Dave Gahan was a junkie in the 90s and early 2000s. He was addicted to drugs and alcohol, and his marriage was on the rocks. In order to deal with it, he turned to a life of crime, including drug and alcohol addiction, and turned to writing songs about it. In the process of writing and producing Never Let Me Down Again, he reached rock bottom.
00:01:59.980In other words, I liked it on third listen more than I liked it on the first listen.
00:02:06.280And I also got deeper into meanings of the songs or at least how they resonated.
00:02:15.560I think it's actually pretty brilliant in retrospect, but I'm not sure what I thought of it when I bought it as a teenager still at the time.
00:02:30.540I was in high school when it came out in 1997.
00:02:33.540And I think I liked Home and It's No Good, but was a little curious about the rest of it.
00:02:41.460And I was learning about Dave Gahan's personal downfall.
00:02:46.860One thing I would say, and this was the summing up that I came to, is that songs like Never Let Me Down Again are about the experience of drug use, of being high, of transcending yourself, going to another world, etc.
00:03:09.580And I think Ultra is about the experience of being a junkie.
00:03:15.480And I say that, I guess, a bit as a criticism in the sense that it's not a fun album.
00:03:28.940I think it's, in a way, a vindictive album.
00:03:32.840And at least in retrospect, after reading the chapters in Stripped, this chronicle that I've been referencing throughout these podcasts,
00:03:44.900every song resonated with Dave Gahan's ordeal of heavy drug use, collapsing marriage, living like a low life, which I don't think we can even underestimate.
00:04:04.580He was carrying around a .38 caliber pistol, wherever he went.
00:04:08.900And he would check into the Sunset Marquee Hotel and never leave, as they say.
00:04:16.020Interesting hotel named Sunset Boulevard Hotel, California.
00:11:43.660And they seem to be about him channeling Dave's ordeal.
00:11:50.380And perhaps experiencing it a bit himself.
00:11:54.420But anyway, those are my opening thoughts.
00:11:56.900Yeah, I mean, I think I agree with you that the album isn't exactly accessible upon first listen.
00:12:06.140I think a lot of the tracks, like you said, are slower, a bit more like, I don't know, something like dazed about it or just almost gives you the feeling of like a hangover.
00:12:19.100You know, I would describe this, if Songs of Faith and Devotion was the Bacchanal party, this was the hangover from it.
00:12:28.520And when you said vindictive, that made me think, like, is this vindictive in the same way that like a broken frame might have been vindictive?
00:12:40.800Like, us three, Dave, Martin and Fletch, we're going to prove to Vince that into the world that we can do this without Vince.
00:12:49.900And in the similar way, like, us three, again, we're going to prove that we can do this without Alan, without all of his craftsmanship in the studio and his musicianship.
00:13:01.200Yes, I can see that, but I actually mean it in another way as well, but you can continue.
00:13:06.900But I think with Dave being like at his low, like, he's doing these interviews at the time with like, I don't know, E! News or whatever.
00:13:16.140And he's just going on and on about how much of an addict he is.
00:13:21.900And that was like their kind of promo.
00:13:23.740And I think this album could have been called, like, Dave Gone 1993 to 1998 or something like that, you know, like, it really, yeah, I agree.
00:13:39.180I guess Martin was suffering with his own alcoholism or whatever during this time and Fletch was recovering from some sort of breakdown.
00:13:48.660But, yeah, I mean, he is the star of the show.
00:13:51.880And it made me think that, I think with the previous album, in this case Songs of Faith and Devotion, that he had sort of, like, achieved this new persona.
00:14:03.600He didn't necessarily need to have, but it just kind of goes to show that, like, all of these frontmen, David Lee Roth, Freddie Mercury, John Lennon, with very few exceptions,
00:14:16.620are these frontmen, like, ever, and obviously Kurt Cobain, are any of these frontmen ever, like, well-adjusted people?
00:14:24.740And I think Dave, as creative a person as he might be now, I don't think he was or is perhaps a well-adjusted person.
00:14:34.500And that's not like a personal dig or anything.
00:14:36.660I just think that would have contributed to his addictions and et cetera, but it also made him a really good frontman as well.
00:14:46.700So, yeah, with you saying that you might not recognize, like, Depeche Mode in this album, I would agree also, because there is just something so fundamentally different.
00:14:58.700There was, I think, actually a good balance of, like, live music and programmed music with, like, they brought in a bunch of different bassists and percussionists,
00:15:11.020like the guy from Cannes whose name escapes me or anything.
00:15:14.540It's like Jackie Feishaupt or something.
00:15:16.860Anyway, and they're bringing in all these different musicians doing all of this stuff that Alan would have been doing.
00:15:25.900He was playing bass on Songs of Faith and Devotion, and he was playing drums and recording these loops and getting these atmospheres together.
00:15:34.600And so they needed someone like Tim Semenen, who had done remixes for the band before.
00:23:42.880And Dave, you know, whether it's out of genuine pain or maybe his own narcissism, it's kind of like, what about me?
00:23:53.220Another thing I learned, this was reported.
00:23:56.560I mean, unfortunately for Gahan, when he checked out of the $500 per night facility, it sounded like he was still pretty angry with the world.
00:24:05.560I was serious about it when I was there.
00:24:08.120But once I left, it was like, fuck this shit.
00:24:11.520More than likely, that anger was compounded by Teresa Gahan's reaction to her husband's, quote, recovery, end quote.
00:24:20.100When I came out, Teresa met me, Gahan recalled.
00:24:23.220We went to get some lunch and she said, I'm not going to stop drinking or using drugs just because you have to.
00:25:14.520And there's these other things, like displaying all the classic symptoms of drug-induced paranoia when the tooled-up Gahan was dealing with gun-toting lowlifes.
00:25:31.460He was holed up at home watching the Weather Channel for up to 12 hours at a time.
00:25:36.260There was another scene where his mother, I guess this was later on, but his son was coming over and he couldn't get clean.
00:25:45.900And he asked his mother to join him to help him take care of him.
00:25:53.980And his mother went and threw out all of his drugs and paraphernalia and stuff.
00:26:02.160And he learned about that and he raced out of the house and he found garbage bags around the street and took them in and emptied the garbage bags on the kitchen floor and was like rustling through them to find his heroin in front of his son.
00:26:18.000And then he said, no, it's not what you think.
00:26:21.600I need steroids for my voice because I've overused my voice.
00:26:25.280And so I need this, again, typical kind of lying and excuses from drug users.
00:26:30.940They do this all the time because they're desperate.
00:27:53.140So anyway, a little bit of a defense of Teresa in the sense that it's hard to put up with someone who's like embraced junkiedom in that way.
00:28:04.180And it almost became his own personal Jesus.
00:28:07.000Like, I'm not like other men at this point because I've abused my body.
00:28:33.340You know, that was interesting to me, what you said about Dave's relationship with Martin and Fletch and saying, like, you guys don't care about me.
00:28:44.400I kind of in like interviews, I kind of felt as though that that tension was there.
00:28:50.140Like we're friends, but we're not like that close.
00:28:54.280And again, Dave, the front man, Martin's the songwriter, Alan's the craftsman.
00:29:02.960And like that specialization, it's not very friendly.
00:29:54.320And had not Depeche Mode happened, he probably, he could have, you know, been on drugs, but not famous and not had this recovery and stuff and could have been a, you know, career criminal or whatever.
00:30:10.420But, yeah, it's just, I don't know, it's a terrible thing.
00:30:16.660And it does remind me when you start talking about him, like rummaging through trash to look for bits of heroin, that's still like going on to this day.
00:30:27.980And in some ways, like a more insidious way, if you think about the opioid crisis and how it's just like devastated a lot of, especially rural areas.
00:30:42.000And I've seen that in my life and, you know, probably a dozen cases, not too personally, but in, in many people that I went to high school with, they just, they start messing around with like Xanax and then Xanax turns into opioid and opioid is what a couple of molecules different from heroin and they're on heroin.
00:31:06.860I mean, I had, it was a shock to me to be in high school and have the drug dogs come through and have them find a neighbor's, a burnt spoon, a neighbor of mine.
00:31:22.560They found her burnt spoon and heroin in her, in her locker.
00:31:27.760I mean, that was a, that was a huge, that was like a tidal wave because I don't come from, you know, the ghetto or, or anything.
00:31:35.320I don't come from 1970s Harlem, you know, this is a lily white suburb we're talking about.
00:31:40.440And that was, but that's what this reminds me of.
00:31:46.020Like, wow, we're actually closer to this stuff than you would think because of, you know, these, these opioids.
00:31:52.320One more quote here, and then we can talk about the songs, but, and I think we'll save a lot more Alan Wilder talk for the next podcast on Songs of Faith and Devotion.
00:32:05.020But this is something that Dave told the Q magazine.
00:32:08.880Q seems to be the major source for a lot of these quotes.
00:32:13.220Dave said, I didn't respond to his leaving as much as I now realize I wanted to.
00:32:19.480The singer confessed, I really miss Alan's input on everything we now do musically, but I miss him as a friend.
00:32:27.960He was probably the person I felt supported by the most in the band.
00:32:32.040And I wish I'd fought harder for him to stay.
00:32:35.560What Alan really wanted was for Martin to turn around and say, you've really contributed something great.
00:32:42.940But Martin's not someone who hands out compliments.
00:32:49.260And I mean, I will, we'll get to it next time, but I mean, it's, there's that idea of putting so much effort into producing the album, creating the sound, making these choices, you know, this way or that, you know, like, for instance, to have and to hold is going to be this brooding song on nuclear annihilation in the Soviet Union, as opposed to the Spanish taster.
00:33:12.640Or, you know, like, that's a choice, you know, like, that's a choice, you know, and he did that.
00:33:20.600I even think that in this album, Ultra, a lot of the, you know, instrumental music or kind of connection music, like use link, and it almost strikes me as doodling.
00:33:38.140I mean, not that it's bad or anything, but it, it might strike me as like failure to make a strong aesthetic choice about something.
00:33:49.800I mean, not that it's bad or anything.
00:34:19.780Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of, of either of these, was it jazz thieves and then use link.
00:34:44.760I'm not a fan of either one of the instrumental tracks.
00:34:48.640And I do, I kind of just see them as, you can call them transition songs, but they're kind of fillers.
00:34:55.860And actually, they do have B-sides that could have been on the album, like Surrender, for example, should have been on there.
00:35:06.640I mean, Slow Blow could have been on there.
00:35:11.240I don't know if only When I Lose Myself was recorded.
00:35:14.220I think it was recorded a little bit, maybe like a year later or something.
00:35:18.020But yeah, that could have been on there as well.
00:35:20.200Laying on your holy bed by the hallowed door
00:35:38.900Feeling like an infidel, not worthy of your fault.
00:35:48.800Tempted by your innocence, beckoned to my fate.
00:37:34.440Again, I mean, I think that's why, it's this weird relationship they have.
00:37:38.600You mean this horny creep set upon weary feet who looks in need of sleep that doesn't come.
00:37:46.460This, and I even hear a little bit of that, that doesn't come.
00:37:49.320I mean, it, it, it, that sleep that doesn't come or also that doesn't come.
00:37:52.660Just in, in his description of, like, the junkie's body just being nothing.
00:37:57.780You know, you don't, you don't eat or shit or piss or, you're just this weirdly Jesus-like in, in a very horrible way.
00:38:07.480Like, this twisted, tortured mess, this bed of sinfulness who's longing for some rest and feeling numb.
00:38:15.700And then, again, why I get this kind of vindictive quality, you see this as well in the love themes, but it's this, whatever, you know, whatever I've done, I've been staring down the barrel of the gun.
00:38:25.580I mean, it's, it's almost this, like, embrace of your whole life trajectory going towards either being shot by one of these junkies or turning the gun on yourself.
00:38:41.060Dave slid his wrist when he attempted suicide, however committed he was to that or not, but it's a dark image.
00:38:51.480And, and, and it does have this, yeah, I mean, I, it's kind of vague to say 90s quality to it, but it, it's this hip-hop drum, negative lyrics, embracing despair.