Andrew Fletcher, keyboardist and founding member of Depeche Mode, died at the age of 61, the news was announced on the band's official social media pages.
As they wrote, the band members were shocked and devastated by the musician's unexpected death.
"Fletch had a heart of gold, we could always count on him if we needed help, a fun conversation, a good laugh or a cold beer," the post read. The cause of Andrew Fletcher's death has not yet been released.
Andrew Fletcher was born on 8 July 1961 in Nottingham. At the end of the 1970s, he founded the short-lived No Romance in China band with his then schoolmate Vince Clarke, in which he played bass guitar, then in 1980 he met Martin Gore and together with Clarke, they founded the band Composition of Sound, in which they were all behind a synthesizer.
That year they hired Dave Gahan as a singer, and at his suggestion they renamed their band Depeche Mode. Shortly after the release of their first album, Speak & Spell, in 1981, Clarke quit. The musician-producer Alan Wilder joined the band at the end of 1982, until his departure in 1995, four of them worked. Depeche Mode's remaining members, Gahan, Gore and Fletcher, remained active.
He played the synthesizer both in the studio and on stage, and was the only member of the band who did not sing.
Depeche Mode regularly gave concerts in Hungary: for the first time in 1985, they played at the Volán track in Budapest. Taking advantage of the performance at the MTK stadium in 1993, the video clip for the Condemnation single was filmed near Göd. They last performed at the VOLT festival in June 2018.
Source: mno.hu/MTI
(Photo: MTI Photo / Balázs Mohai)
