Ultra clean?

Depeche Mode hang out the wash

by Randee Dawn Cohen

"I think you can be very responsible for your actions, but the outcome is not in your control," says Dave Gahan, lead singer of Depeche Mode, over coffee in his London hotel just a few days shy of Christmas. "I think what happened with myself is I basically wanted to hide away from the world, but it was impossible. You're always going to have to come back to the fact that when you come down you're going to be left with the same problems that you created for yourself. And I was really tired of being tired of life. So I chose to be something different."

For Depeche Mode fans, the appearance of the band's new album, Ultra (Mute/Reprise), must seem nothing short of miraculous. No one who's read the pop-music press over the past year can have failed to notice that Dave Gahan and his myriad troubles occupied more text than any new music Depeche Mode might have been working on. Singer Dave Gahan OD's. Singer Dave Gahan gets arrested. Singer Dave Gahan attempts suicide. It's all been a long, strange trip for the 17-year-old British dance-pop band, who otherwise fell out of the public spotlight after their 1993-'94 Songs of Faith and Devotion tour. During the 14 months they were on the road, the band nearly cracked open from the strain: touring constantly put every member in the hospital at one point or another, Gahan's drug addiction found its muse, and shortly after they went home again longtime member Alan Wilder left altogether.

They tried to patch the holes; they began recording Ultra in New York City. But the drug addiction Gahan had exacerbated during the tour became fully obvious to the remaining members, Martin Gore and Andy Fletcher. "I think Dave at that point was trying to hide his illness from us," says Gore in an upstairs room in Abbey Road Studios, where the rest of the album was finished. "He was telling us that he was clean, and that other addicts wouldn't want to hang around him any more because he was on his recovery program. And that obviously wasn't true. His voice was shot."

But since Gahan finished his rehab program at Exodus (the recovery center in California from which Kurt Cobain escaped just a few days before he killed himself) back in May of 1996, he's been saying he's entirely clean and willing to look forward to whatever comes next. And what's first on the agenda is Ultra, Depeche Mode's tenth studio album since they emerged back in 1981 with Speak & Spell (Mute/Sire), laden with synths and dyed hair, leather miniskirts, and an androgynous look that was, for the time, as subversive as Marilyn Manson are these days.

Ultra is without a question a Depeche Mode album, and yet it's unlikely to subvert anyone today. Getting Tim Simenon, of Bomb the Bass notoriety, to produce (the first outsider to do so since the band began) gave a harder dance edge and industrial grind. But Simenon, who professes to be a longtime fan, also lets quite a bit of the old Depeche Mode influence the new. The synth riff in "It's No Good" might have been lifted from the breakthrough 1984 album Some Great Reward; "The Love Thieves" has a gentler, more melancholy weariness. And "Home," sung by Gore, brings the circle around again by ending the album with a hopeful, almost grateful ballad. Gore swears he hasn't written lyrics specifically for or about Gahan; he does, however, suggest there's a unifying theme to Ultra. "For me, there are a few songs on the album that deal with this destiny theme, this fatalistic feel to them."

So Depeche Mode have managed, one more time, to pull themselves from the brink. Yet the future is not as clear as it might seem. Gahan is beginning to reconsider his status as singer. "I love to sing and I love to perform, but I don't know at the moment whether I want to do that with Depeche Mode. I perform Martin's songs, and that's it. I need to do more. I'm sure Martin feels very fulfilled when he writes a song and sees it finished at the end. I think it would be really nice to finish on a high, rather than let the whole thing dissolve into a lot of resentment. But when I do decide to do something, I put my mind heart and soul in it, and I do it. If I decide to stop, it's not something I will open again."