Depeche Mode on moving past the loss of Andrew Fletcher

The legendary band Depeche Mode has just kicked off their latest tour ‘Memento Mori World Tour’ in support of their latest album and 15th record ‘Memento Mori’ without fellow founding member Andrew Fletcher.

Once a trio, the band now consists of two members, frontman Dave Gahan and guitarist/keyboardist and principal songwriter Martin Gore.

The band has opened up in a recent interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music on how they’ve dealt with the loss of one of their members, and what their future might look like going forward.

A trio becomes a duo

“I honestly believe that he enjoyed being in Depeche Mode more than me or Dave. I mean he was like larger than life,” Gore said of the late keyboard player Andrew Fletcher who passed away last year at the age of 60 after suffering an aortic dissection.

“It could be weird for us being there with the audience for the first time. It’s not going to be easy. It’s going to be something that we think about all the time. He’s not here anymore. Physically, he’s not here. He was always on my left side,” Gore added.

Gore spoke about the duo’s debut performance of the new song ‘Ghosts Again’ in February in Italy at the SanRemo Song Festival. The performance was their first time performing without Fletcher.

“The whole experience was, for me, felt awful. Everything about it was wrong. And although everybody afterwards said, ‘Oh, it was great. It was great.’ All that kind of stuff. I kept thinking about how strange it felt to not have Fletch behind me on there.”

The new album has been in the works since 2020 and has since become an unintentional ode to the late Fletcher. After Fletcher’s passing, the two men agreed that continuing to work on the album was what he would have wanted.

“Martin and I did have a brief conversation, and we both really came to the same conclusion pretty quickly that we were going to definitely continue making this record,” Gahan told Consequence of Sound in an interview last October.

Since the band began in 1981, both Gahan and Gore have acknowledged the number of firsts they’ve encountered since Fletcher’s passing, from photo shoots to interviews and performances.

“It was the first time that Martin and I were doing something without Fletch in the knowledge that he’d never be coming back,” Gore said to NME. Despite a few members coming and going, and live bandmates joining the band on stage, the core of Depeche Mode has been Gahan, Gore and Fletcher since they started.

The band is enjoying its new dynamic, but the future is unknown

Gahan has described Fletcher as being a buffer between himself and Gore. Now with Fletcher gone, the two have come closer together in a way that Gore has described as “two long-lost brothers meeting for the first time.”

“There was no one there to buffer that, be the in-between or be Mart’s pal with me on the outside [...] it was about getting to know each other in a different way,” Gahan added.

“Once we finish this tour we’ll take a break, then we’ll see if and when we feel like doing it again. Up until now we always have. You never know, and I’m not saying that in a negative way. We just take each project as it comes,” Gahan said, before adding:

“After Fletch passed and we had to continue I said, ‘Try to enjoy what you’ve got to do here and do the best you can’. You really don’t know if you’re going to be doing it again.”