OVER the years, it has been said on occasion online that Dave Gahan - the lead singer of four-time Grammy nominee Depeche Mode - has a Malaysian father. Is this claim about the frontman of one of the biggest electropop bands of the 1980s and 1990s true?
VERDICT:
TRUE
Gahan himself confirmed this in a June 2017 interview with the British magazine New Statesman, saying that his British-Malaysian father was a bus driver named Len Callcott.
As was written in the article, Gahan said that he first met Callcott when he was ten years old and added that he came home from school to find him sitting at the kitchen table of his Essex, UK home.
Gahan added that Callcott took him and his sister out before leaving the family for good.
“(He) bought us a gift; I think he bought me a sweater,” said Gahan, adding that he also learned that Callcott had first left the family when he was six months old.
“I am told I sort of knew about this,” said Gahan, who later found out that Callcott used to call a neighbour with a phone to check in on him but the messages were not relayed by Gahan's mother.
“I could have done with that information, probably! But everyone has these stories, don’t they? My mum was raised by an aunt she thought was her mum. It was a generational thing,” he added.
