Under the Sign of Bowie

There's little doubt that David Bowie was one of the crucial influences on Depeche Mode. What not everyone knows, though, is that it was precisely around a song by the Thin White Duke that the historic core of the Basildon band indirectly coalesced. And not just any song, but the one that, more than any other, embodies the atmospheres of the Berlin trilogy the Brixton dandy made together with Brian Eno: the eternal "Heroes".

In the Rehearsal Room in Basildon

At the time, Vince Clarke, Martin Gore and Andy Fletcher were already a band. They were called Composition of Sound, and they had songs, synthesizers and a defined, if still raw, sonic direction. What they lacked, though, was a central figure. As Dave Gahan himself would explain years later, deflating any mythologizing account: "I gatecrashed this band right from the start. Before me they were already a band – Vince, Fletch and Martin – and they needed a frontman."

Gahan came from a complex social and personal background. Born in Epping and raised in Basildon, he belonged to a working-class family. His biological father had left the family early on, and his stepfather died while Dave was still young. The future frontman's teenage years were marked by troubled behaviour, including vandalism and a reputation as a difficult kid. In those years he first gravitated towards punk and then glam rock, looking for an identity through music. He attended Southend Art College in London, a fashion school, not with the aim of becoming a designer, but developing an almost instinctive attention to image and visual aesthetics. And an artist like David Bowie, with his evocative, multifaceted aesthetic, couldn't help but serve as a guiding star in those turbulent years in England: "Bowie had a huge influence on me as a kid. I learned to sing, to be an artist, to write songs the same way he did," Gahan would later recall.

The decisive encounter with the future Depeche Mode took place one evening in April 1980. Gahan was rehearsing with another band at the same studios used by Clarke, Gore and Fletcher, then still operating under the name Composition of Sound. In an adjacent room, during a break, he started singing "Heroes". He wasn't the only one at the mic: it was actually a kind of collective improvisation. Vince Clarke was struck by that voice, which effortlessly nailed the octave leap in the final verse leading into the last, melodramatic line: "Standing by the Wall". At the time, though, he couldn't quite work out who it belonged to. Gahan would later recount the episode this way: "Vince thought he'd heard me singing David Bowie's 'Heroes' in a rehearsal room next door, with this other band. I was indeed singing it, but there were a couple of other people too. We were all at the mic, just improvising." A few days later, Clarke called him up. "When he asked me if it was really me singing, I said something like: 'Yeah, that was me.' I didn't have anything better to do," Gahan would recall.

That phone call was followed by an actual audition, in which Dave displayed a vocal confidence and interpretive flair that immediately won over his future bandmates. With Gahan on board, the group changed its name to Depeche Mode, inspired by a French fashion magazine. Dave Gahan's warm voice thus joined the band, which decided to abandon acoustic instruments for good and devote itself full-time to synthesizers and electronic music. The early Depeche Mode's chief reference point was unmistakably Kraftwerk, and the success of their earliest live shows prompted the band to seek out a label to release their first work. After their debut LP – "Speak And Spell" (1981) – and the accompanying tour, the split between Vince Clarke (who would go on to form Yazoo with Alison Moyet) and the rest of the band would come to a head, with Gore stepping firmly into the songwriter's role and Gahan growing ever more at ease as frontman: a dual dynamic that has kept the English band going to this day, through hardships, rifts and shifting musical trends.

The tribute to “Heroes”

But the connection with Bowie and “Heroes” would not remain confined to that – in its own way – historic studio performance. Between 1983 and 1986, Depeche Mode recorded three albums at Hansa Studios in Berlin, in the very same rooms where the Thin White Duke had cut “Heroes”, in the Meistersaal overlooking the Wall. During those years, the Basildon band spent several extended stays in West Berlin, amid the rubble of history and a feverish nightlife, where you could run into artists like Nick Cave and Einstürzende Neubauten. It was also during this period that they shot the famous video for “Stripped”, smashing car wrecks with sledgehammers just a stone's throw from the Wall and from Hansa Studios. Gahan has repeatedly explained the meaning of that legacy: "So many of Bowie's songs are about alienation, about creating another character to live through. From what I understood, Bowie was always much more a character than a rockstar. And my job with Depeche Mode has also always been to put a human character in front of the coldness of the backdrop", the English singer would explain.

“Heroes” thus remains a constant presence throughout the history of Depeche Mode. Until, at one point, Gahan and his bandmates decided to record a cover of the Bowie classic, performing it in the setlists of the Global Spirit Tour in support of their latest album of new material, “Spirit”. It's a very respectful version of the original, with Martin Gore's guitar cautiously retracing the famous lines carved out by Robert Fripp in Berlin, while black-and-white footage of a slowly waving flag plays on the big screen. In the final, most demanding passage, Gahan's voice emerges barely propped up by the steady pulse of the sequencer. The cover was also recorded in the studio in 2017, for the fortieth anniversary of the single, accompanied by a video directed by Tim Saccenti, who had previously worked as a video director for Animal Collective, Run the Jewels, Squarepusher, Pharrell and Lana Del Rey.

"'Heroes' is the most special song there is for me" – Gahan would tell the New Musical Express – "Bowie has been one of my favorite artists since I was a kid. I always bring his records with me on tour, and our cover of 'Heroes' is a tribute to him." Gahan would also explain what he considers to be the symbolic value of the song: "It's a song full of imagery. The Wall, Berlin. It's one of the songs that carries the most hope inside it. There's alienation, there are differences, but there's the possibility of being heroes, just for one day. Maybe we can make it, being together."

On the day of the Thin White Duke's death, January 1st, 2016, Dave Gahan burst into tears, as he would later reveal to Rolling Stone magazine: "I'd seen the news but I didn't believe it until my wife told me. I burst into tears. My daughter saw me, came out and gave me the biggest hug. That really hit me hard. One of the things that hurts me most is that, out of all the times I met him, I never managed to tell him how much his music meant, and still means, to me." Dave, in fact, used to meet Bowie in New York, while his daughter went to school with Alexandra Bowie, David and Iman's daughter.

Yet that profound legacy – starting with “Heroes” – would remain forever bound to the intertwined fates of the Thin White Duke and the band from Basildon.

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11/03/2026