#PAPER MONSTERS DAVE GAHAN HOW TO#

You can't do this to yourself any more,' but it didn't sink in. 'The doctors were saying to me, 'Look, your heart stopped for two minutes. Gahan was revived by paramedics and, after his recovery, was jailed for two days for drugs possession.

Three years later, after a heroin and cocaine binge, his heart gave out again, this time stopping for two minutes. In 1993, the singer was taken off stage on a stretcher after having a heart attack at a show in New Orleans. They famously employed a psychiatrist and a drug dealer to accompany them on their world tour, while Gahan built himself a special toilet known as the Blue Room, where he could take drugs in relative peace. It got to the point where the only way I could sustain it was to get high on a daily basis.'īy the mid-'90s, communications within the band had broken down and their lifestyles had reached Spinal Tap levels of ludicrousness. Your body catches up with you, and you start searching for something stronger. When you're 20 or 25 years old, you can handle it, but by the time you get to 30, it starts getting really difficult. It was about conquering every town that we went to. 'Drinking was definitely a big thing earlier on. He said he always had to live that song down.' I still get cabbies shouting at me, 'Just can't get enough, eh?' We didn't play that song for about 10 years, as Martin hated it. In England, once you get a stigma attached, two generations later it still comes up. 'In America we were this underground English band and were really cool, but here it was a different story. We had to work hard and get out there and tour. 'We didn't sound like them at all and we certainly didn't have the same budgets from our record company. 'We got grouped in with all these other bands like Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet because of the way we looked,' says Gahan, still stung. While Depeche Mode were enjoying commercial success, they found themselves dismissed by the British critics as lightweight. After their early success with the single Just Can't Get Enough and their debut album, Speak & Spell, Clarke quit, claiming that he was unsuited to the pop-star lifestyle (ironically, he stormed the charts with his subsequent bands Yazoo and Erasure). With Gahan, the early line-up featured the songwriter Vince Clarke and two school chums, Martin Gore and Andy Fletcher. The band, named after a French fashion magazine, formed in 1980. The sense is of a man coming clean, not just from the drugs and alcohol but also from the insecurities and frustrations of being the frontman of a multi-million-selling rock band. Bitter Apple is about his emotional regeneration and relationship with his wife, Jennifer, while Dirty Sticky Floors tackles the Jekyll-and-Hyde nature of drug addiction, comically sending up his evil alter ego. With Chandler's help, Gahan fashioned 10 songs that chronicle his precarious journey from junkie rock star to clean-living and compassionate adult. Paper Monsters was recorded in a tiny studio in New York with the multi-instrumentalist Knox Chandler, formerly of the Psychedelic Furs.

'I even had to learn that to be a part of something, you have to show up, that you can't sit at home on the couch waiting for someone to tell you what your next move should be.

#PAPER MONSTERS DAVE GAHAN HOW TO#

With the help of rehab clinics and a series of expensive New York therapists, he says, he has discovered how to be a proper father and a husband, and has learnt to take responsibility for his past. Gahan is clearly accustomed to talking of himself in confessional terms. 'Was I fearful? Absolutely, but I knew I had to confront that fear just like I've had to confront all the other fears I've had in my life. 'I was writing about my feelings, the way I felt about my life and my frustrations,' he says. Gahan, who until now has always sung songs written by the Depeche Mode keyboardist, Martin Gore, says he reached a stage where he needed to do something for himself. Now, 22 years after they first scaled the charts with the single New Life, the singer has completed his first solo album, Paper Monsters.

As well as being hugely influential on the late-'80s acid-house and techno scene, the synth-pop quartet were also the dark precursors to the industrial rock sound of Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson. 'Yeah,' replies Jack, rolling his eyes in feigned boredom before plugging into his PlayStation.ĭepeche Mode's role in directing the course of popular music can hardly be overstated. 'You've heard it all before, haven't you, Jack?' says Gahan. Talking in a curious blend of New York and Essex vowel sounds, Gahan is unnervingly forthcoming about the past, even though his 15-year-old son is in the room. 'I know that if I get high again, I won't survive it,' he shrugs.

Paper monsters dave gahan