Consequence to discuss the new album, he shared some insights into how the band are forging ahead in the face of Fletcher’s death.
“First of all, there was only one Fletch. It was a big shock to us, and very unexpected, of course,” Gahan explained. “Martin and I, when it came to the making of the music for Memento Mori, we already had the title and songs that we recorded. And we had even begun working on some of those with James Ford producing and Marta Salogni, and Fletch had not yet heard any of the songs, nothing. I know he would have loved a lot of the stuff we were doing and he also would have been the first to say, ‘Why do you have to have so many songs about death?’ So I miss that.”
“But Martin and I did have a brief conversation, and we both really came to the same conclusion pretty quickly that we were going to definitely continue making this record,” Gahan added. “And we were going to move forward, whatever that was going to look like without Fletch. Of course, we don’t know what that is, we didn’t know what that was gonna feel like, we don’t know what that feels like, each time we do something like this, or finishing the record, or when we did photos with Anton Corbijn for the first time without Fletch. All these things, they’re different. It’s the only way to describe it.”
Gahan acknowledged that he and Fletcher didn’t always see eye to eye on things, but reiterated that they were always on the same page when it came to the band. “Fletch and I, over the years, have always had differences. But we had one thing surely in common, which was that we both wanted the best for Depeche Mode and the music that we made, and the performances, and we were also friends. We spent the best part of the last 40 years together. We grew up together, we took our first airplane together, we jumped in a van and went up the motorway together for the first time. Everything that we did, we did for the first time and that involved myself, Martin, Vince [Clarke], and Fletch or Alan [Wilder].”
Gahan also acknowledged that Fletcher’s presence in the studio wasn’t the strongest in the first place, with his contributions mostly coming through on stage. “But as a lot of hardcore fans know, Fletch over the years, in the studio didn’t have much to do with the shaping and sound of the musicality of a record or the writing and all those things. And we all know Fletch was Fletch on tour. But in the studio, he did have a really powerful presence and everything to say about what we were doing. So that, of course, is really different.”
“To say I miss him would be an understatement. I miss him a lot,” Gahan concluded. “Yeah, I miss silly things that about him that we would joke about, we would laugh about, that we would argue about. All those things when you lose somebody, when somebody leaves your life and you have no way to change that, there’s nothing you can do about it. You have to move forward.”
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