Music saved Dave Gahan’s life. Born in 1962, and raised in Basildon, Essex, he was a cherubic, rowdy teenager. Between getting suspended from school and in to trouble with the police, his future was looking decidedly bleak. In his final year of secondary school, he applied for a job as an apprentice fitter.
Knowing he needed a job to (even temporarily) distract/extract him from his disorderly life, he asked his probation officer for advice. Be honest at the job interview, he was told. Tell them about your criminal record, but that you are now a reformed person, eager to knuckle down. Gahan told the truth, didn't get the job, walked to where his probation officer worked and trashed the place. Detention centre would have been Gahan's next port of call (and after that, who knows?) if another Basildon teenager, Vince Clarke, hadn't heard him sing David Bowie's Heroes at, of all places, a local scout hut jam session. Before they could tie a few bowline knots in sequence, Clarke, Gahan and two more Basildon mates, Andy Fletcher and Martin Gore, formed Depeche Mode.
The rest may be history, but Gahan knows that music saved him. He is talking to The Ticket about his forthcoming semi-solo album, Imposter, his third collaborative studio work with the English/American production team Soulsavers (aka Rich Machin and Ian Glover). Unlike their two previous outings (2012’s The Light the Dead See, 2015’s Angels & Ghosts), Imposter is a covers album, and in tandem with Gahan’s largely solemn creative worldview there isn’t a happy-clappy song to be heard. Between The Dark End of the Street (James Carr), Strange Religion (Mark Lanegan), Metal Heart (Cat Power), The Desperate Kingdom of Love (PJ Harvey) and Not Dark Yet (Bob Dylan), any light that attempts to shine through is blocked by blackout curtains. Is it, I ask, a fine line between respectful homage and wanting to put his own stamp on them?
“The real challenge to take on something like this is how I can make it sound believable in terms of performing songs by singers that I really admire, while at the same time forgetting about their versions and creating my own experience of being in the songs.”
Natural
Finding his way into the respective emotions of the songs arrived when Gahan finally allowed the original performances to slowly slip away. “I was just singing for myself in my studio, creating my own visual dialogue for them.” Once he did this, he says, a light switch came on. I suggest that it was surely something of a relief not to have been tasked with writing a new batch of lyrics again. He agrees, pointing towards how it was also a distinct advantage to have – however subliminally – chosen songs with lyrics that he could genuinely identify with. “Even though I’ve been listening to these songs for many years and have come back to them many times, in this set of circumstances they all started to feel incredibly natural, almost as if they were meant for me. I know that sounds a bit odd, but some songs are like that – they have always informed me quite often of where I am in my life at any one moment.”
Gahan outlines a good example. The morning of our cheerful Zoom call, he woke up, did a few bits and pieces around the house, but soon realised he hadn’t had enough coffee and was not, therefore, in the right or focused frame of mind. There was only one thing for it, he says. “I poured myself another mug of coffee and put on Exile on Main Street. It’s the Rolling Stones finally making one record that sounds cohesive and it’s intrinsically them. Their message is nothing less than this is what we do and no other band can do it this way. When that happens, it’s magic, it can completely turn you around, and that is honestly what has happened with Imposter. I set the bar for me being invested in the songs and I think we got there.”
Inspiration
He goes on to mention a covers album that, so he reckons, also “got there” and from which he took due inspiration – David Bowie’s Pin Ups. Released in 1973 and featuring cover versions of songs by the likes of (among others) Pink Floyd, Them, The Who, The Kinks and Pretty Things, he recalls he was 11 when he first heard it. “I had little or no interest as to who had written those songs on the album, all I knew was that I loved them, and I thought Bowie had written them. The important message, I feel now, was there is an innocence in the way you listen to music. I know at that time in my life, approaching my teenage years, how impressionable I was to those songs. Bowie, especially, was instrumental in making me believe there was somewhere so much better to go than where I was, what I wanted to be and how I wanted to live. I’m glad that songs still do that to me.”
On a similar theme, he feels privileged to be able to still make music, "If this album has done nothing else for me personally, then it sets the bar fairly high for whatever it is I decide to do next." Will this include, I ask, a 60th birthday party next year? A chipper Dave Gahan very audibly sighs. "Oh, God! I would like to say it's just another number, but it is looming quite large. I say to some people that I'm going to be 60 next year, and I say it with a breezy tone because I really don't feel like that age. It's only when I get up off the couch and I'm reminded that my knees don't work as well as they used to. Or the morning after the night before. . . But, you know, the years advance, don't they?"
Imposter, by Dave Gahan & Soulsavers, is released November 12th on Columbia Records.
