...sexual excess, drugs overload and near death experiences. 20 years ago this month, Depeche Mode had their first hit with the innocuous synth pop 'Dreaming of Me'. Who could have predicted then that their career would become a saga of chemical insanity as dark and drug-ridden as the Stones or Led Zeppelin at their most degenerate. UNCUT article by Stephen Dalton (May 2001).

Dave Gahan can't breathe. He can also hear nothing. Which is a little odd because there are 30,000 Depeche Mode fans just yards away, screaming for him to drag himself back on stage for an encore. His band mates are beckoning him back, but Dave is pinned to the spot with chest pains. His senses are swimming. His legs start to buckle.

It’s October 8, 1993, in New Orleans. Band relations are already at breaking point on the Mode's longest, wildest and most self-destructive tour ever. Everyone is either stoned, wired or suicidally depressed. Nobody’s talking to Dave, though they call him four-letter names behind his back. The singer is now emaciated, a ragged totem pole of tattoos and self-inflicted scars. On stage tonight, he has swaggered and hip thrusted like Michael Hutchence's junkie-god soul brother. Can he possibly get any more rock'n'roll than that?

Well, sure. How about dying at the climax of a show after a drug-induced heart attack? Cool! But damn, here come the paramedics. And now Gahan is being stretched off, too wasted to notice, too fucked to care. As he's loaded into the ambulance, he hears his fellow Mode members hesitantly spark up their improvised encore. It’s a cheery tune called “Death’s Door”. Grimly appropriate. Dave starts to laugh.

"Death was the furthest thing from my mind, to be honest," recalls Gahan today. "I was in so much denial about what was really going on."

By the time he collapses in New Orleans, Dave Gahan has been punishing himself with heroin and cocaine, liquor and dope, ecstasy and agony, guilt and sin for almost a decade. In deference to the minor cardiac arrest he has just suffered, he will be allowed one day off. And then he will start all over again on his headlong rush towards death or glory.

January 2001, the surviving trio at the heart of Depeche Mode are gathered at a west London studio. Five or six years ago, this is itself would have been a miracle. The fact that Dave Gahan, Martin Gore and Andy "Fletch" Fletcher are joking and vibing and grooving on their new album, exciter, is more amazing still considering how their last two records destroyed their friendships, split the band and almost killed them.

Also present is the album's producer Mark Bell, of LFO and Bjork fame, finally consummating the Mode's long but often strained relationship with left-field electronica. In the past, they've been aligned with techno, industrial, house, goth, punk and synth-pop. fashions fade, labels recycle. From stridently uncool outsiders to self-made survivors, Depeche Mode have outlasted them all.

Fletch, the Mode's non-musician and emotional anchor, blasts the album through the studio speakers in its near-complete entirety. Forget the journalistic hyperbole which greets major new releases - exciter sounds majestic, full-bodied and diverse. It hangs together like Modern architecture, a sumptuous amalgam of sleek technology with organic textures. Gahan's vocals are his most tender and expressive yet, especially on a brace of cooing techno-folk lullabies. This is either their most Depeche Mode album yet, or their least.

Uncut are here to discover how the Mode came to make exciter, their first real post-drugs and post-trauma album. Because this is a saga of epic insecurity and chemical insanity, a farcical soap opera every bit as dark and druggy as the stones at their seventies peak, or as a jaw-droppingly debauched as led zeppelin in their planet- shagging prime. And yet it features three men who, on first impressions, seem more at home browsing around garden centres than snorting, shagging and shooting up. Because this is the story of how three or four of the most introverted, vulnerable, unlikely pop stars in history conquered the rock universe.

And it all comes back to Basildon. To school days and teenage cliques and the bruising brutality of growing up strange in a strange town. You can take the boys out of Essex, but you can't quite take basil don out of the boys. Because Depeche Mode are the original new-town neurotics. This genteel, semi-rural community where they all grew up began life as an urban-planned overspill utopia, but by the late seventies its concrete walkways and brutalist precincts began to take on clockwork orange overtones.

"It was a job for a house," recalls Fletch, whose family moved to Basildon from Nottingham. Lanky and laconic, the 39-year-old has an easy, diplomatic demeanor and an accent smoothed into classless estuary English, the lingua franca of the music business. As he chats about football and his small community restaurant in north London, Fletch could easily be a slightly rakish accountant or a market stallholder made good. Hard to imagine him as the Mode's chief depressive and flashpoint for group friction, but still waters run deep.

"If you could get a job, you could get a house," Fletch continues. "But in the seventies it started to go wrong - the town expanded quickly, there were no jobs left. When I was growing up we had fields, football, cricket , countryside - but then it all went wrong economically. It’s now a huge town with not many jobs and young people with nothing to do."

Martin Gore, also 39, initially seems more wary than his schoolyard friend, Fletch. Our first encounter feels rather like a job interview, with Gore the nervy candidate for a junior clerical position. But he is quick to laugh at himself, scrupulously polite and forthcoming. Later, during a follow-up phone chat which overruns by half an hour, he will apologize profusely for being called away to take his wife to the gym. Not many millionaire pop stars are this civil.

"I really hated Basildon," nods the elfin songwriter in his wistful, Ron manager accent - ah yes, leather boys in the park, cock rings for goalposts. "I wanted to get out as quickly as I could. I think being a band was an escape. There was very little to do. It’s one of those places where you go drinking because that's your only option. I hear it's pretty horrible these days."

The threat of violence was ever-present during Gore's teens. "When I was about 17 or 18, me and my friend were walking back from a party in Laindon, which is close to Basildon," he says, "and we heard this running behind us. We didn't think anything of it, but suddenly we were surrounded by six guys saying, 'which one of you called my mate a fucking wanker?' one of those, you know? So then they started punching and kicking us... they weren't fun times. Dave used to get beaten up all the time for dressing out of the norm."

Born in Epping in 1962, Dave Gahan's ingrained Essex vowels are still discernible beneath his lightly Americanized, David St Hubbins twang. Gahan's clearly running on some kind of tightly wound internal motor, even in his off-duty-rock-star clobber of sober suit and sensible haircut. There remains something of a jack-the-lad about Gahan, the teenage tear away who once terrorized Basildon, spray painting walls and stealing cars.

"I just wanted attention," he shrugs, "I put my mum through a rough time, in and out of juvenile court. It was pretty crap - driving and taking away, criminal damage, theft. My mum did the best she could if the law would show up. I remember one time when this police car pulled up outside. She said, 'is it for you?' and I said, 'yes.' I distinctly remembered her saying, 'David's been in all night.' but I'd written my name on a wall in paint!"

Gahan ended up in weekend custody at a sub-borstal "attendance centre" in Romford. "It was a real pain in the arse. You had to work - I remember doing boxing, stuff like that. You had to have your hair cut. It was every weekend, so you were deprived of your weekend, and it seemed like forever. I was told very clearly that my next thing was detention centre. To be honest, music saved me."

The founding members of Depeche Mode all grew up in working-class, religiously-inclined families. Gore and Gahan were both raised by their stepfathers, only meeting their biological fathers later in life. They were weaned on glam rock and soul, David Bowie and Gary Glitter, Sparks and Kraftwerk. But when punk hit Basildon, it changed everything. Thanks to the newly cheap synthesizers, working-class teenagers with limited musical ability could suddenly make arty, avant-garde pop.

"All those early eighties bands were working class kids," nods Fletch. "We came out of a time where prog rock musicians were completely the opposite, public schoolboys. Punk came along when we were 16 and it all changed - working-class kids, coming out of art colleges all over the country, wanting to make music."

Punk was a revelation to Gahan, too. He had been a soul boy, blagging his way into clubs, experimenting with sex and drugs - mainly amphetamines, but an early flirtation with heroin, too. Then he joined the damned fan club and began attending clash, 999 and x-ray spex gigs at chancellor hall in Chelmsford.

"Seeing the clash just made me think: 'I can do that," Dave nods. "I've always been a bit of an exhibitionist and when I was really young the aunts would come round and I would entertain my mum by doing my best Mick Jagger or Gary Glitter impressions across the room, make everybody laugh. I wasn't really good at anything else, but I saw that that really got a reaction."

Inevitably, Gahan fancied himself as a punk front man. "I rehearsed a couple of times with a few bands," he says. "There was one that my friend Tony Burgess played drums in, he didn't actually have a drum kit, he played biscuit tins. Never played a gig, just rehearsing after school. They were called The Vermin. They were very famous in that one area of Basildon. In our own minds we were going to be the next sex pistols."

When instant rock fame failed to materialize, Dave enrolled at art college. But he was still "humping gear" and occasionally singing for a friend's new wave band, the French look. The group shared its keyboard player, Martin Gore, with Composition of Sound, featuring Andy Fletcher on bass and Vince Clarke on guitar and vocals. Fletch now recalls the trio sounding like a "dodgy cure". Like their immediate contemporaries in U2, the unlikely link between these three shy, studious lads was religion.

"Vince and I were born- again Christians from the age of 11 to about 18," explains Fletch. “Dave wasn’t and Martin used to just come along because he liked the singing. That was where we all learned how to play instruments and sing - we learned our trade, I suppose. We used to go to greenbelt every year from the age of 11, which is a massive Christian rock festival. In fact, I once saw U2 there, in 1980."

Fletch no longer feels any faith or devotion, and is therefore condemned to burn for all eternity. "I'm worse than a non-believer is," he nods. "The bible says a person who believes and then doesn't believe is going to be spewed out of god's mouth. Then I go down to the boilers and stoke coal. To be honest, it was more the social aspect of the church, and the music. It was quite a big social scene and in Basildon, there wasn't much else to do. You had to either steal cars or go to church."

Gore was never a believer either, but an enduring curiosity about spirituality still runs through his blasphemous beats and devotional lyrics. A lover of gospel music and a keen student of everything from occultism to Buddhism, Martin has always distrusted organized religion.

"At some point I just get put off," he shrugs. "I think Jesus was one of the greatest figures that ever walked the earth. He never said a word of shit. Every book I read about him, I fall in love with him more and more, but unfortunately that doesn't help me become a Christian is something else."

Gore also took a "quiet pious" anti-drugs stance in his youth. "If I ever saw anyone doing then around me I would always walk away," he says. "It was kind of a moral thing at that time, I don't know why. Maybe it was fear as well, because I'd been quiet and sheltered and never done it - I just didn't want to get involved."

Vince Clarke was the songwriter and the driving force behind composition of sound, but a reluctant front man. One day, after hearing Gahan belting out Bowie's "heroes" in a school rehearsal room, he offered Dave the post of singer.

"About a week later I got this phone call from Vince," Gahan recalls. "He said, 'was that you singing?' and I said 'yes' - it was actually a bunch of people singing, but I said it was me. They were already gigging as well, and I had this bunch of friends who liked to dress up and go to gigs. So we almost had a ready-made audience of about 30 people who were the cool people of Southend. Friday night people. The oddballs."

Gahan was the band's missing jigsaw piece. Although a mere mouthpiece for songwriters Clarke and Gore, his laddish charisma sent a jolt of punky rock'n'roll through their electro-pop machine. Always a sharp dresser, he rechristened the quarter Depeche Mode after a French fashion magazine - translated literally, the name means "fast fashion", although it simply sounded cool at the time. A future super group was born.

Throughout 1980 and early 1981, Depeche Mode became local legends in Essex club land. Vince Clarke honed a catchy, hook-laden, upbeat pop formula that sat somewhat incongruously with the band's emerging leather-and-chains uniform. Martin, especially, was developing a taste for skirts and make-up which would lead to endless speculation about his sexuality.

"I honestly don't know what was going through my head when I was doing that," he sighs. "There was some kind of sexuality to it that I liked and enjoyed, but I look back now and see a lot of the pictures and I'm embarrassed. But it never crossed my mind that I might be gay. I always knew I was heterosexual. Over the years I've met so many people that have naturally assumed I'm gay - I don't have a problem with that. The fact that I'm not is neither here nor there."

Mute records boss Daniel Miller, who eventually signed Depeche Mode, argues that fetishism and bondage was key to the Essex post-punk under-ground. Derived from Lou Reed and suicide, it was the region's hardcore answer to goth and new romantic. The Mode were never New Romantics. Miller calls them "futurists - a very subtle difference." They appealed to his vision for Mute as a Modernist, Eurocentric, pro-electronic label.

But his first encounter with the band, at the rough trade shop in west London, was hardly promising. "It wasn't that I wasn't impressed, I didn't actually listen," Miller admits. "I was in the middle of something else, they wanted to play me stuff, and I said I can't listen to it now. I just thought they looked like dodgy new romantics. I didn't even hear the music at that point. The first time I heard the music was at this gig in canning town. I didn't even associate them as being the same group."

Mute were far from the obvious choice, but Clarke persuade his fellow Mode members that Miller's left-field pop instincts would serve them well in the long-term. "We’ve got a better chance on Mute," he explained in an early Sounds interview. "Daniel's been good to us and we like the way he operates."

Gore recalls being offered "ridiculous amounts of money" to sign with various major labels, but they chose Miller largely because they admired Mute artists like fad gadget, the normal and silicon teens. "We’re very lucky that we did," Martin nods. "One of the people after us was mark dean who went on to sign Wham! - that whole fiasco. I'm sure if we'd signed to any one of those major labels we wouldn't be around today. We’d have been dropped by our second or third album."

The foursome agreed a handshake deal with Mute at the start of 1981, accepting a 50/50 profit-share which later became the gold standard for artist-led labels. They would not sign a formal contract for 20 years. "I thought that if you're fair with an artist, if you pay them, give them the freedom that you want and do the best to promote their records, why would you want a contract?" Miller says. "Why get lawyers involved? It just seemed too impure."

Although their unorthodox Mute deal would eventually prove hugely lucrative to both band and label, the Mode spent their early career watching the pennies. Even while gigging and recording their debut album speak and spell in 1981, Fletch and Gore stuck with their banking and insurance jobs in east London. When their second single "New Life" shot to number 11 in June, they traveled to their debut Top of the Pops appearance by tube.

"I didn't have a choice," Fletch shrugs. "There was no advance at all. I think Vince got a small publishing advance, and we got a hundred quid, so we didn't have any money. All we ever wanted was our beer money and to give our mums 10 quid a week, and that was it. It was a bit peculiar - I think for the first two years we went to top of the pops on the tube with our synths and things. I'd go to work the next day and get a standing ovation."

But just as success loomed, the Mode master plan faltered. Vince Clarke announced his decision to quit the band even before speak and spell became a top 10 album in October 1981. "I never expected the band to be this successful," Clarke said soon after quitting. "I didn't feel happy. or contented. Or fulfilled. And that's why I left. All the things that come with success had suddenly become more important than the music. There was enough time to do anything."

With hindsight, Fletch suggested that Clarke simply felt he could fare better outside the group - which he would soon prove with Yazoo and, later, erasure. "Vince was always the ambitious one," says Fletch. "He was the driving force behind the band initially. He was unemployed, he used to get 30 quid a week and he'd save, like, 29 pounds 86p. He used to get one loaf of bread a week."

Two decades later, Martin Gore remains baffled by Clarke's departure. "Maybe it was personal, maybe their were frictions," he speculates, "minor frictions compared to what we've put up with for the last 20 years. One thing that might have been a turning point was when he came along to rehearsal with two new songs, and he was teaching us how they went, and when he went to the toilet we just looked at each other and said, "we can't sing these, they're terrible!"

One of the new songs dismissed as derivative rubbish was "only you", later a huge hit for Yazoo, the pop duo Clarke formed with Alison Moyet after leaving the Mode. "Great song," sighs Fletch. "It’s a mistake anyone can make."

Fletch insists post-split relations with Yazoo were amicable, but admits, "you had to be careful with Alison because she'd just beat you up. She was in our class at school and she was the best fighter in the year. Once, when we were laughing at her and she said, 'Fletch, if you laugh at me once again I'll kick you in the bollocks'. Never laugh at Alison Moyet. She will kick you on the spot."

Gore says the Mode were "in shellshock" after Clarke left, but it was also a "godsend" for his songwriting ambitions. The band advertised in Melody Maker for a replacement keyboard player. West Londoner Alan Wilder was recruited on a weekly wage of £50 in late 1981, initially for live shows only. He would not become a full band member for another 18 months.

At first, Wilder's more middle-class roots created distrust in the band. "They were very 'bas'," recalls Daniel Miller. "All their friends were from Basildon and Alan came from a slightly different - slightly posher, in their eyes - background. He was musically very adept and, at the beginning, slightly snobbish about the fact that everything they played was one-finger monophonic stuff."

Due to his more advanced abilities, Wilder was initially branded "muso", the ultimate punk insult. "I suppose my classical upbringing was a factor in this," he says. "What I added was an enthusiasm and desire to experiment more. I was also desperate for us to be taken more seriously, which meant producing a darker, weightier sound."

Wilder also brought a certain symmetry to the Mode, functioning as Gahan's party-loving ally, while close friends Fletch and Gore formed a more introverted faction. Years later, these divisions would fuel serious friction. But the new boy's first impressions were mostly positive.

"They were a very tight unit, somewhat self-deprecating and lacking in confidence," Wilder recalls. "All the musicians I'd been involved with prior to this had exuded self-belief while enjoying little or no success. I'd never met a group like this one and it made me wonder how they had come so far in such a short time. Then I realized how much influence Daniel Miller had over them, it became clear that it was actually Vince Clarke and Daniel who had been the driving forces up to that point."

Miller was indeed a crucial "co-producer and collaborator" on the first few Mode albums, but denies dictating their sound. "It’s a bit of a joke," he says. "I was only a bit more experienced than they in the studio were. But I had ideas about how to push it, move it forward."

Alan Wilder came on board just as Depeche Mode's honeymoon with the pop press began to curdle. As their dirty electro sound hardened, chart music softened. The gleefully synthetic new pop generation was being supplanted by that cherite fluff and windy, worthy stadium rock. The synth-pop trend withered, but the Mode stuck unfashionably to their guns. Although their commercial profile would build steadily throughout the eighties, UK critics consistently dismissed the band as comically pervy lightweights. They were a Casio tone cure, a toytown New Order, but without the credibility or mystique of either. Reviewers were savage.

"If I'd been writing reviews at the time I'd have given us a bad review," Gore concedes. "At least the first couple of album, and probably a bit longer. But we also suffered because of our image. We had a really awful image. Once you hate something and get a bee in your bonnet about it, you have to really work to gain people's trust back."

Daniel Miller argues that regional snobbery worked against the band in their early days. "They didn't come from London or Manchester or Liverpool or Edinburgh," he says. "They came from Basildon, which is almost like Neadon or something. That was always mentioned in interviews in a slightly snidey way."

Dave Gahan says, "you know what England's like - the first thing you ever do, that's it. It’s written on your gravestone. When we first started, we just did anything that was put in front of us and we were very happy to do it. All these TV programmes and mags were interested - your swap shops and your smash hits. But we looked fucking horrible in some of those early pictures, and I don't think we ever lived it down."

America, which would later embrace the Mode as stadium rock gods, proved to be even more indifferent than Britain in 1982. On a short spring tour, Gahan performed with his arm in a sling - ironically, he had just had his teenage tattoos removed and the scars had swollen up badly. The tour started badly, and got worse.

"We played the Ritz club in New York," recalls Fletch. "The first gig that Alan played. We’d done top of the pops the night before - why we agreed to, I don't know. But Mute decided to send us over on Concorde. Unfortunately it was probably the most disastrous gig of our lives. None of the equipment worked, we didn't go on stage until 2.30 in the morning. A guy outside said to me afterwards, 'what happened to you lot? You used to be good....'"

After their transitional post-Clarke album, a broken frame, the Mode recorded a trio of albums which marked Gore’s coming-of-age as a songwriter, heralding a new lyrical darkness and hard-edged sound. It’s 1983 sequel, construction time again, was mixed at Berlin's Hansa ton studios, the "hall by the wall" famous for bowie's "heroes" and, later, landmark albums by nick cave and U2. Hansa became their regular studio for the next three years. The studio was recommended by Gareth Jones, the Mode's long-term engineer. A strong pound also made it significantly cheaper to relocate the band to Germany rather than pay London rates. Besides, Berlin was a 24 hour party city and the Basildon boys were starting to live a pop-star party lifestyle.

Martin Gore, who ended up moving to Berlin for two years, recalls, “it was a significant time for me personally, because before that I’d been going out with a girl who was a devout Christian who really had me on reins. She was ridiculous - anything was perverted. If I watched something on TV and there was someone naked, I was a pervert. When I finally left her, I started going out with a girl in Berlin and suddenly discovered all this freedom."

Gore’s growing interest in S & M found an outlet in Berlin's famously bohemian club scene, and it was there he would compose sado-erotic anthems such as "master and servant" for 1984's some great reward, the more industrial-flavoured sequel to construction time again. But the songwriter plays down his interest in domination and submission.

"There’s only about one or two songs that ever touched on S & M," Gore argues. "There was a time when I used to go out to a lot of these clubs anyway, just out of interest. I was never heavily into it, but it was a fascinating scene. But sex is an interesting part of life. I may seem to write about it a lot, but I don't think I overdo it."

Alan Wilder confirms, "We certainly saw Martin come out of his shell during this time. It seemed as though he had some catching up to do, having been a quiet and reserved teenager by all accounts. Frequenting clubs and bars became more routine and we all saw a very different side to Martin when he was set loose, so to speak - heavy drinking followed by apparel-removal being top of his list of favourite activities."

The Mode's reputation as a small-town synth pop-lightweights still dogged them during the Berlin years. While Gore flirted with gentle S & M symbolism, Frankie Goes to Hollywood took a much more upfront and marketable leather-clone look to the top of the charts. When Depeche Mode began tinkering with industrial rhythms, they were overshadowed by hardcore metal-bashing hipsters such at test department or Einsturzende Neubauten. Unlucky timing and critical disdain conspired to belittle their progressive pop agenda.

The Berlin sessions were a confusing time for Gahan. He acquired the nickname "Caj", as in "casualty", for his all-too-real impression of a wasted rock star. But he could also turn puritanical, dismissing his fellow band members for their juvenile indulgence. "It would piss me off," he says now, "but I think that was more because I felt I was missing out on something."

In august 1985, Gahan married his long-term girlfriend Joanne. They moved into a semi-detached Essex home, bought several sports cars and tried to play happy families. But the singer was constantly torn between domesticity and debauchery, dependable husband and wild front man.

"I wouldn't say I was 100 per cent comfortable in either, I needed both," Gahan admits. "I definitely needed family and stability, but I was always itching to get out and play. But somewhere along the line, especially after all my antics during the late eighties and early nineties, I found a way to keep both and do both."

In 1985, the Mode consolidated their huge European congregation with their first greatest hits collection, singles 1981-85. Afterwards, while recording the masterful black celebration in Berlin in 1986, the band signed their first legal agreement with Daniel Miller on the morbid grounds that he might die at any moment.

"Up until that point we didn't actually have a contract," says Gore. "It was a handshake and an honour kind of thing. But we just started thinking that Daniel's getting on now and he's overweight, so what would happen if anything happened to him? What would our position have been?"

Relations between the Mode and Miller were also becoming strained. Following clashes over the new album's lack of obvious singles, an exasperated Gore disappeared to stay with a former school exchange friend in northern Germany. "There were quite a lot of arguments going on around that time," Gore recalls. "We’d overdone the working relationship between us, Daniel and Gareth Jones. That was the third album we'd done together and I think everybody'd become very lazy, relying on formulas."

In fact, the Teutonic torch songs and Wagnerian lullabies of black celebration helped make it the Mode's biggest hit to date. A top three album in Britain, it also earned a significant cult following in America, where the band are licensed by Mute to the mighty Warner's corporation. Four years after their disastrous 1982 jaunt, the foursome decided to risk another us tour. The strength of underground Mode-mania overwhelmed them.

“It sold out in a second,” Fletch recalls. "We had this bizarre situation - we'd never had a top 40 album in America, or even a top 100 album, but we were playing to 30,000 people."

The rise of "alternative" rock radio was crucial to the Mode's us success. "One of the problems we've always had with Britain is our so-called dodgy past, but America never got that," says Fletch. "In fact, they thought it was quaint. You’ve got to remember punk had passed them by, and they had this horrible music at the time. This was the first time Americans were starting to listen to music that wasn't journey and Aerosmith. And from that radio format, bands like nirvana and pearl jam came about."

Alan Wilder suggests the Mode's embracing of global fame was partly a reaction to "provincial" British snobbery. Prophets without honour in their own land, they keenly courted other markets. "It seemed that in the late eighties," Wilder says, "we fitted perfectly with what all-American, white middle-class kids seemed to be searching for - a band that was clean cut enough to cross over but subversive enough to push a few boundaries at the same time."

The black celebration period marked a significant shift for Depeche Mode. Around this time, they employed a tour accountant, Jonathan Kessler, who would eventually become their first real manager. They also shot their first video with Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn, who would shape their visual identity for years afterwards. Just as he did with u2, the "old master" helped re-invent a gawky quartet with a serious image problem as heroic, iconic, post-Modern superstars.

For Gahan, this was a step towards credibility. "I felt really comfortable with Anton," Dave nods. "He was trying to portray us in a good light. It wasn't like it was just a job, he definitely was in it for the long term."

The next Mode album, music for the masses, would make them fully-fledged us stadium rock stars. Recorded in Paris, the album title was intended to be an ironic comment on the band's enduring unpopularity. In reality, these epic evocations of travel and sex sold more than half a million copies, grazing the UK top 10 and the US top 40. Significantly, the single "Strangelove" was remixed by bomb the bass founder and future Mode producer, Tim Simenon, one of the band's earliest acknowledgements of club music.

A month after the album's release, in October 1987, Dave Gahan became a father. He and Joanne named their firstborn son Jack. Eight days later the Mode's biggest tour yet kicked off in Spain. It would rumble on for nine more months, during which Gahan alternated between cocaine excess and soul-sapping guilt. "I felt like shit because I constantly cheated on my wife," he confessed six years later. "I went home and lied, my soul needed cleansing badly."

The final show of the tour, at the Pasadena Rosebowl near LA on June 18, 1988 was filmed by DA Pennebaker and his wife, Chris Hegedus, for the tour documentary 101. Director of the legendary 1965 bob Dylan documentary don't look back, Pennebaker knew nothing of the band before taking the job. Released in 1989 with a companion live album, 101 inevitably tells only half the story.

"We never really allowed don Pennebaker to see the darker side of being on the road," admits Wilder. But for Fletch, a celluloid recording of selling out a 70,000-seat stadium was justification enough for 101. "No one believed an alternative band could play to so many people," he says, "and again that set the ball rolling for a lot of other bands after us. We were conquering the world."

As Depeche Mode retooled their sound for the nineties, they were unexpectedly hailed as underground dance pioneers. The rise of rave culture and acid house boosted their cool rating, especially when Detroit techno pioneers like Juan Atkins and derrick may began to name check them as an inspiration. Initially, though, these veteran punks and soul boys were baffled.

"When rave culture started, a lot of techno musicians cited Depeche Mode as big influences," says Daniel Miller. "They didn't quite understand that initially. I understood it completely, but they didn't really like the music very much. They were partiers but not ravers."

In 1989, Depeche Mode flew into Detroit for a meeting with derrick may arranged by the face magazine. Alan Wilder later described may as "the most arrogant fucker I've ever met" and his music as "fucking horrible". But for Fletch, being mobbed by American club kids at Detroit's legendary techno club industry proved to be inspirational.

"We weren't getting much attention at home so to be mobbed by black kids in Detroit is something," he nods. "We thought we must be doing something right. In those days, that scene was orange juice and no drugs. We just wanted a beer. It was frustrating."

The notion of an extremely white synth-pop band from one of the whitest regions of Britain impacting on the on the black-American club underground might seem highly unlikely - at least as unlikely as Kraftwerk helping to inspire hip-hop. But Martin Gore has always been a fan of blues, soul and gospel music. Around the time of violator, he also discovered to his amazement that his father was a black American GI. This is the one subject he refuses to discuss in our interview because it "brings up family traumas".

In the late eighties, Depeche Mode started enlisting credible club land remixers for their singles: from bomb the bass to underworld to Dave Clarke. Even so, Gore still considers dance music to be "90 per cent dross". But the chemical side of rave culture was another matter, and ecstasy figured heavily in the violator sessions of 1989.

"Everybody has a honeymoon period with drugs where everything's fine and you can bounce back the next day," nods Gore. "But that didn't last very long for me. I was always depressed for weeks afterwards. Obviously, everybody has a very different chemical make-up, but in the end it wasn't very productive for me."

But the band's increasingly excessive lifestyle was taking its toll. "It was just one party after another for a good five, six, seven years," says Fletch. "And it was good, but then it was terrible. It became too much."

Beneath his unflappable exterior, Fletch began suffering from sever depressions. This may have been a delayed reaction to the death of his sister from stomach cancer in the mid-eighties, or an obsessive-compulsive streak inherited from his father. He began to morbidly obsess on every minor ailment, despite all medical evidence that he was healthy.

"It was absolutely hopeless, it didn't matter what you said," recalls Gore. "He would sit in the studio moaning with the longest face on, then he would get up and kind of shuffle to the floor like an old man. There was one day after he walked out, the rest of us looked at each other and burst out laughing because it just looked like an act! We were thinking he can't be serious! But he was. That was the first week of it happening, we had no idea that he was going through depression."

Fletch finally quit the violator sessions and checked himself into a south London hospital which, years later, would become synonymous with rock-star rehab - the priory.

"It was quite a normal place," he recalls. "Now, of course, celebs check in there as a career move. That certainly wasn't the case with me. The day I went there for the first time I thought I was going into a mental institution. It was funny because when I was in there the geezer from the cure was in there, Lawrence. We were both in the same situation."

Fletch initially spent a month in the priory, returning several times over the next decade. But he insists his psychological problems are much like any normal person, famous or otherwise. "I think it would have happened whether or not I was in a band."

soon, Fletch's troubles would be overshadowed by Gahan's. "Dave was increasingly living in his own world," says Wilder. "The most unsettling thing was that his drug use adversely affected his personality, either through enhancing aggression or the loss of his greatest asset, his sense of humour. I think I noticed it during the period of recording for violator in Milan. The 'spanner' in him came to the fore. I remember, for no reason, he deliberately picked a fight with about 10 locals just walking down the street. I was petrified, expecting to be knifed at any moment, but somehow he always got away with that sort of behaviour."

Violator was produced by relative newcomer mark "flood" Ellis, who would later work with u2 and nick cave, then given a sleekly contemporary mix by disco veteran François Kevorkian. It became a huge transatlantic hit in march 1990, spawning a slew of top 10 singles, including the techno-glam stomp of "Personal Jesus" and the sleek, mournful disco lament, "enjoy the silence". For the first time in the band's career, critical and commercial success came hand in hand. "Personal Jesus" became a million-selling us single after MTV removed a shot from Anton Corbijn's video, apparently on the grounds of implied bestiality. "The shot of the horse's arse come when there all this heavy breathing on the track," explains an incredulous Martin Gore. "I don't know if Anton was consciously trying to be perverted, I think it was more coincidental that it happened at that point. These people see things very strangely."

As newly crowned godfathers of the burgeoning "alternative" scene, the Mode embarked on the 75-date world violation tour to promote the album. In June, they filled two nights at LA's dodger stadium. As a support, they invited the newly formed electronic, featuring new order's Bernard summer, ex-Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr and pet shop boys Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe. For a band often dismissed as top shop to new order's Armani, the Basildon quartet were emerging as first among equals at this gathering of electro-pop titans.

Backstage, spirits were high and liquid ecstasy flowed freely. "I got completely and utterly fucked up on the first night," recalls Bernard Sumner later. "There was a shower in the dressing room and I just filled it with puke. It was the worst night of my life."

Traveling by private charter plane and cushioned by a huge entourage, the Mode's own appetite for excess now took on premier-league dimensions. "I wouldn't say the tour was any more intense that at many other times," argues Wilder. "Tickets were selling like hot cakes and we were enjoying ourselves. There was a lot of ecstasy around, but I couldn't say that anybody was adversely affected by that. Apparently, Dave was using heroin, but this wasn't obvious in his performances, and there was the usual amount of drinking and frivolity. It was a long tour and maybe there was a delayed reaction, with cracks appearing later."

Gahan's marriage to Joanne had unraveled and he fell for his new love, American publicist Teresa Conway, on the world violation tour. After the tour, in April 1992, Gahan and Conway married at an Elvis-themed Las Vegas chapel. Dave settled in LA. Leaving behind a wife and young son. Ominously, his own father had done exactly the same.

"That was always something tormenting me," Gahan says. "It was like I was walking away from something that was a part of me and I really wanted to nurture in my life. I guess I felt I fucked up over that for a while, and trying to drown the feelings. But I spent more time trying to drown the feelings that actively getting off my ass and doing something, which would have been the right thing to do."

Adrift in LA, Gahan drowned his feelings of exiled Brits before him, LA became the singer's fantasy rock-star theme park. Huge success and wealth not only deepened the problem. Wasted or not, he could get into any party, club or crack house.

"I went along for the ride and got carried away with it," Dave nods. "The problem with that is the idea became so much bigger than the person, the character got out of control. So then, even when we weren't touring, I sort of felt like I had some kind of image to live up to. I wasn't making any music - I might pick up a guitar now and again and have a pathetic attempt, a terrible jam when my mates were round. But other than that it was just playing the part."