DEPECHE MODE THEN THEY WERE TWO

• Published date: 18 March 2023

These factors combined led to the theme of Depeche Mode's 15th album Memento Mori - Latin for "remember you must die". Many of the tracks are draped with its theme of mortality, giving a contemplative and slightly unsettling tone to the band's already gothic feel

The 12 songs were written and the album title decided before the morbid theme took a darker turn. On May 26th, 2022, Gore and David Gahan's bandmate Andy "Fletch" Fletcher died suddenly at home, the result of a fatal aortic dissection (a tear in a main artery). It was a shock to friends, family and his bandmates, who knew him as the sensible one of the group, expected to outlive them all.

Instead, he left the band with just two members, and uncannily, an album that pressed upon the listener how finite our time on this Earth is. A chilling coincidence, I suggest.

"I'm not going to lie. Obviously after Andy died, you start thinking, 'do you tap into something when you write songs, or is there something supernatural that goes on?' But the logical side of me said it's more to do with those other factors," Gore says.

"Of course it makes you think about your mortality. But I don't want to overthink it and I don't want it to control my life. I still feel I'm quite a young soul."

Comfortably sitting on a plush office chair in his record company's London HQ in a biker jacket, jeans, trainers, a top of blond curly locks and a wide American smile, Gore certainly doesn't look like your archetypal grandad, even though he technically is one. His clean living helps; he has given up alcohol since overindulging during the band's heady days in the mid-1990s, and is vegetarian too.

Frontman Gahan is in another room also on promo duty; he too has cleaned up from his debauched era (his sobriety began after his heart stopped beating for two minutes after a drug overdose). And, like all good rock stars, he too ignored the memo of what people are expected to look like in their 60s: these days he's not far off his poster boy look from the 1980s and 1990s, save for shorter, slicked-back hair and ever-present sunglasses.

Once the shock of Fletcher's untimely death had settled, it was almost a given that the pair would carry on. "It wasn't really a big conversation between us, because we decided it was better for our mental health to carry on and not wallow in the misery," says Gore. "It had been a long time since we'd worked together because of the pandemic as well, and it was easier for us to deal with our grief by...