The story of Depeche Mode

Kids from Basildon

The story starts in Basildon, a town in Essex about thirty miles east of London. In 1977 two schoolmates, Vince Clarke and Andy Fletcher, started a short lived band called No Romance in China, with Clarke singing and playing guitar and Fletcher on bass. Fletcher later joked that he never really chose to be in a band. He had a bass, so he got roped in. Clarke and Fletcher were both churchgoing teenagers, and their classmate Alison Moyet remembered them walking around town in raincoats with Jesus Saves printed on the back. Another pupil in that same class was a quiet boy called Martin Gore, who worked as a bank cashier after his exams and played guitar in an acoustic duo called Norman and the Worms.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In 1980 Clarke and Fletcher formed a new group called Composition of Sound, and after watching Martin Gore play a small synthesiser at a local pub, they brought him in too. Synthesisers were suddenly cheap, and they suited three shy boys perfectly. You could tuck one under your arm, plug it straight into the venue's sound system, and skip the van altogether. The band often travelled to gigs by train. Clarke sang at first, but he felt stuck behind his keyboard and wanted a proper frontman. They auditioned a few people, and that summer they chose a local lad who had impressed Clarke by singing David Bowie's Heroes at a jam session in a Scout hut. His name was Dave Gahan.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Dave Gahan had arrived by a rougher road than the others. He was born David Callcott in Epping on the ninth of May 1962. His father left when he was a baby, and he took the surname of his stepfather, Jack Gahan, whom he believed was his real dad. Jack died when Dave was nine, and soon afterwards a stranger appeared in the house and was introduced as his real father, only to vanish again a year later. As a teenager Dave stole cars, sprayed graffiti and ended up in juvenile court three times. He was warned that detention centre was next. He later said simply that music saved him, and he called Depeche Mode the bus that got him out of town.[1] [2]

The new line up was Gahan, Gore, Fletcher and Clarke, and they played their first gig as a four piece on the fourteenth of June 1980 at a school in Basildon. Soon they had a regular slot at a club called Croc's in nearby Rayleigh. Composition of Sound was starting to feel embarrassing, so Gahan suggested a new name borrowed from a French fashion magazine, Dépêche Mode. Gore liked to say it meant hurried fashion or fashion dispatch, although a truer translation is closer to fashion news. By the autumn of 1980 they were playing as Depeche Mode, rehearsing in a local church whose vicar let them use the hall as long as they stayed polite and not too loud.[1] [2] [3]

Mute, Vince Clarke and the first hits

The band's first ever studio recording was a song called Photographic, cut for a compilation of new electronic acts called Some Bizzare Album. They also made a demo tape, but instead of posting it, Clarke and Gahan walked it round London's record companies and demanded that someone play it on the spot. Most told them to go away. When a label asked them to leave the tape, they refused, because it was their only copy. Then, at a gig at the Bridge House pub in Canning Town, a man named Daniel Miller stayed behind after his own act's soundcheck to watch them. He ran a tiny label called Mute from his flat, and he thought they looked like a dodgy New Romantic band until they started playing.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Miller had started Mute in 1978 to release a single of his own, and he offered Depeche Mode a handshake deal instead of a big advance. Major labels waved serious money at the teenagers, and Gahan remembered one even offering clothing allowances, but the band took Miller's offer and a share of the profits instead. Gore later said it was the best decision they ever made. Their first single, Dreaming of Me, came out in February 1981 and reached number fifty seven. The second, New Life, climbed to number eleven and earned them a spot on Top of the Pops. They went to the BBC by train, carrying their synthesisers the whole way.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The third single, Just Can't Get Enough, was the one that broke them. Clarke said he wrote it after hearing Spandau Ballet's To Cut a Long Story Short, the first time a dance beat had really grabbed him. It reached number eight in Britain in the autumn of 1981, and at its peak it was reportedly selling sixty thousand copies a week. The success convinced Gahan to leave college and Gore and Fletcher to quit their office jobs. The debut album, Speak and Spell, named by Miller after the children's toy, came out on the twenty ninth of October 1981 and reached number ten. Clarke wrote almost all of it. Rolling Stone was not impressed and called it PG rated fluff.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Behind the scenes, Vince Clarke was unhappy. He disliked interviews and photo shoots, he had been stung by a tabloid that misquoted him, and he found himself at odds with the others on the tour bus. The band played their last show with the original line up on the third of December 1981, and Clarke left soon afterwards. He said he was tired of touring. Gahan later dismissed that as nonsense and suggested Clarke simply lost interest once fans started writing to ask what kind of socks he wore. Clarke himself later blamed his own ego. Within weeks he had teamed up with Alison Moyet to form Yazoo, and their first single, Only You, went to number two.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Starting again: Wilder, Berlin and the sound of metal

Everyone assumed Depeche Mode were finished without their songwriter, but none of the three wanted to go back to their old jobs. Martin Gore had written two songs on the debut, and he dug out older songs he had written as a teenager. The first, See You, came out in January 1982 and reached number six, beating every single Clarke had written for them. For live shows they placed an anonymous advert in Melody Maker looking for a keyboard player under twenty one. The best candidate was Alan Wilder, a classically trained musician from west London who was actually twenty two. He was hired as a paid touring musician, and he was pointedly left out of the sessions for the second album, A Broken Frame, which the trio wanted to prove they could make alone.[1] [2] [3]

Wilder became a full member in October 1982, when Daniel Miller simply phoned him to say so. His arrival changed everything. For the third album, Construction Time Again in 1983, the band began working with engineer Gareth Jones and brought in expensive sampling machines, a Synclavier and an Emulator. They went out to derelict sites and building yards with hammers and tape recorders, smashing metal and stone to create percussion, inspired partly by the Berlin noise group Einstürzende Neubauten. They mixed the album at Hansa Studios in West Berlin, where David Bowie had worked. The single Everything Counts, a sour look at corporate greed, went to number six in Britain.[1] [2] [3] [4]

West Berlin changed the band, and especially Gore. He broke off a long engagement back home, moved in with a German girlfriend named Christina Friedrich, and threw himself into the city's all night clubs. He started wearing leather harnesses, make up and skirts on stage and refused to tone it down when the others asked. The next album, Some Great Reward in 1984, reflected that world. Master and Servant used sex as a way to write about domination and power, and some radio stations would not play it. The whip sound on the record was not a whip at all. It was Daniel Miller hissing and spitting into a microphone, and the band also sampled Fletcher spanking Gore.[1] [2]

The biggest hit from that era was People Are People, a plea against prejudice that Gore partly based on being taunted in Basildon for the way he looked. It reached number four in Britain and number one in West Germany, where television used it as the theme for its coverage of the 1984 Olympics. It took longer in America, but Los Angeles radio station KROQ kept playing it, and in 1985 it reached number thirteen on the Billboard Hot 100. Then came Blasphemous Rumours, a song about a teenager's suicide attempt and an early death, with a chorus suggesting God has a sick sense of humour. A Basildon priest publicly objected, and Mute nervously paired it with the ballad Somebody on a double A side single.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

By the time the band landed in America for the spring 1985 tour, they had quietly become a cult. Gore said they expected nothing and found themselves playing to fifteen thousand people a night. In July 1985 they went further than most Western pop groups dared, playing behind the Iron Curtain in Budapest and Warsaw. They tried to book Moscow and East Germany too, but the paperwork defeated them. At home, the British press still treated them as a teen band, and the four of them were exhausted. Gahan later said that if Depeche Mode were ever going to split, it would have been at the end of 1985, when they did little except argue.[1] [2]

Black Celebration, Anton Corbijn and the Rose Bowl

They made Black Celebration in the winter of 1985 in London and Berlin, under orders from Daniel Miller to live the album, an idea he borrowed from the film director Werner Herzog. It meant around a hundred and twenty days of fourteen hour sessions, lots of marijuana and plenty of paranoia. Mute worried the songs were too slow and morbid to produce a single, and Gore was so upset he briefly fled to a friend's farm. Released in March 1986, it became their best selling album yet and the darkest. The single Stripped even features Gahan's Porsche idling and fireworks fired past a row of microphones, because they were recording on Bonfire Night.[1]

Around this time the band found the man who would shape how the world saw them. Anton Corbijn was a Dutch photographer, the son of a pastor, who had made his name shooting Joy Division for the NME. He first photographed Depeche Mode back in 1981 and did not like them much, preferring guitar bands. He turned down their requests for years. In 1986 he finally agreed to film a video for A Question of Time, mostly because he fancied a trip to America. He realised their music and his grainy black and white images fitted perfectly. Forty years on he still has no contract with them and no job title. Gahan later said Corbijn saved them visually.[1] [2] [3]

Music for the Masses, released in September 1987, was a joke of a title. Gore found an old record called Music for the Millions and thought it would be funny, because everyone kept telling them to be more commercial. Daniel Miller had stepped away from producing, so Alan Wilder effectively steered the sessions in Paris, London and Denmark. The band worked to strange rules: no presets, no chords played by one hand, no hi hats and no sample used twice. The track Nothing sounds like it has a hi hat, but it is really a pneumatic bus door. Never Let Me Down Again borrowed a drum sound from Led Zeppelin's When the Levee Breaks and became their great live closer.[1] [2] [3]

On the seventh of March 1988, the band played East Berlin, one of very few Western groups ever allowed to perform in communist East Germany. The show was approved by the ruling party and its youth movement. Only later did the band learn that ordinary fans had little chance of tickets, which went largely to the families of officials. Years afterwards Fletcher said they should not have done it, and that they had let themselves be used. On the same tour, drugs began creeping in. The band had mostly stuck to alcohol and marijuana, but now cocaine arrived, and Gahan, overwhelmed by his growing fame, began a slide that would nearly kill him.[1] [2]

The tour ended on the eighteenth of June 1988 at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California. Their American label feared the huge stadium would not sell, but it did, with a paid crowd of more than sixty thousand. Pet Shop Boys, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and Thomas Dolby opened. When Gahan waved his arms during Never Let Me Down Again, the whole stadium copied him, like wheat blowing in a field. Afterwards he broke down backstage, feeling they had reached the end of the road. The documentary maker D A Pennebaker filmed it all for 101, which followed a busload of young fans across America and is often credited with inspiring MTV's reality shows.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Violator: the whole world finds out

For their next album, Miller suggested a producer called Mark Ellis, known to everyone as Flood. He had engineered U2's The Joshua Tree and worked on Erasure's records, and he told the band their old rules were rubbish. If a song wanted a guitar, use a guitar. The band first gathered in Milan in 1989, partying most nights, and got little done except one song. Gore had brought a bare demo, just a stomping beat and a melody on acoustic guitar. It was inspired by Priscilla Presley's memoir about Elvis, and how one person can become a kind of god to another. It became Personal Jesus.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Personal Jesus came out on the twenty ninth of August 1989, launched with adverts in the personal columns of British regional newspapers reading your own personal Jesus, with a phone number to call and hear the song. Some papers refused to run them. The song reached number thirteen in Britain, became the band's first gold single in America, and was reported to be the biggest selling twelve inch in Warner's history at the time. It stayed on the West German charts for twenty three weeks. The video, directed by Corbijn in the Spanish desert where Clint Eastwood made westerns, dressed the band as cowboys in what looked like a brothel, and MTV censored it.[1] [2]

The album's other big song nearly never happened. Gore wrote Enjoy the Silence as a slow ballad, just his voice and a harmonium. Wilder heard it and imagined it as a dance track, even hearing the chorus in the voice of Pet Shop Boys singer Neil Tennant. Gore was against it and sulked for two days while Wilder and Flood sent everyone away and rebuilt it. When he came back and played his guitar riff over the new version, the room realised they had a hit. Gore later said it was the only time they ever knew for sure in the studio. It reached number six in Britain, number eight in America, and won Best British Single at the 1991 Brit Awards.[1] [2]

Violator came out in March 1990, and the timing of one event turned it into a phenomenon. The band agreed to a signing session at the Wherehouse record store in Los Angeles. Thousands of fans turned up, the crowd pressed against the shop windows, some people were hurt, and riot police were called. The band were whisked away after minutes, and the chaos led news bulletins across America. Violator reached number seven on the Billboard 200, stayed on the chart for seventy four weeks and went triple platinum. By 2006 it was estimated at more than seven million copies worldwide, their biggest album. Gore insisted the title was a joke, the most ridiculous heavy metal name they could think of.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The World Violation Tour opened in Pensacola, Florida, in May 1990, where locals in pickup trucks shouted homophobic abuse at Alan Wilder because of his haircut. From there it became their first true stadium tour, eighty eight shows with around a hundred crew and eleven trucks, and tickets vanished in hours. Forty two thousand went for Giants Stadium almost at once, and they sold out Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. More than a million people saw them that year. But it was also the tour where things began to unravel. Ecstasy was everywhere, and Gahan fell for the band's American publicist, Teresa Conroy, while still married to his first wife, Jo.[1] [2] [3]

Songs of Faith and Devotion and the fall

After the tour, Gahan left his wife and young son Jack and moved to Los Angeles to be with Teresa Conroy. He threw himself into the rock scene of Jane's Addiction and the grunge bands, and began using heroin. When Daniel Miller saw him in London he recognised a classic addict at once, thin and hiding it badly. In April 1992 Gahan married Conroy in Las Vegas, and none of the band attended. When the four met in Madrid that year to start a new album, the others barely recognised him. He had long hair, new tattoos, and in Wilder's words he looked like he had spent a year in LA. Fletcher, meanwhile, was fighting serious depression.[1] [2] [3]

Flood suggested they live and work together in a rented villa near Madrid, as U2 had done for Achtung Baby. It was a disaster. Nobody was talking, Gahan stayed in his room, and the first six weeks produced almost nothing usable. Things improved in Hamburg, but Fletcher left to be treated for depression, and Gore was drinking so heavily that he once boasted of sixty seven pints in a single session. Out of all this came some of their most powerful music, heavy with guitars, live drums played by Wilder, strings and gospel singers. Songs of Faith and Devotion was released in March 1993 and went straight to number one in both Britain and America.[1] [2]

The Devotional Tour that followed ran for fourteen months and more than a hundred and fifty shows, and Q magazine later called it the most debauched rock tour ever. The band travelled in separate limos and barely spoke. Gahan needed cortisone injections to perform. Gore suffered two stress induced seizures and was arrested in Denver and fined fifty dollars over a noisy hotel party. On the eighth of October 1993 in New Orleans, Gahan collapsed with a drug induced heart attack before the encore and was taken to hospital. The others played on without him. Doctors told him to stop touring. He refused, and the tour carried on.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In early 1994 the band played South Africa, Asia and Latin America. Fletcher, whose depression had its roots partly in the death of his sister and in obsessive compulsive disorder he believed ran in his family, suffered a full breakdown. After two shows in Honolulu in March 1994 he left the tour, and the band's longtime assistant Daryl Bamonte took his place on stage. Fletcher reportedly told Miller he would not tour again while Wilder was in the band. On the first of June 1995, Wilder announced he was leaving. He said he had given everything, that the workload was never shared fairly, and that relations had become intolerable. Unable to reach Gahan by phone, he told him by fax.[1] [2] [3]

Alone in Los Angeles, Gahan was falling further. Conroy had left him, his friends were mostly other addicts, and he spent days shut away with the curtains taped closed. On the seventeenth of August 1995 he came home from a spell in rehab to find his house had been burgled, and that same day he cut his wrists with a razor blade at his West Hollywood home. Sheriff's deputies found him conscious, and he was treated at Cedars Sinai Medical Center. He later called it a cry for help and said he had made sure people would find him. Fans around the world sent him cards and letters. Within weeks he was using again.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Ultra: the night Gahan died

Gore and Fletcher still wanted to make music, and in late 1995 they pulled Gahan back into a London studio with a new producer, Tim Simenon, better known as Bomb the Bass. It was grim. Gahan would go to recovery meetings, meet a dealer on the way out and arrive at the studio high. A six week session at Electric Lady in New York produced just one usable vocal, for a song called Sister of Night, stitched together from many takes. Years later Gahan said he could hear how scared he was on it. Gore seriously considered breaking up the band and releasing the songs as a solo record, and even Daniel Miller wondered whether they would survive.[1] [2]

On the night of the twenty eighth of May 1996, at the Sunset Marquis Hotel in Los Angeles, Gahan injected a speedball, a mix of heroin and cocaine, and his heart stopped for two minutes. Paramedics brought him back. He remembered total blackness and terror, then seeing himself on the floor, then waking up in handcuffs. He was arrested for possession of cocaine and needles and spent a couple of nights in the county jail. Bailed out by manager Jonathan Kessler, he told television cameras that he was a heroin addict, that he did not want to end up like Kurt Cobain, and that he was sorry to his fans and to his mum.[1] [2] [3] [4]

It was a turning point. Facing drug charges and an ultimatum from Gore to quit drugs or quit the band, Gahan checked into the Exodus Recovery Centre on the sixth of June 1996, the same clinic Kurt Cobain had last attended before his death. He stayed four weeks, moved into a court ordered sober living house, and started recording again. Paramedics in Los Angeles had already given him a nickname, The Cat, because he had survived so many brushes with death. Fletcher summed it up simply. Dave came good in the end. He gave up drugs and drink and got all his vocals done. He has spoken about staying clean ever since, and in 2011 MusiCares honoured him for more than a decade of sobriety.[1] [2] [3]

Ultra, their first album without Alan Wilder, was released in April 1997 and went to number one in Britain and number five in America. The single Barrel of a Gun came first, then It's No Good, which topped the charts in Denmark, Spain and Sweden. The band decided they were not fit to tour, so they played just two short Ultra Parties in London and Los Angeles. In 1998 they came back on the road for a singles tour with two new faces, the Austrian drummer Christian Eigner and the British keyboard player Peter Gordeno. Both would still be playing with the band nearly thirty years later. In 1999 Miami's Ultra Music Festival took its name from the album.[1] [2] [3]

The trio years: Exciter to Spirit

The new century brought Exciter in 2001, produced by Mark Bell of the techno group LFO, with a sparse, glitchy sound that split critics. The tour played to more than a million and a half people in twenty four countries. Now sober, Gahan wanted to write. He released his own album, Paper Monsters, in 2003, and told his bandmates he wanted half the songs on the next record. That did not go down well. Fletcher brokered the compromise, and on Playing the Angel in 2005 Gahan had three songs, the first Depeche Mode tracks since 1984 not written by Gore. The album topped the charts in many countries, and its lead single Precious, which Gore wrote about his children coping with his divorce, reached number four in Britain.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Gore had his own battle. He admitted he had been a heavy drinker since his youth, and by the Playing the Angel sessions, in the middle of his divorce, he could manage a few useful hours before getting too drunk. At the end of that tour he decided to stop. By 2009 Fletcher joked that he now had two sober bandmates. On the next tour, for Sounds of the Universe, Gahan collapsed in Athens in May 2009. Doctors first suspected gastroenteritis but found a malignant tumour in his bladder, which was removed. Sixteen shows were cancelled, and he finished the tour having chemotherapy on the road. He later said it was the first tour where he thought, I can't do this any more.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Los Angeles remained their second home. In April 2009 they played on Jimmy Kimmel Live on Hollywood Boulevard and drew more than twelve thousand people, the biggest crowd the show had ever seen there. On the seventeenth of February 2010, at a Teenage Cancer Trust concert at the Royal Albert Hall, Alan Wilder walked on to play piano while Gore sang Somebody, his first time on stage with them in about fifteen years. Gore and Vince Clarke even made a techno album together in 2012 as VCMG, their first collaboration since 1981. Delta Machine followed in 2013, mixed by Flood, and in 2017 Spirit arrived, an angry, political record produced by James Ford.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Spirit was nearly the end. Ford said the sessions were full of passive aggressive tension, and at one point he threw everyone out except Gahan and Gore so they could talk. Fletcher was furious at being excluded and had to be steered out of the room by their manager. The talk turned into a deal, with Gahan allowed a few songs per album, and ended with a hug. That same year, the American far right activist Richard Spencer tried to claim Depeche Mode as the official band of his movement, and Gahan answered him with a very rude word. The Global Spirit Tour became their longest ever, with a hundred and thirty shows and a record four nights at the Hollywood Bowl.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the seventh of November 2020 Depeche Mode were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, alongside former members Vince Clarke and Alan Wilder. Because of the pandemic the ceremony was virtual. Gahan's message was that music had saved them, in more ways than one. Chris Martin of Coldplay said they had thrown away all the rulebooks, and Arcade Fire's Win Butler said their music still sounded as if it could come out twenty years from now. When Gahan thanked heroes like David Bowie and the Clash, Fletcher dryly chipped in with the Eagles. It turned out to be the last time the three of them appeared in public together.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Losing Fletch and Memento Mori

On the twenty sixth of May 2022, Andy Fletcher died at his home in London after an aortic dissection, a tear in the body's main artery. He was sixty. Gahan and Gore said they were shocked and overwhelmed with sadness, and that Fletch had a true heart of gold and was always there for support, a lively conversation, a good laugh or a cold pint. Alan Wilder called it a bolt from the blue. Alison Moyet wrote that they had known each other since they were ten, on the same estate, from classmates to labelmates. Fletcher left his wife Gráinne, to whom he had been married for almost thirty years, and their two children.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Fletch was always the band's mystery. He did not sing lead or write songs, and in 101 he joked that Martin wrote, Alan played, Dave sang and he just bummed around. In truth he ran much of their business, spoke for them in public and kept the peace between Gahan and Gore. Gahan found that joke offensive in hindsight. He said Fletch was the voice of reason and represented the band's identity, calling him Depeche Mode's biggest supporter. Wilder had often said Fletch would outlive them all. For Gahan the loss only truly hit him at the funeral, when Daniel Miller walked in and he and Gore fell into his arms and wept.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The band were due in the studio six weeks later. Gahan briefly thought it was over, but when he phoned Gore, Gore simply asked, we're moving on, right. They were already working on songs written during the pandemic, many of them about death, so Gore had suggested calling the album Memento Mori, Latin for remember that you must die. After Fletcher's death he refused to change it. Four songs were co written with Richard Butler of the Psychedelic Furs, the first time Gore had written with anyone outside the band. The first single, Ghosts Again, came out in February 2023, and Gahan said it gave him the same feeling as Enjoy the Silence.[1] [2] [3]

Memento Mori was released on the twenty fourth of March 2023 and reached number two in Britain. Critics called it their best in years. Gore said losing Fletch had brought him and Gahan closer, talking on the phone and even on FaceTime, which they had never done before. The world tour began in Sacramento the night before release and ran for a hundred and twelve shows, ending in Cologne on the eighth of April 2024. Every night World in My Eyes, Fletcher's favourite, was dedicated to him, with his photos on the screens. In New Orleans they played almost thirty years to the day after Gahan's heart attack there.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Honours kept coming. On the thirteenth of December 2023 Los Angeles declared Depeche Mode Day, with Gahan and Gore at City Hall. Their three sold out shows at Mexico City's Foro Sol, in front of nearly two hundred thousand fans, became the film Depeche Mode M, directed by Fernando Frías, which premiered at Tribeca in June 2025 and reached cinemas that October. In March 2026 they contributed a cover of Buffy Sainte Marie's Universal Soldier to War Child's charity album Help 2, produced by James Ford. Ford said he suspected Gore was already writing again. As of 2026, more than forty five years after Basildon, Gahan and Gore are still Depeche Mode.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The people around Depeche Mode

Dave Gahan and Martin Gore. The singer and the songwriter have been opposites for more than forty years, Gahan the extrovert rock star and Gore the private man who puts his feelings into songs. For decades Gahan sang only Gore's words, and his push to write caused real strain in the 2000s, settled in the end by a quota. Since Fletcher's death they say they have grown closer than ever, talking on the phone and even on FaceTime.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Martin Gore and Andy Fletcher. Gore and Fletcher met as boys and were classmates at Nicholas Comprehensive in Basildon. Gore called Fletch his closest friend since they were twelve, and was best man at his wedding in January 1993. Fletcher often acted as the go between for the shy songwriter, passing on Gore's objections to arrangements so he could avoid confrontation. On the 1994 tour, when Fletcher's depression made him unbearable to the others, Gore still spoke of him as his closest friend.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Dave Gahan and Alan Wilder. Of all the band, Wilder was closest to Gahan, and Gahan valued his musicianship more than the others did. Yet when Wilder quit in 1995, Gahan was so deep in addiction that Wilder could not reach him by phone and had to send a fax. Gahan later said Wilder's departure left a big hole and admitted he missed him. It was Gahan who invited Wilder back on stage at the Royal Albert Hall in 2010.[1] [2] [3]

Alan Wilder and Andy Fletcher. The trained musician and the self confessed non musician never got along. Gore said Wilder cheered up noticeably when Fletcher was absent from the Hamburg sessions in 1992, and Wilder resented earning the same as a bandmate who did little in the studio. After Fletcher's death in 2022, Wilder wrote that the news was a real bolt from the blue and sent his condolences to Fletcher's wife, Gráinne.[1] [2] [3]

Depeche Mode and Daniel Miller. Miller signed them on a handshake in 1980, produced their early albums and kept faith when Vince Clarke left. Gore called him more of a friend than a record boss. The relationship strained during the tense Black Celebration sessions, after which Miller stepped back from producing, but he never left their lives. At Fletcher's funeral in 2022, it was Miller whom Gahan and Gore fell into, sobbing.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Depeche Mode and Anton Corbijn. The Dutch photographer at first disliked the band and refused to work with them, until a 1986 video changed his mind. Since then he has shot their photos, directed around two dozen videos, designed album sleeves, logos and stage sets, and filmed their concert documentaries. He has no contract. He says the band's trust makes him want to earn it, and Gahan says Corbijn saved them visually.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Alan Wilder and Flood. When Flood arrived for Violator in 1989, he and Wilder formed a tight partnership, often sending the rest of the band out of the studio while they worked. Together they turned Enjoy the Silence from a slow ballad into a hit and pushed Songs of Faith and Devotion toward a rockier sound. Gore said Flood in tandem with Wilder was a great team. They also co produced Nitzer Ebb's album Ebbhead together.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Dave Gahan and Teresa Conroy. Gahan met Conroy in 1988, when she was the band's press officer on their American tour, and began an affair during the Violator tour while married to his first wife, Jo. He left his family for her and moved to Los Angeles, and they married in Las Vegas in 1992. Their years together were soaked in heroin. When Gahan told her he wanted to get clean in 1995, she would not stop using, and she left him.[1] [2] [3]

Vince Clarke and Alison Moyet. They grew up in Basildon and both attended the same Saturday music school at eleven, though they did not really know each other. After Clarke left Depeche Mode he answered Moyet's advert, and as Yazoo they had instant hits. Moyet said she was aggressive and he was passive aggressive, and by the end they recorded at different times of day. The duo split in 1983 and reunited for shows in 2008.[1] [2]

Martin Gore and Richard Butler. In April 2020, during lockdown, the Psychedelic Furs singer texted Gore suggesting they write songs together. Butler sent lines, Gore set them to music, and they finished seven songs. Gore thought six were too good to waste on a side project, so four ended up on Memento Mori, including Ghosts Again. It was the first time Gore had ever written with anyone outside Depeche Mode, though Butler never joined the band.[1] [2]

Dave Gahan and Jennifer Sklias. Gahan's third wife, the Greek American actress and filmmaker Jennifer Sklias, came into his life as he rebuilt it after addiction. He converted to the Greek Orthodox Church before their marriage, and they have a daughter, Stella Rose, born in 1999. Gahan credited her with encouraging him to start writing his own songs, which led to his first solo album, Paper Monsters, in 2003.[1] [2]

Rare facts about Depeche Mode

• Depeche Mode's first ever studio recording was Photographic, for a compilation of electronic newcomers called Some Bizzare Album. The band recorded a demo of three songs for the Some Bizzare Album compilation, and Photographic made the cut. They later re recorded it for their debut album, Speak and Spell.[1] [2]
• For their first Top of the Pops appearance in 1981, the band took the train to London carrying their own synthesisers. New Life had reached number eleven, earning them a slot on the BBC show. With no van and no roadies, they simply carried their keyboards on the train all the way to the studio.[1]
• The swan wrapped in plastic on the Speak and Spell cover cost the band a fee of one thousand pounds. Photographer Brian Griffin shot the puzzling image. The band had agreed not to put their faces on the cover, wanting the artwork to show they were serious musicians. Griffin went on to shoot their covers until the mid eighties.[1]
• The marching boots on A Broken Frame are the synth pop band Blancmange, stomping in front of the microphones. For the song Shouldn't Have Done That, the band wanted the sound of marching feet. Blancmange happened to be recording in the same studio, so they were recruited to march for the tape.[1]
• Martin Gore recorded his vocal for Pipeline standing beside railway tracks near Shoreditch, with trains audible in the background. The 1983 song Pipeline was the purest example of the band's found sound phase. Gore sang it on location under an old arch, and the final mix added no overdubs at all.[1]
• Hansa Studios in Berlin reportedly had the only fifty six track mixing desk in the world in 1983, which is why the band mixed there. Construction Time Again had used so many channels that the London studio's twenty four track desk could not cope, according to Dave Gahan. So they took the tapes to West Berlin.[1]
• In Berlin in 1984 the band recorded a covers album named Toast Hawaii, after Andy Fletcher's favourite snack. It was never released. The snack came from the canteen at Hansa Studios in Berlin. Fletcher liked the name so much that in 2002 he gave it to his own record label, which signed the band Client.[1] [2]
• Martin Gore sang the love song Somebody completely naked in the studio. Recorded live with just Alan Wilder on piano, Somebody became the band's first acoustic performance on record. Gore wrote it for his Berlin girlfriend, Christina Friedrich.[1] [2]
• Blasphemous Rumours hides a sixteen bar instrumental version of the hymn Jesus' Love Is Very Wonderful. According to Jonathan Miller's biography Stripped, the melody is cunningly disguised in the arrangement. Gore wrote the song after years of attending church out of boredom on Sundays, noticing that the sickest person on the prayer list always died anyway.[1]
• The single Stripped includes the sound of Dave Gahan's Porsche idling and fireworks recorded on Bonfire Night. The band fired rockets horizontally past a row of microphones so they could capture the fizz as it passed. They were recording on the fifth of November, so the timing was perfect.[1]
• Black Celebration opens with Daniel Miller's distorted voice quoting Winston Churchill's victory speech from May 1945. The phrase is a brief period of rejoicing, from Churchill's speech after Germany surrendered. The band later considered it as a title for their 1988 live film before choosing 101.[1] [2]
• Anton Corbijn wanted to be a missionary as a boy, until he read that two missionaries had been eaten in New Guinea. His father, uncles and grandfathers were pastors. He picked up a camera at seventeen, and later felt his religious upbringing chimed naturally with Martin Gore's lyrics about faith.[1]
• People Are People has not been played live since the Rose Bowl in June 1988. The band came to dislike it. Although it was their first big American hit, Gahan called it too nice and too commercial, and Gore named it among his least favourite songs. Fletcher called it their biggest hit that they never play.[1] [2] [3]
• On the day of the Rose Bowl concert, the crew had to hire a crane because the stage roof was too heavy for the rigging. Nobody discovered the problem until they tried to raise the roof after hanging all the lights and speakers. Gahan also started losing his voice at soundcheck, but recovered in time.[1]
• Before hiring D A Pennebaker for 101, the band's only request was that he not turn them into Spinal Tap. Pennebaker said Depeche Mode were ideal subjects, trusting him to film whatever he wanted. He and his partner Chris Hegedus later called 101 their favourite and most fun film to make.[1] [2]
• Enjoy the Silence began life as a slow ballad sung by Martin Gore over a harmonium. Alan Wilder heard the demo and imagined it as a dance track sung by Neil Tennant of Pet Shop Boys. Gore sulked for two days while Wilder and Flood rebuilt it into the band's biggest single.[1] [2]
• For the Enjoy the Silence video, Dave Gahan spent a week walking the Alps, the Algarve and Balmoral dressed as a king with a deckchair. The others filmed their parts in a few hours. The band hated Anton Corbijn's idea at first, but the video became an MTV hit and later inspired Coldplay's Viva la Vida.[1] [2]
• Depeche Mode once lip synced Enjoy the Silence for French television on top of the World Trade Center in New York. The 1990 clip was filmed for Michel Drucker's show Champs Élysées, on the observation deck of the south tower.[1]
• Personal Jesus was inspired by Priscilla Presley's memoir Elvis and Me. Gore said the song is about being a Jesus for someone else, and how Elvis was Priscilla's man and mentor. His favourite cover is Johnny Cash's, recorded for the last album Cash released before he died.[1] [2]
• The chiming hi hat on the song Nothing is actually the sound of a pneumatic bus door closing. The band had a strict no hi hats rule in the eighties, along with no presets and never using the same sample twice. They got round it by sampling a door.[1] [2]
• The guitar intro of Never Let Me Down Again was a happy accident caused by a sampler running over the count in. Producer David Bascombe said the sampled guitar was never meant to play at the start, but everyone loved it. The snare drum on the song was sampled from Led Zeppelin's When the Levee Breaks.[1]
• Songs of Faith and Devotion was one of the first albums ever to leak on the internet, before most people had heard of an mp3. Fans passed around the 1993 album in bulky early digital files that could take half an hour per song to download over dial up. The label issued legal takedowns.[1] [2]
• Los Angeles paramedics nicknamed Dave Gahan The Cat, because he survived so many brushes with death. During his worst years of addiction in the mid nineties, Gahan is said to have survived four near fatal episodes, including a cardiac arrest in 1996 when his heart stopped for two minutes.[1]
• Alan Wilder announced his departure from Depeche Mode on the first of June 1995, his thirty sixth birthday. Wilder was born on the first of June 1959. After leaving he turned down an offer to join the Cure and concentrated on his own project, Recoil.[1]
• In 1994 Alan Wilder narrowly escaped death when an RAF Tornado jet crashed beside the road he was driving on in Scotland. Both pilots were killed. Wilder said the plane passed about fifty feet above his open top car, and that ten seconds further along the road he would surely have died.[1]
• Andy Fletcher was a formidable chess player. Neil Arthur of Blancmange said he never once beat him on tour. Fletcher also owned a restaurant in St John's Wood, London, in the nineties, called Gascogne. He handled much of the band's business and was the only member with no songwriting credits.[1]
• Martin Gore only learned at thirty that his biological father was an African American soldier stationed in Britain. He was raised by his mother and stepfather, who both worked at the Ford plant in Dagenham, and later met his biological father in the American South.[1]
• Dave Gahan's children went to the same school as David Bowie's. When they finally met properly, Bowie simply told him, I know you. Gahan had won his place in Depeche Mode by singing Bowie's Heroes as a teenager. He said Ziggy Stardust changed his life.[1] [2]
• A version of Just Can't Get Enough sung by Thai children became a charity single honouring a murdered young Celtic player. Reamonn Gormley had taught the chant to children at a Thai foundation. After he was stabbed to death in Scotland in 2011, aged nineteen, their video became a charity single that reached number thirty in Britain.[1]
• In 2009 Depeche Mode's performance on Jimmy Kimmel Live drew more than twelve thousand fans to Hollywood and Vine, the show's biggest crowd there. The show gave away ten thousand wristbands in a single day. Chris Martin of Coldplay watched from the side of the stage.[1]
• In 2017 Depeche Mode became the first act to play four nights at the Hollywood Bowl in a single run. The promoter said they could have sold six. The band's American fame had been built largely by the Los Angeles station KROQ in the eighties.[1] [2]
• A character in the video game Left 4 Dead 2 wears a Depeche Mode tour T shirt. The band allowed their likeness to be used in 2009, and the character Rochelle wears a pink shirt from the Touring the Angel tour.[1]
• Los Angeles declared the thirteenth of December 2023 Depeche Mode Day, with Gahan and Gore at City Hall. The honour came from city council member Monica Rodriguez, in the city that first turned the band into stars in America.[1]
• Dave Gahan has an obsession with dishwashers and will reload one if someone puts the cutlery in wrong. He confirmed the story, first told by Bobby Gillespie, in a 2021 Guardian reader interview, and added a warning never to use an oven's self cleaning setting too often.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.