“We’d realised that we were not a part of anything else that was going on with the music scene in England, we were doing our own thing”: Dave Gahan on how Black Celebration changed everything for Depeche Mode
· louderBy Niall Doherty
published 27 October 2024
The electro trailblazers moved away from their poppy beginnings on their fifth record, and the singer says it set them up for everything that happened next
Depeche Mode’s fifth studio album drew a line under everything that went before. Think of the Basildon electronic-rock pioneers now and everything that comes to mind – music that’s dark and epic and uncompromising and euphoric all at the same time - has its roots in 1986’s Black Celebration. Before that, they were something else, torn between their poppy beginnings and trying to broaden their sound. It was the record where Dave Gahan, Martin Gore, Fletch and Alan Wilder became the band they wanted to be. But it wasn’t without its hurdles, as Gahan told me a few years ago.
“By Black Celebration, we’d really realised that we were not a part of anything else that was going on with the so-called music scene in England, we were doing our own thing,” Gahan recalled. “When we first presented a couple of songs from Black Celebration to the radio plugger, Neil Ferris, their faces… it was fun to see. Excited? No, the complete opposite, like, “where’s the song for the radio?” We had realised that that was not our thing.”
They were already fans who had embraced the side of the band that wasn’t fully focussed on making big hits, Gahan remembered. “By that time we’d created quite a following in Europe,” he said. “They’d be places that we were respected for our albums. That was more important to us, making a body of work, making a piece of work. In the early couple of years, we’d do anything. If someone said to us, ‘Go on Swap Shop on Saturday morning…’ And we always felt uncomfortable. I always felt like a fish out of water. All the teenybop stuff was weird and that happened very early on because we had a couple of hit singles, Just Can’t Get Enough and New Life. They were hits.”
Gahan said the fact that Depeche Mode were still playing stadiums – at the time, they were coming off the back of a triumphant 2017 show at the London Stadium – made him appreciate their decision not to chase hit singles even more. “After all these years, we’re a band that can fill the fucking Olympic Stadium and we haven’t really had hit records,” he said. “People go, ‘Oh yeah, Just Can’t Get Enough’ and they can’t remember anything after that. In the rest of the world we were lucky, we were slowly forging an army of fans and a following from playing live. A lot of that has come from our live performance, which is very different from the record. We’re like two different bands.”
Depeche Mode are currently on hiatus after the mammoth tour to support 2023’s Memento Mori. Gahan was recently announced as one of the guest singers at a forthcoming tribute show for the late, great Mark Lanegan, taking place at London’s The Roundhouse in December.
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Niall Doherty is a writer and editor whose work can be found in Classic Rock, The Guardian, Music Week, FourFourTwo, on Apple Music and more. Formerly the Deputy Editor of Q magazine, he co-runs the music Substack letter The New Cue with fellow former Q colleagues Ted Kessler and Chris Catchpole. He is also Reviews Editor at Record Collector. Over the years, he's interviewed some of the world's biggest stars, including Elton John, Coldplay, Arctic Monkeys, Muse, Pearl Jam, Radiohead, Depeche Mode, Robert Plant and more. Radiohead was only for eight minutes but he still counts it.
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