[bong] Article on DM

After years of singing about alienation, depression, and tragedy--
the very reason many gay youth have bowed to Depeche Mode for the better
part of two decades-- frontman Dave Gahan took his martyr role to a literal
extreme. His heroin addiction led to a suicide attempt and then a
near-fatal overdose. "It's a classic case of 'Be careful what you wish
for,'" reports Gahan, now addiction free and in the midst of plotting out
the band's next video the day we meet at the Essex House on New York's
Central Park. "I was thinking that what I was doing was really cool, part
and parcel of being a rock star-- then tortured artist shit."

Coming four years after their last album, ULTRA (Mute/Reprise) is
Depeche Mode's remarkable resurrection, an album filled with compelling
dramas like "Sister Of Night", recorded while Gahan was still in the throes
of addiction, and the dark single :Barrel Of A Gun".

"Recording 'Barrel Of A Gun,' I was in a place of 'I fuckin' hate
this shit, I hate myself,'" Gahan recalls. "I was using up all of my
chances. I'm ranting about this monster I had created: 'this horny creep,
who looks in need of sleep that doesn't come, this twisted, tortured mess,
a bed of sinfulness.' That was exactly how I was feeling."

It sounds like Martin Gore, the band's lyricist, wrote these songs
as a way of getting through to Gahan-- a notion Gore rejects as "ludicrous"
but Gahan is willing to entertain. "It's Matin's business, but I thing
he's looking at himself, too, and his struggle with his own destiny," says
the singer. "I think in some way I get to deliver a message of maybe hope
and faith, through music, through my voice. Martin once said to me that he
feels like he get his songs through God, but he has to channel them through
me. Once I got clean on this album, I felt that again."

The fact that alienated queer teens have been turning to Depeche
Mode's songs since the band formed 17 years ago is not lost on Gahan.
"They're people who try to get really honest about who they are, and it's a
struggle then to be accepted," says Gahan, fingering a CD single by a
beefcake named Sam Walker, whose house version of the Mode's "Just Can't
Get Enough" is popular in gay clubs. "And I always feel like that, and I
think Martin does too. I'm an incredibly sensitive person, almost to the
point where I feel like it's me against the world. There's a comfort and a
sensitivity that comes Depeche Mode's music or my voice. You can have a
belief in it."

And even a sense of humor. The tongue-in-cheek album title, Gahan
says, was picked "because it's like a detergent commercial or something:
ULTRA, the new and improved Depeche Mode, the clean and sparkling version.
The version that actually brought joy to my heart."


Writer: Ray Rogers