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Chapter 1: What unique elements define Depeche Mode's music and image?
This is exactly right.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands. I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this. He's going to get what he deserves. We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends. Listen to The Girlfriends, Trust Me Babe, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I got you, I got you. Your 20s can be so exciting, but they can also be really overwhelming, confusing, and honestly, just kind of lonely.
May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and the psychology of your 20s is breaking down the science behind the biggest roadblocks we face. I was six years into my career, the 80-hour weeks and just the first one in, the last one out, and I ended up burning out.
There was a large chunk of my 20s that I was just so wanting to be out of that phase, out of my skin, and I just really regret not living in the present more. You don't need to have everything figured out right now. You just need to understand yourself a little bit better. Listen to The Psychology of Your 20s on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Sometimes a suspect is found guilty before a verdict is ever read in court. On the Wicked Words podcast, I talk with the writers who dig deep into the cases that changed history, including Marsha Clark, who went from prosecuting one of the most famous murder cases to writing crime fiction. It doesn't matter that you didn't take part in the murder.
If you were at the scene at all, you're guilty of murder. Every week, the real story is revealed. Join us every Monday for new episodes of Wicked Words. Listen to Wicked Words on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
This is a story about machines, about eyeliner and ecstasy, synthesizers and subversion. This is a story about how one of the softest looking bands in pop music became one of the hardest to kill. and about how their frontman went from a teen dream pinup to a clinically dead junkie on the bathroom floor of a West Hollywood hotel.
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Chapter 2: How did Dave Gahan's addiction impact his life and career?
And that was the day that Dave Gahan, lead singer for Depeche Mode, overdosed, flatlined, and spent two minutes on the other side before dramatically coming back to life. On this episode, synths, sex, stigmas, speedballs, salvation, and Depeche Mode. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is Disgraceland. A geish is a kind of piercing that one gets in one's perineum.
You may know the perineum by its more colloquial name, the taint. You know, taint his dick, taint his ass. A guiche is not to be confused with a Prince Albert, which is a ring or a barbell that is pierced into the head of the penis, but now I'm getting on track. The guiche piercing procedure, as you can probably imagine, is quite painful.
You must get on all fours with the one doing the piercing sitting directly behind you. And when the needle goes into that tender piece of flesh, for a dude at least, it feels like someone has just kicked you in the balls with a pair of steel-toed boots. Geish piercings hurt like hell. And then, according to those who get them, like Depeche Mode's Dave Gahan, the pain eventually turns to pleasure.
Just like the pain and pleasure that lurked in the subtext of great Depeche Mode songs like Master and Servant. Also quite like the pain Dave experienced when he was written off as some teen magazine electropop flavor of the week only to experience pleasure when he proved himself more dangerous, more subversive, and more rock and roll than anyone could have imagined.
But Dave Gahan wasn't feeling pain or pleasure at the moment, in his perineum or anywhere else for that matter. Because Dave Gahan was dead. Years of abuse, of an unshakable addiction to shooting junk, to doing cocaine, had all led to this inevitable end. The Depeche Mode frontman's tattooed body, blue and cold, lay flat and motionless on a hospital bed.
It was shortly after 2 o'clock in the morning, on May 28th, 1996. The staff at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles were ready to call it. I think we lost him, one of the doctors said. Another doctor was wiping the sweat from his brow. And Dave Gahan, only 34 years old, had no pulse and no signs of life. Earlier that evening, Dave Gahan was headed toward the point of no return.
He settled his bar tab at the Sunset Marquee Hotel in West Hollywood and made his way back to his room. On his arm was a beautiful woman that he'd just met. Following closely behind like a dark shadow was his dealer. Inside his room, Dave told the woman to hang tight. He stepped into the bathroom and that dark shadow followed. Out of a small bag with a zipper came the goods.
The only thing Dave really wanted tonight, even more than the beautiful woman who was on the other side of the bathroom door currently reapplying her makeup. The dealer prepped a speedball. This right here, this is called red rum. Do some of this and you'll be shining like Danny fucking Torrance. Dave took the syringe and stuck it into his flesh.
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Chapter 3: What led to Dave Gahan's near-death experience in 1996?
The needle broke the skin, and Dave rammed down the plunger, and the junk rocketed into his bloodstream, and he was sent soaring toward the very specific sense of euphoria that he'd felt the very first time that he shot heroin and had yet to reach again. This time, though, he was getting closer. He just had to hang on a little longer. He could see it, taste it, the high. It teased him.
And then he was out. All 100 pounds, give or take, of Dave Cahan's junky body came crashing down onto the bathroom tile. The dealer had seen this kind of thing before. Even with smack heavyweights, he gave Dave's face a slap. Nothing. Come on, Dave, he said, giving a few more whacks with the back of his hand and still nothing. He shook Dave's lifeless body. Dave wasn't here, man.
And the dealer grabbed Dave by the lapels and burst out of the bathroom, dragging the body across the floor. And the girl in the bedroom took one look at Dave's sweaty body and the track marks in his hands starting to lose color, and she freaked. She nearly knocked the phone off the bedside table when she grabbed the receiver. Her hand shook uncomfortably as she began to dial 911.
The dealer saw this and dropped to his body. It was on the girl instantly. He slapped the receiver out of her hand and hung it up. What the fuck did she think she was doing, 911? The fucking police? No way. The girl fought back. She pushed. She shoved. She kicked and screamed. And the dealer got annoyed and bounced. Problem was hers now. And the girl dialed 911 once more.
Fifteen minutes later, paramedics were strapping Dave Gahan's lifeless body onto a gurney and loading him into an ambulance bound for Cedars-Sinai, one and a half miles away. They weren't surprised at who they were looking at. Dave was famous in these parts, all right, and not just for his music.
At the hospital, a team of doctors worked to bring him back to life, and they performed chest compressions and readied the defibrillator. And that's when Dave Gahan's heart stopped. He flatlined. Here was a guy who once wore his toughness on his sleeve and his music.
A guy who went from pain to pleasure time and again, pushing past being pigeonholed creatively and pushing through a debilitating addiction and through a piercing in his taint. A guy who is now, by any and all measures, dead.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
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Chapter 4: What were the circumstances surrounding Depeche Mode's rise to fame?
Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that. Trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield. And in this new season of The Girlfriends. Oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care, so they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no. I vowed I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to The Girlfriends, Trust Me Babe, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. May is Mental Health Awareness Month and your 20s, they can feel like a lot.
On the Psychology of Your 20s podcast, we unpack the anxiety, the overthinking, the heartbreak, the identity crisis, all of it that comes with being in your 20s. Because if you've ever thought, is anybody else feeling this way? They definitely are.
I feel like my 20s was a process of checking off everything that I was not good at to get to what I was good at. Oftentimes we take everything a little bit too seriously and we get lost in things that we later on decide weren't even important to us to begin with.
There was a large chunk of my 20s that I was just so wanting to be out of that phase, out of my skin. And I just really regret not living in the present more. Each week, we break down the science behind what you're going through and give you real tools to navigate it. Your 20s aren't about having it all figured out. They're about understanding yourself just a little bit better.
Listen to The Psychology of Your 20s on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your husband is not who you think he is. Your body is not what you thought it was. Your identity is formed by a secret history. I'm Dani Shapiro, and these are just a few of the stunning stories I'll be exploring on the 14th season of Family Secrets.
And just then, we felt the plane turn in the air. So much so that the bags that were under people's seats just kind of flew into the aisle. Each week, we dive headfirst into the complex power of secrecy.
how it shapes our identities and relationships, and how it ultimately can reveal to us our truest selves.
My daughter, she's pretending she doesn't know, but is trying to cook and feed me and keep me alive because I wasn't eating anything, and me pretending like everything was fine. He kind of shoved me out of the way and said, move. And he went out the front door and he jumped in a car and drove off. And that was the last time I saw him.
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Chapter 5: How did Depeche Mode's sound evolve over the years?
Listen to season 14 of Family Secrets starting May 7th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Six years earlier, on March 20th, 1990, the streets of Los Angeles were overrun with Depeche Mode fans. 17,000 people, to be exact, stretching out for 15 city blocks down La Cienega Boulevard. It was merely a fraction of the nearly 70,000 who'd shown up at the Rose Bowl in nearby Pasadena two years prior.
But that was the final show of the band's first true American tour, and this was a record release signing for Violator, the Pesh Mode's seventh studio album. And in this case, it's not like a niche audience was showing up for a niche band. It wasn't just girls in leather jackets and cut-off shirts anymore, or guys with craftwork by way of Gene Vincent fashion sense.
It was sportos, motorheads, slots, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, and dickheads. Every sub-click of late 80s era American teenager was in attendance. Grown-up America, Square America, Crosby, Stills, and whoever the fuck America, those people didn't know who or what the Pesh Mode was.
They didn't know what to make of the UK band's recent single, Person of Jesus, the one with the twangy, spaghetti Western guitar motif, the swaggering beat, the sweaty-sounding breathing, and the call to action to reach out and touch fate. The song that freaked my mother out when she caught me watching it on MTV one afternoon for reasons that I still can't understand.
Square America didn't know how Personal Jesus was actually connected to the past, to their music, to rock and roll history, or how the band's primary songwriter, Martin Gore, conceived of it after reading Priscilla Presley's memoir, Elvis and Me. Square America, the young and restless America, Macho Fucko America could hardly fathom how, in 1990, this was a new kind of Beatlemania.
And that tonight, the human gridlock swallowing up the entire street in LA was about to turn into a riot. It was 9 p.m. The latest single from Violator, Enjoy the Silence, would cross over and hit number eight on the Billboard Hot 100 in just a month's time. Right now, that song was thundering from speakers outside the warehouse, the music store that was hosting tonight's meet and greet.
A limo rolled down La Cienega. Girls screamed at it while the dudes used their bodies to try to stop it. And when it finally did come to a halt, the limo was directly in front of the warehouse. The back door opened and out stepped Dave Cahan, Martin Gore, and Depeche Mode's two keyboardists, Alan Wilder and Andrew Fletcher, a.k.a. Fletch, who were hustled inside by the security detail.
Just a glance at the quartet, and suddenly it was bedlam on the block. Thousands of kids surged from the street toward the store, their bodies pressed up against the giant glass windows. Some climbed trees or TV news vans to get a better look.
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Chapter 6: What were the challenges faced by Depeche Mode during the recording of 'Songs of Faith and Devotion'?
Where were the guitars? Where were the drums? It was all synthesizers. It was all machines. It was soulless, dead inside music. The pop equivalent of five construction workers standing around a hole while one guy did all the digging. As a UK magazine melody maker noted in the review of the band's jaunty 1981 debut single, Just Can't Get Enough, I can, you will.
At least, that was the thinking anyway. In reality, Depeche Mode thought of themselves as the opposite. They were punks from Basildon, a town just outside London. The synthesizer was like Johnny Ramone's Maserati guitar or Paul Simonin's smashed P-Bass. It was DIY, it was rough and tumble, and it was novel.
With a few synthesizers, you could be in a proper band but eliminate the age-old hassle of busting your sorry-ass lugging equipment and all that other shit around night after night.
But although they modeled themselves as a poppier version of experimental noise bands like Einstein and Newbottom and Australia's SBK, the latter, which ate raw sheep brains on stage during a show, Depeche Mode was misunderstood by the pop cognoscente as disposable synthetic garbage. At least Duran Duran played instruments. Again, this was the thinking anyway.
That was before the group's original co-founder and lead songwriter, Vince Clark, abruptly left around the time their first album, Speak and Spell, was released in the fall of 1981. It was before Fletch and Alan Wilder began to find new ways to make their machine sound more human.
It was before Martin Gore stepped up to fill that songwriting void and began to deliver songs that were darker, more provocative, and more subversive. Songs like People Are People, Blasphemous Rumors, Black Celebration, and the aforementioned Master and Servant. Songs about S&M, songs about God's supposed sick sense of humor, songs about death with a killer beat to boot.
And it was before Music for the Masses, Depeche Mode's sixth album in as many years, that was released in 1987. The title was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but wound up becoming the band's biggest record to date. Ditto for the U.S. tour that followed.
That once maligned synth-pop sound was now selling out 95% of the seats at the enormous Rose Bowl, an epic final show which veteran rock and roll documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker turned into the most excellent concert film ever.
101 all of it leading to this violator a smash upon its release already outselling chart mainstays madonna and prince it also helped that it was the first depeche mode record to prominently feature martin gore's guitar which helped bridge the gap between the mainstream and the goth electropop world from which they emerged but violator was more than another record violator was vindication
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Chapter 7: How did Dave Gahan's transformation affect his relationship with the band?
They were the LAPD's problem now, and the LAPD dealt with that problem swiftly and efficiently. It cost the city of Los Angeles $18,000 to pay for the 100-plus riot police. And when the dust settled, the city went looking for someone to foot the bill. Whether that was the warehouse or KROQ, the local alternative radio station that promoted the event.
Depeche Mode were long gone by the time Warehouse ponied up the cash. Not that the band was concerned about price tags. Not at this moment. They were riding high on that vindication feeling. And as their limo faded away into that March evening, so did the stigma that had followed them since the beginning. Something else was about to take its place.
Crossover success, fame, and Dave Gahan's transformation from synth-pop joke into an honest-to-God rock star. A transformation that would kill him.
We'll be right back after this.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that. Trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield. And in this new season of The Girlfriends. Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care, so they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no. I vowed I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to The Girlfriends, Trust Me Babe, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. May is Mental Health Awareness Month and your 20s, they can feel like a lot. On the Psychology of Your 20s podcast, we unpack the anxiety, the overthinking, the heartbreak, the identity crisis, all of it that comes with being in your 20s.
Because if you've ever thought, is anybody else feeling this way? They definitely are.
I feel like my 20s was a process of checking off everything that I was not good at to get to what I was good at. Oftentimes we take everything a little bit too seriously and we get lost in things that we later on decide weren't even important to us to begin with.
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Chapter 8: What does Dave Gahan's story reveal about the rock star lifestyle?
He kind of shoved me out of the way and said, move. And he went out the front door and he jumped in a car and drove off. And that was the last time I saw him.
Listen to season 14 of Family Secrets starting May 7th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
The World Violation Tour was massive. 88 shows on four continents over the course of six months. Sold out stadiums from New York to Texas to California. Eddie Murphy, Sylvester Stallone, U2's Bono, just a few of the pop culture luminaries on the guest list backstage.
This was 1990, the same year that Madonna rocked the pointy cone bra on her Blonde Ambition tour and also the year of the Rolling Stones' Steel Wheels tour. The Stones had once been the avatars of Dangerous, but now they were just going through the corporate machinations. The Stones didn't shock or offend anymore, not in 1990.
Depeche Mode, on the other hand, as popular as they were becoming, still got under the skin. Walking down some suburban street in America, Eddie Cochran hair, fingernails painted black, leather jackets over bare chests, Martin Gore in a dress, the androgynous rockabilly goth vibe of it all elicited more than one homophobic slur from passing pickup trucks.
In fact, Alan Wilder said in a Rolling Stone interview from this very time that he'd been called that slur at least 20 times so far that day alone. And Alan was one of the more conservatively dressed in the group. Depeche Mode did what rock and roll does. Real rock and roll. They were provocative. They challenged the accepted norms. They pissed people off.
And they did it Jan McConnell style in the process. Just a handful of synthesizers and samplers. Martin Gore's Gretsch White Falcon guitar and Dave Gahan's Rockstar Stance. Powered by pure adrenaline and also by the ecstasy they took each night after the show. Dave, in particular, went deep into what he understood was the rock star's duty.
You didn't cut your hair short, wear a crop-top pastel t-shirt, and flap your arms like some old horndog rooster as Mick Jagger was now doing at 47 years old. By the way, Mick Jagger shouldn't even be alive at 47 years old. Where were the real ones Dave Gahan wanted to know? The ones that burned out and didn't fade away. The ones who died before they got old. The Jimmys, the Janices, the Jimbos.
They were long gone, and the void they left behind was huge. So when the World Violation Tour ends, your sole purpose is to fill that void. You leave your wife and child in London because London is over. LA is where it's at. And that's where rock stars are not only dead, but undead, roaming the wet streets of Hollywood Boulevard at night like vampires.
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