The Depeche Mode album Dave Gahan called “spooky” to listen back to
“I finally came to the realisation that it was time for me to grow up and be a man,” Depeche Mode frontman Dave Gahan said in 1997, 35 years old at the time, still a young guy by most measures.
He’d been in the spotlight for nearly half of those years, having spent the entirety of the 1980s plugging away as one of the pioneering voices of synth-pop, only to receive a steady influx of derision from much of the old guard of the British music press.
Then, just when it seemed like the worm had turned and Depeche Mode were finally getting their proper respect with the massive success of 1990’s Violator and 1993’s Songs of Faith and Devotion, Gahan slipped into the darkest period of his life, crippled by a heroin addiction and several years of self-destructive behaviour. Like many artists before him, he had constructed a persona to hide within while on stage or in the public eye, and had gradually lost touch with reality along the way.
“I’d stick the mask on and try to control the emotions of 20,000 people every night,” he said, “And yet I couldn’t have a conversation with a person in a room. I took it to an extreme, like I was living out some book about The Rolling Stones. I wanted to adopt this rock n’ roll approach, and do it honestly, and I just went overboard. It’s as if I plotted my own demise.”
Gahan’s repeated flirtations with death while living in Los Angeles in the mid-1990s supposedly earned him the nickname ‘the cat’ among the local paramedics. As his struggles continued to make tabloid headlines, the fate of Depeche Mode also looked increasingly in doubt. With most, if not all, of his nine lives used up, however, he finally checked himself into rehab in 1996, and when he got out, he did something very few chart-topping singers do more than a decade into their careers: he started taking voice lessons.
There was a sort of symbolism to the whole thing; a re-education and reconstruction of a voice that had sometimes been criticised in the past for its coolness and lack of feeling. Returning to the studio, Gahan put those lessons, and the pain of the past few years, into the songs that would become Depeche Mode’s ninth album, Ultra.
It was no easy task, as the band’s songwriter Martin Gore sometimes feared that the album would never get finished, but Gahan’s focus gradually improved, and Gore’s dark lyrical themes gave the singer a way to express some of the hurt he’d both felt and caused while in the throes of his addiction. “Singing some of those songs, and listening to them now,” Gahan said shortly after the release of Ultra, “it’s like looking in a mirror. And it’s pretty spooky”.
The album’s first single, ‘Barrel of a Gun’, was an immediate standout, not just for its obvious lyrical heaviness, but for its visceral sound, including Gahan’s vulnerable vocal: “What do you expect of me? / What is it you want? / Whatever you’ve planned for me / I’m not the one.”
The frontman acknowledged that revisiting these songs after getting clean “brings back a lot of emotions about how I felt about myself and the person I was involved with, who was all the things I loved, and all the things I lost because of my own actions”. He added, “I had started to believe my own press, and thought what I was doing was so cool. I found it wasn’t. I lied, cheated, hid away to justify what I was doing. There was only one upside to the whole thing: I didn’t die.”
