Paper Monsters

Paper Monsters was Dave's breakout album as a solo artist. This was quite a big deal as even though Dave had been singing with Depeche Mode for over 22 years, all of the lyrics that he sung were written by Martin Gore or other people. Dave had indicated as early as 1988 in the interview below that he had always written songs on his own (starting around the 12:01 mark), but just had never had the courage or incentive to put them forth to Depeche Mode.

After some time, he had begun to demo his songs to Martin and the rest of Depeche Mode, but was never met with much enthusiasm or the suggestion to include them on Depeche Mode records. For example, this is what he said to Daniel Barassi in a radio.wazee interview on February 20, 2003: "I guess the first time I really plucked up enough courage to play something to Martin was a song...called 'Closer'. I played him, during the Ultra sessions, a rough demo I made, which was basically me tapping my foot, and singing. I played it to Martin, and I could tell he liked it. For a moment there I felt like it was going to be on Ultra. I was very excited. That lasted about three days...and then we had this discussion, and everybody came to the conclusion that the song didn't fit with the theme that the album was heading in. At the time, I was quite hurt by that, and it knocked me back a few years, to be honest."

However, sometime after the recording and touring of Exciter in 2002, Dave got in touch with Sigur Ros producer, Ken Thomas, and together with his friend, session musician Knox Chandler, began seriously working on songs for a new album in Electric Lady Studios in New York. The final result was a 10-track album and three single releases. It was followed up by a 75-date world tour out of which one official concert video was produced called Live Monsters.

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CD Booklet

Vinyl Print Media

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Album Tracks

B-Sides

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