Форум

Nov. 4th, St. Pete Beach, Florida. As Ron, the VIP host at the hotel, escorts me through to the pool area, I'm astounded by the size of this place. Biggest hotel I've ever been in, I think. Certainly the pinkest at any rate. Looks like a gay version of Buckingham Palace, but with a much nicer location. Ron would have fitted in well there too.

We get through the labyrinth that makes up the belly of this beast of a hotel, and make our way to the table where my victim is situated. They are all there.. Martin Gore, Peter Gordeno, Jonathan Kessler, a guy I don't know, Darrel Ives and, of course, the man I'm here to see: Christian Eigner. Ron taps Christian on his shoulder and says, "Mr. Eigner, this is the gentleman that is here to see you". Christian gets up and shakes my hand. Everyone else at the table smiles and nods.

Kinda weirded out by the fact that less than 24 hours earlier, I was playing foosball and drinking beer with these people, I smile and say hi! I'm not here to talk about foosball, of course. Nor beer for that matter. I'm not even here to talk about Depeche Mode, but rather Christian Eigner's new solo album, "Recovery", which was released in late October.

As Christian and myself walk to a secluded table in the shade, safe from the scorching sun and the kids playing in pool, I ask him how he's doing. He smiles and gestures at the scenery; "Just look at this place... I'm good!". And you can tell. The thirtytwo year old Austrian looks like he's doing very well indeed. "It's good to get out on the road, finally". We order something to drink, and asking me if I'm in a hurry, to which I say "of course not", Christian excuses himself and goes to get some cigarettes.

While I wait, I look through the notes I made in preparation for this interview. I'm hoping to get a few things thrown in there about the Depeche Mode tour, of course, but I've focused on Christian as a solo artist, as that is the capacity in which he is meeting me. Not knowing where to start, I decide to leave it up to him.

"So, what have you been up to lately?", I ask him as he sits down, and lights a cigarette."Well, we've been rehearsing alot. We've been rehearsing for five weeks, which is quite alot actually. We did two weeks in Santa Barbara and nearly three weeks in New York. Then we did production rehearsals in... well we had to change that of course, because we wanted to start in Fort Lauderdale and we wanted to do production there. But we couldn't because of the hurricane. So what we did was we had to change production to Jacksonville, and get everything together for the show last night."

I was at the show last night, and tell him this. "What did you think? How did it look?" he asks. And, surprised that he is now the one asking questions, I tell him. I tell him that it looked really good. I tell him it was a good show, with a few screw ups here and there. The biggest of which occured during the first encore, where Dave had "Everything Counts" stopped, and started over again. I ask Christian exactly what went wrong with the song. "Well, we fucked up," he laughs, "that's how easy it is. Everybody came in at wrong places, and it was just funny to stop it. Why not, you know? I mean it was the first show."

This is part one of a three part interview. Stay tuned for part two, coming Monday November 15th, in which Christian talks about how he teamed up with Depeche Mode, and about writing with Dave Gahan.