“A big influence”: the bands that made Dave Gahan want to perform

Posted On March 8, 2025March 8, 2025

For Depeche Mode frontman Dave Gahan, music was more than just a passion. It quite possibly pulled him from the brink of a lawless road to Borstal youth detention. Thrill-seeking via joyriding stolen cars and petty vandalism as a teen in Essex’s Basildon, the wayward Gahan faced a juvenile court three times and later a mandated Attendance Centre in Romford after trashing his probation officer’s office.

In the same town, school friends Martin Gore, Andy Fletcher and Vince Clarke had formed Composition of Sound, originally a more conventional band set-up, before taking advantage of the newfound portability and accessibility of synthesizers joining the burgeoning electronic happenings across the country. Encountering Gahan singing David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’ in a scout hut jam session in 1980, his recruitment as frontman also resulted in their name change—Gahan inspired by the French fashion magazine Dépêche-mode for their revamped act.

Gahan’s reputation as one of alternative music’s great frontmen took time to hone. Early concerts and TV spots would capture a stiff and uneased singer jiving and swaying to the synthpop behind him, lacking the later gravitas and crowd command so memorably documented on the America-conquering 101 concert film. “When I first started performing, I was paralysed with terror,” Gahan told The Guardian in 2021. “I’d hang on to the microphone, and my knuckles would still be clenched afterwards. Then I found that if I moved around, I didn’t feel so nervous. I kept moving, and gradually, within all the stuff I was nicking, I found something of my own”.

Like many of his generation, classic rock and glam proved to be formative influences on the young Gahan: “From an early age, Mick Jagger. When I was a kid, I danced around a lot and mimicked people on Top of the Pops. Bowie was a big influence… and then took from people like James Brown, Prince and Elvis.”

Bowie’s mark on Gahan was evident in his karaoke song of choice at the dawn of Depeche Mode’s genesis, but the animated fervour of the likes of Brown and Jagger also set Gahan apart from his synthpop contemporaries, avoiding the staid and muted presentation that could often typify the electronic scene with a lively energy that would pump up the audience—the dancing crowds a major decider in Daniel Miller’s signing them to his independent Mute records label.

Punk was no less important. Serving as a late 1970s catalyst for the disparate genre splinters that dominated the early 1980s charts—New Romantics, Two Tone, and even the New Wave of British Heavy Metal all owing to the new terrain paved by punk—one London band who perhaps doesn’t quite receive the same critical adulation as their punk peers is held with deep affection for Gahan: “When I was 14, I was infatuated by Dave Vanian from The Damned, his whole stage persona.”

Vanian’s baritone croon, penchant for black leather, and irreverent aura can be spotted in the seeds shown for Gahan’s performance style. Reportedly, Gahan witnessing The Damned live struck him with an epiphany: “I can do that”. He borrowed from the singers he loved and later joined their ranks in the pantheon of popular music’s most celebrated frontmen.

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