Interview: Christian Eigner
Back by popular demand, the archived version of our Christian Eigner interview, which was done in Florida, November 2005.
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.”
Christian’s work with Depeche Mode happened almost by chance. “I moved to London in ’95, and I did session work there, I played on alot of sessions. And I did alot of work with a keyboard player… best keyboard player in the world, to me… Dave Clayton… actually Gordeno’s good too…”, he says, nodding towards the table where Peter and the rest are sitting. For some reason I suddenly feel a surge of irony within me, and chime in… “he’s not tooo bad, I guess.” Christian laughs.
“Yeah, I did alot of stuff with Dave Clayton. I knew Dave through studio work. He’s a great guy. He had a production company that was called Toy Music, with Kerry Hopwood, who’s the programmer now, and a third guy, Q who’s an engineer. And they were producing alot of stuff, and all the stuff they did I played on, and everything was really good. All they ever did was great. It was was like production for some guy called Floods…? Flats! An artist… some weird artist. And he wrote songs with Karl Bartos from Kraftwerk, and I played on that. They did some stuff with Paradise Lost… you know… different things. Anyway, he was in the studio
Admittedly that is a very long time. And while the math is perhaps slightly off, then the 9 years he’s been with the band isn’t all that far off the 15 year mark that Alan Wilder reached. So does he feel like a full time member of the band now?
“Well, to be honest, between tours everybody does what he wants to do anyway, but as soon as we’re together it’s a band. It really is a band, it feels like being in a band. I’ve never had the feeling that I was a session musician here. Never. From the very first moment we started – it’s never been like that.” If they invited you on board as a full time member, would you accept? “I would think about it! I mean… what’s the difference. I’m in the studio with Dave. I’m on the road playing every night. So what would be different?”
Admittedly a very good point. One could be forgiven for argueing that in the time between “Exciter” and “Playing The Angel”, it didn’t seem like neither one of the core members of the band felt like they were in Depeche Mode. At least not from the perspective of an outsider looking in. I quickly abandone this trail of thought, forgive myself, and move on to the subject of writing with Dave Gahan.
“I was doing stuff with Andrew Phillpott, and we thought it would be interesting to send it to Dave, see if he wanted to sing on it. And Dave was like “hey, we need to write some stuff together”, and then we started doing writing sessions together. We wrote quite alot. Alot more than just those three… I don’t know what will happen with remaining songs. They definetly will be out at some point. They really are too good to not be put out.”
