Wagging Tongue written in response to Mark Lanegan's death.
They say it is the first co-write with Martin to make it onto an album. Wasn't You Move the first?
Oh Well was a b-side and Long Time Lie was a bonus track, so I guess we don't count those.
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The Gore-Butler co-writes are some of Depeche Mode’s strongest songs, and Gahan’s strongest performances, in years. The stately and lyrical Don’t Say You Love Me, for instance, is a singer’s showcase in the Scott Walker lineage...
“It’s so Scott Walker!” enthuses Gahan. “It was a weird coincidence because I’d been listening to a lot of Scott – songs like Sundown and A Woman Left Lonely, those torch-like melodies…”
Gahan himself, along with regular songwriting partners including touring DM members Christian Eigner and Peter Gordeno, contributes two songs, plus a co-write with Gore entitled Wagging Tongue – their first to make it onto a Depeche Mode album. Gahan attacks it as if he’s angry at someone, but who?
“I’m not sure,” says Gahan. “I am ranting at somebody. There was a part of it that came to me literally just after I got the news that Mark Lanegan had passed away. Rich [Machin of Soulsavers] rang me and said, ‘Lanegan’s gone, mate.’”
Gahan had got to know the ex-Screaming Trees singer through Soulsavers, for whom they both starred as guest vocalists – although the pair had admired each other’s work for years. The Depeche man was, he says, “surprised but not shocked” when Lanegan, who had survived multiple addictions and rolls of the lifestyle dice, gave up the ghost in February 2022.
“We saw him as some freak of nature…” Gahan shakes his head. “Look, what got him in the end, who knows, but he had a terrible bout of Covid, had a terrible fall. And he spent a good few couple of months in a hospital in Ireland. Anyway, there was a part of this song that came out of that.” Gahan pauses. “Storyteller – Mark was a great storyteller. Just with his voice. I didn’t even have to follow him lyrically sometimes. I knew through his tone where he was.”
Another of Gahan’s songs closes the album. Speak To Me flames out in an epic swirl of sound – both Gore and producer James Ford credit engineer Marta Salogni for the ethereal analogue tape treatments that grace this and other songs (“think Frippertronics,” they both say). The lyric finds its narrator in a lonely place, reaching out in desperation. Is it an addiction song?
“That’s definitely in there. Because it’s built into me now,” says Gahan. “The power of that feeling of disappearing with a drug. And the power of asking for help. But also, there’s a part in there where I was, in part, talking to Martin. I want to have something between us that we haven’t had up to this point. I don’t know what that is. And it’s kind of a bit terrifying. Because what if it doesn’t work?”
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