Interview with Dave Gahan (Depeche Mode): “I have great memories of Portugal. I took my whole family there: mother, brothers, sister… we all went”

Over the last 43 years, Depeche Mode have managed to maintain a vigor that is unparalleled among bands born in the 80s, which lived between the hegemony of guitars and the growing appeal of synthesizers. Success after success, the band created precisely in 1980 by Dave Gahan, Martin L. Gore, Andy Fletcher and Vince Clarke — who shortly afterwards announced his departure, following his path first with Yazzo and then with Erasure — was cementing a status which allows him, four decades later, to continue recording albums and selling out concerts all over the world. At the end of May 2022, when Gahan and Gore, creative forces of the British collective, were preparing to show Fletcher the songs they had been working on and that would be part of the new album, “Memento Mori”, the news of his death was announced. unexpected result of the keyboard player, who was later discovered to have suffered an aortic dissection. At the official presentation of what is Depeche Mode’s 15th full-length, last October, the two musicians revealed that both the lineup and the title had been decided before Fletcher’s disappearance. “’Memento Mori’ means ‘remember that you are going to die’. It sounds very morbid, but the idea we want to convey is that we have to live every day as if it were our last”, clarified Gore, adding that the duo “missed Fletch a lot during the recordings” and that he “would have I loved this album.” “We decided to continue after Fletch died because we are sure he would have wanted us to do so. And that gave the album a whole new meaning.”