← Ongoing History of New Music
Ongoing History of New Music
Introducing "Uncharted": Depeche Mode and the Debauched Devotional Tour
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Hey, it's Alan and I just wanted to let you know that you can now listen to the ongoing history of new music. Early and ad free on Amazon Music included with Prime Limu Emu and Doug. Here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us. Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings Fairy Underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.
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Meet the computer you can talk to with Copilot on Windows. Working, creating and collaborating is as easy as talking. Got writer's block? Share your screen with Copilot Vision to help spark inspiration and use Copilot voice to have a conversation and brainstorm ideas. Or maybe you need some tech help with Copilot Vision. Copilot Copilot sees what you see. Let Copilot talk you through step by step guidance so you can master new apps, games and skills faster. Try now@windows.com copilot hey, it's Alan here.
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And since we're still a few weeks away from new episodes of the ongoing history of new music, I want to share something with you from my other podcast. It's called Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry on Uncharted. I have all kinds of unbelievable stories to tell where true crime mixes with music that includes murder, assassination attempts, predators, stalkers, cults, heists, the mob, plane crashes, and a lot more. And the episode I want to share with you this time is about the Unbelievably Messed Up Devotional tour by Depeche Mode. It was a tour featuring so much alcohol, so many drugs, and so much stupid behavior that members suffered heart attacks, seizures, serious mental illness and overdoses so severe that one member was clinically dead for two minutes. I'll have brand new episodes of the ongoing history of new music in January, but please enjoy this episode of crime and mayhem in the music industry. And if you're not following Uncharted, you might wanna. We have dozens of episodes for you to enjoy. Just download and go. I once had a conversation with someone about the craziest tours in the history of music. And the usual names came up. The who trashing hotel rooms, Led Zeppelin's tours with their private jet groupies and tons of drugs. That time in Atlanta when Ozzy drank himself into oblivion, passed out in the wrong hotel room for 24 hours and missed a show As a result, in 1976, ZZ Top tried to take the entire Texas experience on the road, which involved transporting real live animals to every gig. A buffalo escaped and managed to wreck nine rented limos that were parked at that show. Around the same time, there was the disastrous Sex Pistols tour of America. There were also stories about the Rolling Stones and Metallica, Van Halen and all the usual suspects. But then the conversation turned to the subject of the most depraved and dangerous tour of all time. Who was responsible for that? Motley Crue? Marilyn Manson? Oasis? The debate went on for some time until someone mentioned a road trip in 1993 and 1994 that nearly killed every member of the headlining group. We're not talking about any sort of violence. It was a tour featuring so much alcohol, so many drugs and so much stupid behavior that members suffered heart attacks, seizures, serious mental illness and overdoses so crazy that one member was clinically dead for two minutes. That was a summary of something called the Devotional Tour. At the center of it all was Depeche Mode. It has gone down in history as the most debauched rock tour ever. I'm Alan Cross and this is episode 37 of Uncharted Crime and Mayhem in the music industry. This is an inside look at the tour that nearly took down Depeche Mode forever. And it was all their fault.
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All I ever wanted all I ever needed. Words are very unnecessary Waking only to.
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Harms.
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Depeche Mode on the road in 1993 as part of the Devotional Tour, the road trip promoting their eighth album, Songs of Faith and Devotion. That road trip lasted eight months and was so loaded with excess that it nearly killed everyone. In fact, it did kill someone, albeit temporarily. But we'll get to that. Depeche Mode came together between 1977 and 1980. Their synth based approach was very trendy for the time and for the next half dozen years or so they were a mid level band with a cult following in various parts of the world. Their rise to Superstardom began in 1987 when they released the Music for the Masses album, their sixth record. Singles from that record, Strange Love, Never Let Me Down Again and Behind the Wheel, were global hits. By the time the Music for the Masses tour rolled into the Rose bowl In Pasadena on June 6, 1988, the band was capable of filling a stadium with 60,000 people. A live album and a concert film documented that gig, which cemented the group's breakthrough. Things got even bigger with the next album, Violator. This time, Depeche Mode had the demographics and the dynamics of the music industry on their side. By early 1990, there were indications that hair metal was done and people were tired of old classic rock bands. Gen X was about to assert itself as the driver of music culture, and one of the first groups they chose to drive that culture was Depeche Mode. The seventh album was entitled Violator, and it was a hit from the moment it was released on March 19, 1989. Demand was so crazy that the next day, 17,000 people turned up at an autograph session at a Los Angeles record store and a riot broke out.
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Hi, I'm Kurt Loder with MTV News. British synth pop stars Depeche Mode have a new LP out this week called Violator. To celebrate its release, the group turned up in Los Angeles for the first time in nearly two years. On Tuesday night, fans at a local warehouse record store. Sounds like a pretty genteel event, but it turned out to be anything but. Take a look. It started out as a fairly standard promotional event. Depeche Mode was in Los Angeles to autograph some albums for the group's fans, of which LA boasts an extraordinarily large number.
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Since we've been touring here, we've gradually built up this sort of quite hardcore following that just come and see us whenever and particularly in this area.
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The band was launching a new album called Violator with an album signing session at a warehouse record store on La Cienega Boulevard. And the group knew going in that there'd be a big turnout. You say, you know, it's daunting, really.
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More than anything, you know, and to.
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Sign so many autographs. I mean, we've done some big in.
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Stores in England before for the Reese of albums, but I think this is going to be the biggest. But no one realized quite how big. By the time Depeche Mode arrived on the scene, more than 5,000 fans were on hand, surrounding the store and forming a line that stretched blocks. They spilled out into the street, jammed up against barriers and crowded up onto the decks of a nearby parking garage. How long you been here?
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Since Sunday morning.
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The signing session got underway at 9pm and was due to last till midnight. But the security on hand was inadequate to deal with the unexpectedly large crowd. And after one hour and seven, police cleared the area and asked the band to leave. So very few people actually got to meet Depeche Mode on Tuesday night, but the group will be back before long on a US tour.
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Basically, we're starting the east coast end of May and end up over here first week in August. And that's really as loose an outline as we've got at the moment.
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Pejmode issued an apology in the wake of all that, saying they'd chosen to leave after only an hour at the scene in order to ensure that none of their fans got seriously injured. They'll be back to play this summer, though, as you just heard, so brace yourself out in Los Angeles.
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Good evening.
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Topping the news at the 11th hour.
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Rock fans got out of control at an album signing this near the Beverly center tonight. Pat and Dennis without a tactical alert, which means plenty of squad cars are on the way. The band is called Depeche Mode, the latest postmodern group to retake the United States by storm. Tonight, thousands of fans jam the streets surrounding the warehouse music store across from the Beverly center trying to get autographs. The private security force could not handle them all and police had to be called.
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Police, we are told, have gathered at the Beverly center right now. Thousands of screaming pen wielding rock fans are waiting to get autographs from the British band Depeche Mode. Crowd control problem in West LA tonight as thousands of teenage fans of the.
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Rock band Depeche Mode crammed the area near that shopping center for a chance.
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To meet riot police, we are told, have gathered at the Beverly center right now. Thousands of screaming pen wielding rock fans are waiting to get autographs from the British band Depeche Mode.
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Well, apparently we've been told that we've got to stop now and we have to go because there's some trouble outside and I'm sorry, apologize to everyone, but the police are shutting us down.
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When the crowd realized that the autograph session was canceled, they went nuts. Bricks and rocks and bottles started flying. Two large neon signs were destroyed. Bits of trim and plaster were literally kicked off the building. One hundred and fifty members of the LAPD were called in, all wearing full riot gear. People scattered everywhere, leaving debris and damaged cars in their wake. When the dust finally settled, seven people had been sent to hospital and the record store was left with a bill for $25,000 for the cleanup. This has become known as the Depeche Mode warehouse riot. A few Months later, on May 28, 1990, Depeche Mode began their World Violation Tour in Pensacola, Florida. 88 gigs around the planet. And by the time it was over and many sold out stadiums later, there was no question that Depeche Mode was one of the biggest bands in the world. Once that tour wrapped up, Depeche Mode took a little time off and they needed it. Dave Gane was especially angry and Irritable. He couldn't even go home. He had to move twice because he kept waking up to find Depeche Mode fans on his lawn. One kid went so far as to hire a private detective to find Dave's home address. Depeche Mode reconvened in Madrid in February 1992 to begin work on their eighth album. By this time, alt rock had taken over the world and Depeche Mote was one of the key artists of the era. However, the band didn't seem all that well equipped to handle their stature, their fame and all the pressure that came with it. Let's start with Alan Wilder. He was the last person to join Depeche Mode, signing on in 1982 as a synth player and programmer. By 1991, things were getting a little tense. He wanted to contribute more as a songwriter, but that had pretty much become the sole domain of Martin Gore. He got married and bought a 30 acre, eight bedroom estate in the English countryside. He'd also spent time working outside Depeche Mode with a group called Recoil and the English electronic body music band Nights Areb. Then there was Andy Fletcher. He sought to decompress by everything by playing chess, and he became very good. He also opened a restaurant in London called Gascony, near Abbey Road Studios. But that failed to arrest some mental health challenges he was having. He was diagnosed with ocd, something he believed he inherited from his father. Fletch needed professional treatment for that, as well as his issues with anxiety and depression. He also became a father for the first time in August 1991, which added a new level of stress and pressure. Andy also had tremendous trouble. With Dave gone, Dave was off on a wild ego trip and the tension he created caused a real split within the group. It was three against Dave and Andy just couldn't take it. Martin Gore also had some challenges. He claims to be autistic, and he also loved to party and party hard. He drank to excess and sometimes withdrew into video games, especially Sonic the Hedgehog. And he too had become a father for the first time in June 1991, adding more stress and pressure. As the album sessions wore on, the split within the group got worse. After a while, Dave was allowed to be just Dave, just to help make the antagonism manageable. If Dave wanted to lock himself in a room painting all day and night while fine, he'd be called on only when it was time to do vocals or any other time it was absolutely necessary to talk to him. But the member struggling the most in this situation was in fact Dave godd he'd grown tired of England and had moved to California, where he really embraced the LA rock star lifestyle. He also had add, which was undiagnosed, as were some autistic traits. The weather was nice in la, but the fans continued to be difficult. They'd show up outside his house at 2 in the morning singing Depeche Mode songs. They'd chase him down the street as he was walking his dog, and whenever he went out in public, he'd be recognized. Dave also lost his biological father, Jack, who left the family when Dave was six months old. Jack died in 1991, just as Dave was trying to reconnect with him. Right around the time he first started using heroin, he'd just divorced his first wife, Joanne Fox, who had been instrumental in setting up the first official Depeche Mode fan club. So they'd known each other since they were teenagers. They also had a son named Jack. During the time they worked together, Dave was away from home so much that he rarely saw them through the first five years of Jack's life. After some kind of personal crisis, Dave bolted for Los Angeles, where he indulged in the whole rock God fantasy. He also hooked up with Teresa Conroy, Depeche Mode's former press officer. She introduced him to the people who hung around Jane's addiction, and there were always drugs available with that crowd. He and Teresa were rock and roll soulmates, living out this fantasy and not thinking of the consequences. That relationship resulted in a baby daughter. Teresa, too, loved the rock star lifestyle, and she and Dave really, really went for it. But at the same time, the relationship with Teresa pulled him back from some kind of brink. He would have probably gone over the edge had he been on his own. Still, their drug intake escalated, cocaine and heroin mainly. And once they graduated to using intravenously, Dave stopped eating and became dangerously thin. He grew out his hair and started getting tattoos everywhere, often when he was so high that he'd come out of it to find some strange new ink somewhere on his body. There's one that reads tctm. Fg. That stands for Teresa Conroy to the mother effer Dave Gahn. One job on his shoulder blades took a single 10 hour sitting, which must have been awfully painful. Dave and Teresa were married at the Graceland Chapel in Las Vegas by an Elvis impersonator in April 1992. One of their favorite wedding presents was a big lump of black tar heroin. By this time, both of them were terribly gaunt, recognizable as Heroin junkies at 100 paces condemnation.
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Triumph here on The.
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Stand with the Book in My Hand.
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Truth on My side, Accusations.
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Condemnation One of the singles from Depeche Mode's eighth studio album, released on March 22, 1993. Making the songs of Faith and Devotion album was difficult. The band took 18 months off after the World Violation tour and when they reconvened they tried working and living in the same place. But that proved to be too claustrophobic for everyone and there were plenty of fights. There was no pre production preparation. Song ideas came from Martin Gore's demos and some jam sessions. Dave was often so strung out that he could only manage to contribute vocals. Sometimes nothing ran smoothly. At some point during the recording process, Alan Wilder decided that when the time was right, he was going to leave the group. Andy Fletcher seemed off too. He began exhibiting signs of severe depression and at one point he was sent home from some sessions in hopes that he'd rest, get some help and receive treatment. Despite everything, the album did get finished and a new tour was planned. It was to be called the Devotional Tour and would be the largest road trip ever mounted by Depeche Mode. The initial plan was for 158 dates through 27 countries, covering about 100,000 miles and requiring almost 100 days tons of equipment with a stage designed by photographer and artist Anton Corbin, something that he'd never done before. But the band was not ready for what was to come. It was, as I've said, the most debauched tour in the history of rock.
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Depeche Mode's Devotional tour began on May 19, 1993 in Lille, France, the start of an 11 week European tour that ended in London on July 31. Relations between the four band members was still very strained and the guy everyone was most concerned about was singer Dave Gahn. The tour employed 100 people, including a full time psychiatrist, largely for the benefit of Martin, as part of a 15 person personal entourage. There was also a guy whose sole job was to source drugs on each stop. Here's Dave talking about the tour.
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I've always been a very driven person and been able to do things. Even during the Songs of Faith and Devotion tour, it was pretty. I think Mart and Fletch especially were pretty unaware of the trouble I was really in because I always showed up and done the show and I done my job and stuff like that. So by the time we finished, you know, I started to realize the problems I was having because I didn't have all the people around me looking after me anymore. And I couldn't. It came very obvious I couldn't look after myself.
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The partying began the moment the tour began. Accommodations were luxurious and everything was catered towards having a great time. For the next few months, Depeche Mode was encased in a special hedonistic bubble with incredibly lavish and wild parties happening after the show every night. Most of the craziness came on the second leg, which took the band through North America. The stories are so incredible that some people may have to die before all these stories can be told. But we can report on a few things. Dave's ego and his role as a rock God got worse and worse. He became so insufferable that when it came to staying in hotels, the other members of the group insisted on being on separate floors from Dave. In June 1993, when the tour rolled into Berlin, Depeche Mot was banned from the Intercontinental Hotel, which was their usual place. Dave would spend days in his hotel room banging heroin into his veins. There was a rumor that Dave went through a vampire phase. His dressing room was dark and filled with candles. And as a joke, someone delivered a coffin to the tour and Dave obliged by taking a nap in the coffin before each show. Now, to him, this wasn't such a big deal. Here's a quote from Dave. Even the bed I slept in in Los Angeles was in the shape of a coffin. A huge double bed shaped like a coffin. My whole life was Spinal Tap at the time. There's a story that Dave demanded that Primal Scream get the opening slot on the tour because he knew they liked to party like he did. But the story goes that Primal Scream was so shocked by what they saw that they gave up drugs entirely. And before this, Primal Scream did a lot of drugs. Singer Bobby Gillespie was once quoted as saying that Dave did more drugs, more coke, ecstasy, heroin and alcohol than all of Primal Scream combined. And that is saying something. Even though he trained for the tour by working out, running and practicing martial arts, Dave looked awful. Those bruises on his arms weren't scratches from when he dove into the crowd. Those were needle marks. Dave and the band's road manager were arrested after fighting with security guards at a hotel in Quebec City on September 8, 1993. There was an occasion in New Orleans on October 8, 1993, when Dave couldn't do the encore because between the last song and when he was supposed to go back on stage, he OD'd and the paramedics had to be called. Here's what Dave had to say about that at the end of the gig. I couldn't go back for the encore. Martin had to do a song solo. I overdosed. I had a heart attack. While all the paramedics rushed me off to the hospital, I heard the song Death's Door in the background. But it wasn't just Dave Kahn and don't worry, we'll get back to him later. The other members of Depeche Mode were going crazy, too. Martin Gore would allegedly drink vast amounts of beer and and then stripped naked. He needed some very strong sleeping pills every night just to get to sleep. He was arrested in Denver after insisted on playing very loud music in his hotel room at 4 in the morning. This was November 3, 1993, and he spent the night in jail. He really should have been taking it easy because he started having panic attacks that were so severe that he thought he was dying. Then came a grand mal seizure in the middle of a business meeting at the Sunset Marquis Hotel in Los Angeles in November 1993, ahead of five nights at the Great Western Forum. The seizure was brought on by stress, alcohol and drugs. That was his second such attack, and I won't even mention all the minor panic attacks he'd been suffering during a break. About a week later, a private jet was chartered to take everyone on a quick trip from Dallas to the Caribbean. There was a pressurization problem and the plane struggled to get back to Texas, which freaked everybody out. Andrew Fletcher wasn't in great shape either. He was depressed and homesick and a hypochondriac, unable mentally and physically to handle what the band was doing. He suffered a nervous breakdown and had to be checked into the hospital for a month, missing the entire second leg of the tour. He told Daniel Miller, the head of Depeche Mode's record label, that he would never, ever again go on the road with Alan Wilder. Interesting. We were told that as the band's business manager, he had to stay behind to take care of some business. Well, the truth was that he wasn't on tour because he was very, very sick. At first he thought he might have a brain tour, but as it turned out, it was just a very, very severe case of depression. He was replaced on the second leg of the tour by keyboardist Darrell Badamonte for the last 39 shows. And he had a wild time, too. He turned 30 on the tour, and the party for his birthday lasted three days. Alan Wilder knew that he was definitely going to leave the band after the tour, so he was just trying to stick it out, even through an excruciating kidney stone attack while he was on a break in South Africa between the first and second legs of the tour. We'll get back to his situation shortly. And Dave, he just kept going and going. Depeche Mode was in Buenos Aires on April 8, 1994, when they heard about the death of Kurt Cobain. Dave was a little taken aback by the news. But after a day or two, he went back to his usual ways. Back in North America, Dave's onstage performances were getting more erratic. He'd forget words to songs and miss cues. The reviews were bad between and after shows. He needed cortisone shots for his voice. A roadie was hired to make sure 10 or 15 women were brought backstage to party. After every gig in Detroit, Dave took a big stage dive. That didn't work out. He was taken by ambulance to the hospital. So great was the abuse on his body that by the summer of 1994, Dave Grant weighed no more than 100 pounds. The crowds had been huge and the money was unbelievable. Both Dave and Martin wanted to extend the tour, make more cash. But Andy and Alan were dead against it. And it was decided in the end that enough was enough. After the tour, everyone scattered. No one wanted to see each other. Dave went back to la, where the parties continued. He had no interest in being clean. He liked being a party animal junkie. But the heroin had stopped working. His body had become so hardened to the drug that it had no effect. But he had to keep using just to keep from getting dope sick. He was still with Teresa at this point, but she was no Help. One morning he woke up on a dealer's lawn wearing nothing but pants, shoes and socks. His wallet, watch, jewelry and shirt were gone. Alan Wilder was having his own issues. He was still planning to quit the band because he'd had enough of the dysfunction and being creatively sidelined. And he also had his own near death experience. On September 1, 1994, about two months after the tour ended, Alan was driving through the Scottish countryside when an RAF jet fighter trainer almost crashed right on top of his skate car. This jet literally fell out of the sky, narrowly missing him by more than 200 meters. Had his girlfriend not seen the plane coming, allowing Allen to pull over onto a farm road, his car would have been hit by this plane falling out of the sky. The two pilots on board were killed. That'll make you think about your life. On June 1, 1995, almost a year after the tour ended, Alan Wilder resigned from the Depeche Mode after serving 13 years with the group. Here's his official Due to increasing dissatisfaction with the internal relations and the working practices of the group, it is with some sadness that I have decided to part company from Depeche Mode. Since joining in 1982, I have continually striven to give total energy, enthusiasm and commitment to the furthering of the group's success, despite a consistent imbalance in the distribution of the workload. Unfortunately, this level of input never received the respect and acknowledgment that it warrants. The quality of our association has deteriorated to the point where I no longer feel the end justifies the means. Given the circumstances, I have no option but to leave the group. Meanwhile, Dave Gahn's life was not going well. He went back to la, where he continued to do lots and lots of drugs. He grew paranoid and carried a gun with him, even if it were just outside to check the mailbox. He'd do things like watch the weather channel for 24 hours straight. He painted the walls and floors black. He started talking to his collection of stuffed animals and it got real weird when the animals started talking back. There were a couple of trips to rehab, including a secret visit to a fancy clinic in the Arizona desert. But when he checked out on August 17, 1995, he returned to his house to find that it had been completely looted. He was robbed. Nothing was left, just wires hanging out of the wall. His Harley was gone, all the recording gear, even the cutlery out of the kitchen drawers. That's when he loaded up on smack and checked into the Sunset Marquis Hotel. And while looking in the bathroom mirror, slashing his wrists seemed like a good idea, so he did while he was speaking with his mother on the phone. Two two inch cuts. Someone called an ambulance. When they arrived, there was blood everywhere and Dave was almost unconscious. They had to stitch him up right there without anesthetic because the situation was so dire. This was not the first time either. The same paramedic team rescued him several times. They started calling him the cat because he seemed to have so many lives. When he woke up in a straight jacket in a padded room, the psychiatric ward at nearby Cedars Sinai Hospital, all he could think about was getting high again. And who cares if a suicide attempt is a felony in California? He was going to do what he was going to do. Later, he tried to hang himself in his bathroom, but that didn't work out either. He began collecting more guns for his protection and had a.38 with him at all times. The people he hung out with got sketchier and sketchier. He started injecting powerful speedballs, dosages of heroin and cocaine, just so he'd feel something. Meanwhile, Martin Gore had sent Dave a tape of demos for the next Depeche Mode album. Dave flew to New York to work on the new songs, but he was too strung out to get much done. The story is that the song Sister of Night, one of the tracks from the 1997 Ultra album, was recorded while Dave was high on heroin. Not all at once, though, because he couldn't manage to get through the full song.
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Well, I can't actually remember if I was actually high, but I was certainly either strung out or sick at the time. You know, at the time, at that particular time, I was. It was a case of kind of sitting on the fence. I was going to great lengths to convince everybody else that I was doing okay. But inside I knew that I wasn't really done because I don't know for what reason, but I didn't feel that I put together some clean time and then I'd be using again. And I was in that place of going back and forth for a long time and it was getting harder and harder. So physically and emotionally by that time I was really not very well. And I knew it was coming to the point of having to really basically, you know, piss or get off the palm. And, you know, I went back to LA and decided to kind of have one more party. And it was the camel, the straw that broke the camel's back, you know, in a way, because it became very apparent then that it clearly wasn't working for me anymore. And, you know, a Lot of it is fear, you know, when you're in that place, it's fear of actually making the leap to try something different, even if you know it's not working. It's almost like being comfortable in your own misery, you know, it was. I knew that feeling of either being euphoric or being sick, and I knew what it felt like, but I didn't know what it was like. I'd forgotten what it was like to just feel okay and, you know, and be happy with that. And it took some time after that and a lot of work to get to that place. And fortunately as well, it was put to me to go back to LA and work with a vocal coach and stuff like that, which I reluctantly done and then found that it was giving me a lot more confidence and self worth and a structure to my day and all those simple things in life that help you to kind of get through whatever it is you're going through. It's too easy to kind of just go back to something that you think is okay. Sister of Night when the hunger descends When I listen to the song, it's a good reminder because I remember how I was feeling, you know, it was hard to just stand up for an hour.
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After the New York session, you know, Dave went back to LA to get himself back to some sort of working order and sought out this vocal coach. And the following week, you know, we heard on the radio that he'd OD'd and got arrested. For me, that was the point where I was thinking, you know, this, Is this really worth it? And that that's not being really nasty today is because, you know, we been through it with him 50 times before this. And it gets to a point where you think, you know, you're hitting your head against a wall and it's not really working. So, you know, you gotta try and think of, you know, alternatives.
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And.
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We just, you know, decided that he should have his another last chance. And fortunately, this time he's taken it. And he's been clean for more than six months now. I think it's six or seven months.
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But for Dave Gahn, things were about to get worse. Much worse.
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In the 70s, four young women were found dead for nearly 50 years. Their cases went cold. I'm Nancy Hickst, a senior crime reporter for Global News. In the season finale of Crime Beat, I share how investigators uncovered shocking evidence of a serial killer and hear exclusive interviews with the killer's family. Listen to the full season of Crime Beat early and add free free on Amazon Music by asking Alexa to play the podcast Crime Beat Amadeus.
- [35:33]
A
Yeah, that Amadeus shows up in Vienna at 25. He's jobless, totally free from his dad and ready to make some noise. He finds love in an amazing partner, Constanz Weber, and suddenly he's dropping beats that nobody can ignore. Salieri was convinced that Amadeus was God's chosen one, so he had to be silenced. Tune in to the story of history's most infamous musical rivalry. Amadeus premieres Monday, January 5th on Showcase Stream on Stack TV. Dave Gaughan will never forget May 27th, 1996. After flying back to Los Angeles after the Sister of Night Sessions, he went to a party and then checked in at the Sunset Marquis Hotel again. But after injecting a mixture of heroin and cocaine, he suffered a massive overdose. His dealer tried to revive him. No dice. His hands started to turn blue. His breathing slowed. Dave Gaughan was dying at 1.15am on 28 May. Someone called 911. When the paramedics arrived, they thought they'd lost Dave. He was clinically dead for two minutes, Full cardiac arrest. And the thing that brought him back, The Pulp Fiction adrenaline needle to the heart. When he was released from hospital and released on jail on $10,000 bail over the drug charges, he went right back to the smac. But this time, there was absolutely no buzz. Nothing. And that's when Dave checked himself into the Exodus Recovery center in Marina Del Rey, California. That was the same place that tried to straighten out Kurt Cobain the week he died. It was also where Shannon Hoon of Blind Melon tried to get straight. But in Dave's case, the treatment worked. Here's Martin Gore.
- [37:23]
D
Halfway through the recording of this record, Dave got clean and sober. And so the remainder of the recording time was easy. I mean, the vocals are usually the last thing you put on anyway, so we weren't really held up. And once David made that choice and decision, we carried on and we did the vocals.
- [37:46]
A
Meanwhile, Teresa filed for divorce and wanted some big money. But at least Dave was alive, which is more than he could say for some of his junky friends.
- [37:54]
C
Trying to destroy myself is, you know, a really negative way of a permanent solution to a temporary problem. You know, a bit like suicide, you know, living a suicide, you know, all the time, being in that kind of place.
- [38:13]
D
Well, Dave's already been through two divorces and, you know, the rest of us are trying to keep our families together. So, you know, after three years of working to go straight out on another tour, there'll probably be two more divorces. On the card for me and Andy. So not a good idea.
- [38:29]
C
See, what happens is over the years, you, the egos become out of control and each person within the band, I think, was struggling to kind of gain respect. Instead of just like being quite happy and accepting what you are yourself and what your role is and just going with it and trying to have fun with it instead. It was kind of like a bit of a struggle there for a while. Towards the end of like the whole songs of faith and devotion period, it became really obvious.
- [39:04]
A
The good news is that Depeche Mode eventually came out on the other side of all things that happened between 1991 and 1997. Dave is sober and so is Martin Gore. Alan Wilder is living quietly for a while. He had that 30 acre, eight bedroom country estate where he had his own recording studio. He also had a nice vacation property in a town called Vestfold in Norway. The only member not with us today is Andy Fletcher. After the craziness of the 90s, he was able to collect himself and continue as a functioning member of Depeche Mode. He had some financial issues resulting from some bad investments, but he survived those as well. But then Fletch died of an aortic dissection at his home on May 26, 2022. This is when the biggest artery in the body suddenly tears, causing massive internal bleeding. It's one of those situations that, that no one ever expects to happen. Andy Fletcher was 60 years old when he died. So today Depeche Mode is down to just Martin and Dave. They continued to record and tour together and they seem intent on moving forward almost 50 years after the band first got together in 1980. Like I said, Depeche Mode's success in the 90s was legendary. And one day we might even hear about all the things that happened. If you have any questions or comments about anything you hear on this podcast, shoot me an email. Alanalancross ca we can also meet up on all the social media sites along with my website, ajournalofmusicalthings.com I update that with music news and recommendations every day. And there's the free daily newsletter that you should get. Oh, and check out my other podcast, the Ongoing History of New Music, which deals with rock music at large. I have hundreds and hundreds of episodes just waiting for you. See you next time for more stories of crime and mayhem in the music industry. Episodes arrive every two weeks. Technical productions by Rob Johnston. I'm Alan Cross. Hey, Ryan Reynolds here wishing you a very happy half off holiday because right now, Mint Mobile is offering you the gift of 50% off unlimited. To be clear, that's half the price, not half the service. Mint is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price. So that means half day. Yeah, give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront.
- [41:32]
B
Payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow 135 gigabytes of networks busy taxes and fees extra. See mint mobile.com.