2015-09-14 Shaun Keaveny's Breakfast Show, BBC 6 Music, London, UK
Notes
Dave Gahan was interviewed over the phone on Friday, September 11th, which was aired on Monday the 14th, on Shaun Keaveny's Breakfast show, presented during Matt Everitt's Music News segment. This interview was also partially aired on 2015-09-14 The Radcliffe & Maconie Show. The fragment has been downloaded and cut off from the whole episode, and re-uploaded on Box as a 128 kbps mp3 file. A transcript has been typed out below for your convenience. Shaun also interviewed Dave two years ago.
- Duration: 03:33 minutes
Audio
Transcript
Matt: And finally, news from Depeche Mode frontman Dave Gahan. He is releasing a new album NOT with the "Mode"... [or] "Depeche"? What do we call them?
Shaun: We call them Depeche Mode!
Matt: But with Rich Machin of UK production duo Soulsavers-
Shaun: -You'd be wrong to say that it was with Depeche Mode. [plays snippet from DM's 'Wrong']
Matt: They've done albums with people like Will Oldham and Mark Lanegan in the past. It's actually the second record he's done with Soulsavers. The first, 'The Light The Dead See' came out in 2012. His new album is called 'Angels and Ghosts', it's coming out on the 27th of October, on Columbia Records, [with] nine brand new tracks. Mark Radcliffe actually played the new single 'All This And Nothing' on Thursday last week. But our report Elizabeth [Alker] spoke to Dave Gahan himself. One question, I guess, would be: What exactly is the difference between working solo and working with Depeche Mode, who is one of the biggest bands in the world, have got a massive fanatical following, a sort of well documented history and instantly recognisable sound?
Dave: With Depeche it's a full collaboration. When you're making a record with a band in that way, and [with] a group of people, producer, engineer, programmers, you're all collaborating, and you're all trying to kind of get your ideas there, but there is definitely a lot of compromise. And there has to be. And you hope that, in the end, you reach a point. But certainly Martin and I, when we were making a Depeche record, we know we wanna make a record that's a complete record from start to finish. There's nothing on there that goes on there, [of which] we're like, "Meh, not sure about that one but, you know, we gotta shove it on there." We still are very critical of that. With the Soulsavers, it's different for me, because I am thinking about the bigger picture. I'm thinking about how it's gonna begin, how it's gonna end. That doesn't really present itself immediately. It usually takes a good sort of few songs in.
Matt: So is this a more accurate picture of who Dave is, artistically, rather than Depeche Mode?
Dave: Yeah, I don't really have to edit myself in any way. But when you're writing, you can't do that anyway. For me, it's quite often a sound or a particular note or something, just the way it's played, or how it's present to me, [like] a string of notes that form a phrase that end up inspiring me to come up with the words, for some reason. I don't edit that, I'll just go with it, and quite often it's not until the song is almost completed that I start to realise, "OK, I know what I'm trying to get out of here now." For me, it's about a lot of feeling. It's a lot of emotion, and if a word presents itself, then throw it down there, and figure out why that word presented itself later on.
Matt: Obviously, God bless that man, for being part of Depeche Mode. God bless that man for being brilliant, and God bless that man for being that famous, and spending that much time in LA, without his accent going anywhere near America. I love that. As we were just saying.
Shaun: It's true, he does, he sounds like a fantastic plasterer that we get around. But also, I heard he was going to be the new James Bond...?
Matt: Oh God... go on.
Shaun: Basildon Bond.
Matt: If you wanna see him live: he's doing Los Angeles, New York, and London, [on] October the 26th, Shepherd's Bush Empire, then he kicks in Berlin, Paris and Milan.
Shaun: He is a fantastic chap. We had him on, a couple of years ago, actually. [...] Right now we're gonna play something from one of those new nine songs, and this is it, this is called 'All Of This And Nothing', as we were just discussing.
