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Alan Wilder visited the concert of Dave Gahan

Dave Gahan continues his "Paper Monsters Tour". During the third leg he came to London's Carling Hammersmith Apollo (October 29th). This concert had one special guest. After long months of silence, but unfortunately not on the stage, Alan Charles Wilder appeared backstage. Alan willingly talked to the fans. One of these lucky people was Chris Myatt.


"After the show we were loitering in the bar area upstairs where the VIP's were so we hung about for a few minutes being nosey! I saw Johnathon Kessler so I said hello and shook his hand. Stood next to him was Alan Wilder which I had to do a double take to convince myself it was him. Not to miss the oportunity I approached him and shook his hand with the comment that "you have put weight on" to which he laughed and agreed with me!

I asked him if he would give me 5 minutes of his time to which he agreed to do. The first question I asked is if he was moving abroad to live to which he replied he wasn't - he is still living outside London (like Fletch said last week). My next set of questions were about fan websites where I began explaining about mine and in particularly fan/bootleg mixes (including his) to which his reply was "have you had permission from me?" - then he laughed by saying he "does not have a problem with it" (phew!). We started talking about fan remixes in a little more detail and his main statement about them was "a lot of them are better then the official remixes", but he didn't give any examples. I asked him if he remembered Raphy's cd - and he did!!

My wife was with me during all this so Sarah said to Alan that she had become more interested in DM since meeting me (post 1995), so Alan looked at her and said "poor you!" with a smile. (This was because I had forced my wife to listen to Bloodline earlier in the day in the car).

I had one question left for Mr Wilder that I think every fan wanted to know: "Will you ever be involved with the band again, particularly in producing an album in the future?" His reply - "Absolutely not". It wasn't the words he used but he said it with a determined accent. After this we shook hands and he left with a small crowd to go meet Dave backstage.

As you can imagine I was extremely pleased after this chat (it was my birthday after all), but to meet Alan after 18 years of trying it was worth the wait - a very warm and honest man."

Courtesy of Chris Myatt

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