Depeche Mode
The new album also served to deal with grief
Depeche Mode is now on a world tour again.
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The fact that Depeche Mode finished the new album after the death of Andrew “Andy” Fletcher also served to deal with the grief.
The band Depeche Mode around Dave Gahan (60) and Martin Gore (61) had to cope with a terrible blow of fate in May last year when founding member Andrew “Andy” Fletcher (1961-2022) died at the age of just 60. In an interview with “Welt am Sonntag” Gore explained why this bereavement really made the two of them finish the album “Memento Mori” that has since been released.
“After Andy’s death, we knew that it would help us if we finished producing our album,” he describes the process as a kind of creative grief management, but also classifies the whole thing: “I don’t mean to say that we share our grief hidden that way or swept under the rug. It just helped us focus on something that we’d all been passionate about over the years.”
In this way, he and singer Gahan made sure “that not everyone was sitting at home alone. We didn’t wallow in our sorrow by thinking about Andy the whole time.”
Concert with honor in Germany
The band also wants to honor Fletcher on the “Memento Mori World Tour”, which kicked off on March 23 in Sacramento, California. “We’ve thought about it very intensively. We already have an idea how we’re going to deal with it, I can’t say more about it yet,” Gore said. Appearances are also planned for Germany. Depeche Mode will stop on May 26, 2023 in Leipzig, June 4 and 6 in Düsseldorf, June 20 in Munich, June 29 and July 1 in Frankfurt and July 7 and 9 in Berlin.
The keyboardist and Depeche Mode co-founder died unexpectedly on May 26 at the age of 60. A month later, the band announced the cause of death, saying Fletcher had suffered an aortic dissection (a tear in the main artery). “Although it was much, much too early, he died naturally and without long suffering,” emphasized the musicians.