Joseph Ira Dassin (5 de noviembre de 1938 – 20 de agosto de 1980), más conocido como Joe Dassin, fue un cantante y compositor francés nacido en Estados Unidos.
Dave Gahan, très décontracté, lors de sa comparution à Québec, en 1993 – photo Le Soleil, Jean-Marie Villeneuve
À qui revient la palme d’avoir défrayé la manchette à la fois pour avoir donné un bon concert et pour avoir comparu au palais de Justice de Québec? Ni à des hard rockers, ni à des punks, ni même à des rappers, mais bien à Depeche Mode.
Le 8 septembre 1993, la formation de pop électronique amorçait le segment nord-américain du Devotional Tour à Québec. Arrivés au Château Frontenac à 1h30, dans la nuit précédant le spectacle, les Anglais ont constaté qu’il n’y avait pas d’électricité dans l’hôtel. Le personnel avait précisé aux artistes qu’il s’agissait d’une panne planifiée, mais les esprits se seraient échauffés au point où le service de sécurité a dû être appelé et un gardien a reçu un coup de tête… Les policiers sont venus calmer le jeu.
N’empêche, le jour du spectacle, le chanteur Dave Gahan et son garde du corps, Daryl Levy, ont dû se présenter -assez décontractés, avec leur friandise glacée!- au palais de justice pour voies de fait et entrave au travail des policiers. Aucune accusation n’a cependant été retenue et le concert, en soirée, s’est bien déroulé. Très bien, même: le quatuor a «littéralement soulevé ses quelques 7000 fans avec un show sans faille», écrivait Michel Bilodeau, sur les lieux pour Le Soleil.
Apparaissant d’abord derrière un rideau où la foule pouvait les voir en ombre chinoise, les musiciens ont ouvert avec Higher Love. La troupe avait opté pour une scène dépouillée où il y avait, au centre, un imposant cube sur lequel une portion des musiciens étaient installés, mais qui servait aussi de grand écran.
La foule avait accueilli chaleureusement chacune des pièces, or Bilodeau avait noté quelques oublis d’incontournables comme Blasphemous Rumors ou People Are People.
The Swedish Academy says it has stopped trying to reach Bob Dylan, who has neither made a public statement nor responded to the academy after it awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature. Sara Danius, the Swedish Academy’s permanent secretary said she has not heard from Dylan since the announcement, according to the Guardian. “Right…
When most bands announce a new tour, adverts and emails will suffice. When it’s Depeche Mode, Europe’s media is summoned to a theatre inside the towering design museum in Milan — journalists in the stalls, while whooping fans occupy the balcony — to hear the news in person from chief songwriter Martin Gore, 55, lizard-like frontman Dave Gahan, 54, and keyboardist-slash-Easter-Island-statue Andy “Fletch” Fletcher, 55.
When most bands announce a new tour, adverts and emails will suffice. When it’s Depeche Mode, Europe’s media is summoned to a theatre inside the towering design museum inMilan — journalists in the stalls, while whooping fans occupy the balcony — to hear the news in person from chief songwriter Martin Gore, 55, lizard-like frontman Dave Gahan, 54, and keyboardist-slash-Easter-Island-statue Andy “Fletch” Fletcher, 55. Everything, from the bustling queues to obtain a silver octagonal admission lanyard to the rock-star gleam of Gahan’s ludicrous golden shoes, seems designed to remind you that this veteran group remain a very big deal.
Any fans who watched the event live on a Facebook stream on Tuesday will know that these things are sent to try us. The upbeat trio must tackle a Hungarian journalist who wants to know about their love of Hungary, an Italian who wishes to enquire whether “the rock” is “now completely dead”, and a member of the German press who just wants to see Gahan dance. For we Brits, the real news is easy to spot: next summer Depeche Mode will perform at the London Stadium in the Olympic Park, their first UK stadium appearance since a lesser event at the Crystal Palace National Sports Centre in 1993. Tickets go on sale today.
“Crystal Palace was 23 years ago. It’s another life,” Gahan tells me later. After the masses have gone, he’s giving a handful of one-to-one interviews in a curtained-off room backstage, while Gore holds court in another along the corridor. “It was suggested by our manager that it’s time for us to do something a bit bigger in England, maybe out in the open. My son Jack lives in London and is a West Ham supporter, so he was quite thrilled.”
‘I don’t know why we get to still do this. The band is much larger than the individuals involved’
The band, who emerged from Basildon in Essex at the start of the Eighties synthpop boom, have long been slightly prickly about the esteem in which they are held in their home country. Both Gahan and Gore have lived in the US for many years, in New York and Santa Barbara respectively, and it’s commonly mentioned that their menacing, tortured brand of electronic rock is far bigger in America and the rest of Europe, especially Germany, than it is here. When a map is displayed on the theatre’s screen with stars indicating the places they’ll visit on next year’s tour — 32 shows, everywhere from Lisbon to Minsk — the single London star looks rather lonely.
“I don’t think there will ever be as much adulation in Britain as there is in the rest of Europe but we have a loyal fanbase there,” says Gore. The band have been regulars at the O2 Arena since 2009, and Wembley Arena before that, so they’re hardly shadowy obscurities. “It wouldn’t be a wise decision for us to play five stadium shows in Britain. But it is time for us to play one at least.”
Gore, dressed all in black right up to his carbon-fibre wedding ring, says Depeche Mode still see themselves “as a cult band”. Selling more than 100 million albums while seeming like outsiders is a neat trick. On albums such as their biggest, 1990’s Violator, and their most recent, Delta Machine from 2013, they summon a spiritual turmoil and a dark physicality — a world in which sexiness is next to godliness — that sits far from the bright lights of the mainstream despite those sales figures. With no Grammys to their name and just one Brit Award (Best British Single for Enjoy the Silence in 1991), I mention that they’ve never had much official recognition. “Virtually none!” Gore laughs. “At the same time it doesn’t really bother us that much. Maybe it would be the death of us if we suddenly started being recognised.”
Stadium mode: the band will play just one night in London (Anton Corbijn)
What they have got is a proper, globe-straddling rock star for a singer, which never hurts. Dave Gahan could only be more of a textbook rock and roller if he was dead, which he was for several minutes in 1996, following an accidental overdose of cocaine and heroin. Clean since then, in 2009 he had an operation to remove a cancerous tumour on his bladder and must now undergo regular intrusive checks. “I’m very good, thank you for asking,” he says when I enquire after his health. “I just recently had all my check-ups done that need to be done.” There’s one positive, he says, that he can credit to his old life as an addict: “I have a great strength, which is a denial of what’s really going on! I use that to my advantage with this. I just put it to the side until it comes around.”
READ MORE
Depeche Mode fuel Glastonbury rumours with huge European tour
Nevertheless, he needs this tour to be slightly less mammoth than the ones that have gone before, especially as there are North and South American dates still to be announced. “My one stipulation about this tour was we have to do fewer shows each week. I don’t bounce back like I used to. I really give it my all in a show. Once I’m up there, I’m in another world and I enjoy that place, but the next day I wake up to reality. The spirit is young but the body is starting to decay, let’s put it that way.”
In contrast to Gore, who wants to get questions answered as quickly as possible and whose day’s catchphrase has become “We’re not here to talk about the new album”, Gahan is a delight to chat to — fidgety and energetic and happy to ramble away, even about the new album. Next spring the band will release Spirit, their 14th. It isn’t finished yet but they can play us a minute or so of snippets which sound like a computer apocalypse, boiling over with electronic clanks, scrapes and buzzes. After three albums in a row with Ben Hillier, it’s being produced by James Ford, known for his work on albums by Arctic Monkeys and Florence + the Machine. “He’s a real sound master,” says Gore when coaxed briefly onto the subject. Gahan says: “Working with James was really refreshing. We needed it. It was time to do something different.”
The clip of new material only contains one lyric: “Where’s the revolution? Come on people you’re letting me down.” I ask if that’s the key message, as it’s the one they’re revealing right at the start. “I would say it is. It’s quite a linchpin on the album. We’re really asking that question of ourselves and of the world,” says the singer. “What’s happening? What’s happening? We’re all feeling it and none of us seems to have the answer. I would say that this album definitely reflects what’s going on outside more than what’s going on inside. And the outside world is becoming too much.”
Neither of them will get a vote in the US elections, as they don’t have US citizenship. “It’s terrifying at the moment,” says Gore. “To me it just seems like the same thing as the Brexit vote: a lot of unhappy people who aren’t quite sure what to do with that unhappiness. Before the Brexit vote, even the Leave campaign people didn’t really expect to win. And everyone’s saying Trump won’t win now. But until it’s over, I’m not gonna sleep very well.”
Whatever happens, they’ll keep on being the voice of the outsiders, with an album and tour like clockwork every four years regardless of the solo projects and family life that happen in between. “This is also another family,” says Gahan of the band and those who work with them. “I don’t know why we get to still do this. It’s something that I think has become much larger than any of the individuals that are involved in it.”
The Depeche Mode machine rumbles onwards, as powerful as ever. They’ve more than earned their newfound stadium status in London.
Depeche Mode play the London Stadium, E20 (0844 844 0444,depechemode.com) on June 3
Si vous étiez ado au milieu des années 90, vous avez probablement écouté en boucle Nevermind, l’album culte du groupe Nirvana. Un opus illustré par un bébé nageant dans une piscine. Vingt-cinq ans après, il a refait cette photo culte.
près)
Plus
Si vous étiez ado au milieu des années 90, vous avez probablement écouté en boucle Nevermind, l’album culte du groupe Nirvana. Un opus illustré par un bébé nageant dans une piscine. Vingt-cinq ans après, il a refait cette photo culte.
Spencer Elden n’avait que quelques mois lorsqu’il est devenu une star. Si son nom ne vous dit probablement pas grand chose, il est certain que vous l’avez pourtant déjà vu tout nu. Car le jeune homme est – ou plutôt était – le bébé nageur que l’on voit en couverture de Nevermind, l’album culte du groupe Nirvana. Sorti il y a 25 ans, cet opus s’est vendu à plus de trente millions d’exemplaires et comporte notamment le tube planétaire qu’estCome as you are.
>>> Le divorce de la fille de Kurt Cobain tourne mal, son ex refuse de lui rendre la guitare mythique de son père
Pour célébrer cette date anniversaire, le New York Post a retrouvé ce fameux bébé qui nageait après un billet de un dollar. Spencer Elden a lui aussi 25 ans et il a pris un malin plaisir à recréer cette photo devenue légendaire. A un petit détail près : « J’ai dit au photographe : « Je le fais tout nu ». Mais il a pensé que ce serait bizarre, alors j’ai enfilé mon maillot de bain. »
>>> Frances, la fille de Kurt Cobain, « n’aime pas Nirvana plus que ça »
Si Spencer Elden a accepté aussi facilement de replonger, c’est que cet album compte encore aujourd’hui beaucoup pour lui : « L’anniversaire représente quelque chose pour moi. C’est étrange d’avoir fait un truc qui a duré 5 minutes quand j’avais 4 mois et que ce soit devenu une image iconique. C’est cool mais bizarre de faire part de quelque chose de si important alors que je ne m’en rappelle même pas. »
The baby featured on Nirvana’s « Nevermind » album cover recreated the iconic shot 25 years later https://t.co/BARM7vt7lM pic.twitter.com/r1uZBvxcE0
— New York Post (@nypost) 25 septembre 2016
Une photo publiée par John Chapple (@johnchapple) le 25 Sept. 2016 à 12h40 PDT
READ MORE
Pimpf : Drifting somewhere... 