1987-05-26 BBC Radio One London, London, UK

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Notes

Bruno Brooks interviewed Dave Gahan and Andrew Fletcher backstage at the Golden Rose Light Entertainment Festival in Montreux, for BBC Radio One London. SoundCloud user DELTAFORCE70 ForTheMasses has ripped this interview from a bootleg cassette and uploaded the file here on SoundCloud. The file has been re-uploaded below.

• Duration: 03:15 minutes

Audio

Bruno Brooks: …Mode and “Strangelove,” we’ll play that for you in a moment. We now have Andy and Dave of Depeche Mode here with us, hello!

Dave Gahan/Andrew Fletcher: Hello!

B: So how are you enjoying Montreux? So far so good?

D: Fantastic.

A: It’s a beautiful place.

D. It’s a beautiful place. Actually it is, no seriously, it’s a beautiful place. And it’s-

B: It’s just like the picture card, isn’t it?

D: Yeah, it really is, yeah. I opened the windows this morning– I opened the curtains this morning, looked out, and it does look like a, you know, it looks like it’s a photo you’re looking at, you know.

B: And everything’s so fresh, as well, there’s nothing industrious about it at all.

D: No, it’s great.

B: It’s great. Well, you’re working on a new album in Paris which is, uh, due to be finished in Denmark, although you are working in England as well at this present time, aren’t you?

D: Yeah. We’re in London at the moment and, um, just doing some more recording. We plan to finish off here in Denmark mixing. Um, we’ve recorded about half the songs, I’d say, so far. Martin’s been writing a lot of songs and, uh, we’ve just been sort of throwing away the bad and recording the good.

B: Tell us the name of the studio because I think it’s quite funny-

A: I don’t know if we can give that away.

B: You can, go on!

A: The studio’s called Konk. (laughing)

B: Konk Studios.

D: K-O-N-K. (laughing)

B: Certainly very original, anyway. “Strangelove,” of course, is your 19th hit single to date. I mean, that’s quite an amazing success. I see you as tax exiles in the near future. I mean, do you see yourself going that way?

D: Uh, we’re not really at the moment. Obviously, you know…you know, you do think about things like tax and that but we all enjoy living in England, you know, so, and uh, at the moment, you know, we’ve got no plans to sort of go and live anywhere else, you know. So, we’re– at the moment we’re just paying the tax, you know.

B: Keeping the taxman happy. Your records, let’s be honest about it, you either love them or you hate them. And, you know, there are people like even my own colleague, Steve Wright, who make it very obvious-

D/A: Steve who?

B: They make it– Steve Wright, that’s him-

D: Ah, Wright. Is he still working?

B: Yes, apparently so. He’s one of the very– well I would say few people who claim that your records are extremely boring. Here’s your chance to reply, I mean, do you think he’s talking around his hat or what?

D: Well, the joke’s on him, really, isn’t it, cause he still plays it. We get on so well with Steve, that’s the thing, and it’s all in fun, I mean, you know.

A: He actually really likes our records-

D: He really likes the band, yeah-

A: We saw him the other day, and uh, he was saying it was only a joke on the air, and uh, he thinks we’re practically the best band (unintelligible).

B: But on the more positive side, I mean, what is it you think that is so attractive about your records, and why do you have such a cult following? You know, one hit after another, and you’ve seem to have got this formula down.

D: Well, I mean, we know, we’ve been…we’ve been going about, what, 6 and a half, 7, getting on 7 years now, and uh, so, we’ve always played live and gone out and played to an audience so we’ve built up a big following from playing live and those people, you know, they go out and buy the records straight away. Um-

B: Would you say that you’re still known as a keyboard band (unintelligible)?

A: Well we use-- I suppose most people think of us as a keyboard band, but actually we do use a whole variety of instruments.

D: You know, Martin plays guitar, you know, quite a bit now.

B: Yeah, I noticed that on Top of the Pops.

D/A: Yeah.

B: Was that a conscious change for Depeche Mode?

D: Not really, I mean, we’ve always used guitars. See, there’s always been this uh– it’s just that we’ve never actually– so we tend to sort of…in the studio, we use anything, you know. It’s not like, we don’t limit ourselves to just using keyboards, you know. Anything that’s around that makes a good noise, we’ll use.

B: Well, where Martin starts wearing the skirts, maybe you can start wearing them now, Dave.

D: Uh, I don’t think so. (laughing) I think I’ll stick to the trousers.

B: Thanks for dropping in. Here’s the record at #16, Depeche Mode, thank you.

D: Bye.

(“Strangelove” starts playing)

Lineage

Tape Rip (Audio cassette "Fast Fashion" 1987) -> Transfer (Pioneer stereo, surround & stereo system wide) -> Audacity -> FLAC 16-bit 44.1khz (level compression 8) -> (level compression 160Kbps) for Soundcloud -> downloaded from SoundCloud as 128Kbps file and re-uploaded on DMLiveWiki