2017-04-09 Gaydio 88.4FM, Manchester, UK

Notes

Phil Marriott interviewed Dave Gahan at Brown's Hotel in London on March 28th. Marriott uploaded this interview several times, in parts: On April 7th, he uploaded an article about it on his own website; on April 8th, he uploaded a 10-minute audio clip of the interview on YouTube; on April 9th, Gaydio FM aired the interview on their channel; on April 12th, Marriott uploaded the full interview as a podcast. The full interview has been re-uploaded below.

Some quotes of the interview that Phil Mariott put on his site:

“Spirit is an album about humanity and about our place in it, and we’re not doing very well! That’s why we led with ‘Going Backwards’, as much as we do feel like we are going forwards and new doors are being opened.”

“I’ve lived in America for almost twenty seven years. Things have changed there since I moved, and things are changing again, but not for the good it seems. We’ve got to see how this evolves in the next few years. Hopefully people will come out and shout about things they’re not happy with. The one good thing about America is that you can do that without being thrown in prison! In some countries where there are other dictators, if you are outspoken, or you’re the wrong colour, or you’re gay – you disappear.”

“The way I feel about life is everybody should lead the life that they want to lead. They shouldn’t be told otherwise. Politicians always unnerve me. They’re all full of shit on one level or another. What I’ve been witnessing in America over the last couple of years has been quite shocking.”

“If we picked a particular part to be working on, we assigned a certain instrument to that part. So, also, there would be a continuation of that sound throughout the record that you'd come up again, whether it was a pedal steel guitar, or it was a certain kind of vintage drum machine that we were using. Say on 'So Much Love', where we wanted a vintage, kind of broken, busted up drum-sound. We would go back to these instruments and use them again. A synthesizer that we used from the '70s called the Elka, which was a beautiful sounding synth that has these very old, sort of Germanic sounding, beautiful string-sounds, and sort of choiry sounds, just unique sounds, we used that a lot.”

“I wanted ['Cover Me'] to be very cinematic, and I had this sort of idea of us finally destroying this beautiful planet that we live on. Hence the northern lights: it's just one in many millions of beautiful things... the oceans, just things that we take for granted. And the "Northern lights" was just a metaphor that I wanted to use, because I did once experience actually being there while that was happening, way up north in Scandinavia. Yeah [it's quite an emotional experience], and it's also out of the world somehow, quite spiritual, and moving, moving to the point of tears, the beauty of something happening in our universe. And so I had this idea at that time, a little lyrical idea, not really a melody. But anyway, I came back to that, and that became that song. And I also saw the song in two halves, where the second half was where we are finally leaving or something. This person or whoever it is, who I live vicariously through, leaves the planet, only to find another planet that is exactly the same as ours, and he has this horrible feeling of like, "Oh wow, it's not the planet, it's me, I am doing this. I'm destroying this beautiful world that I live in. And that can be just an emotional relationship that you have with another person, or trying to be having a relationship with another person that you can't quite get to because you just can't. And that, for me, is quite often where I find myself with music and songs: I am quite often this other person. Of course it's me, but I can live vicariously through this performer, this guy that I've created, which is me, but a character. And throughout songs and films and books and stuff like that, that's where I get lost.”

“With 'Cover Me', the song that was coming to mind a lot, the feeling of the song that I wanted to get on this, and it's a totally different kind of song, but the feeling that I wanted to get was like Bowie's song 'Life On Mars', where the second half of the song seems to go to another place, or 'Space Odyssey', that kind of feeling. It opens up for you, the listener, to just be able to go off in their own dreams and ideas.”

[On hearing that BBC is re-broadcasting their old Top Of The Pops performances from the early '80s]: “Oh dear! I find it a little awkward. When I first got with the band I was eighteen years old. A lot of time has passed since then. So when I watch these old clips, the first thing that goes through my mind is, ‘What was I wearing?’ Phil, my brother, often sends me photographs that he finds on the internet. ‘Remember this?’ It’s all part of growing up, and living part of your life in public, and you’ve got to pay the price.”

• Duration: 15:57 minutes