It's been almost four years since the long-running English synth-pop band Depeche Mode released a new album. While part of the reason for that delay has been singer Dave Gahan's well-documented struggle with drug addiction, Gahan says he's straight now.

MTV News' John Norris spoke at length with Gahan last week at Brown's Nightclub in London to get the full story.

John Norris: How are you feeling, and are you sick of answering that question?

Dave Gahan: No it's a nice question, and my answer is that I feel so much better about myself, you know. It changes every day really. From day to day. But I'm certainly feeling much better than I was eight months ago.

John: What's a day like for you now? I mean is it much of a concern? Are you going to meetings regularly?

Dave: Yeah, it's something I have to do. If I want to stay sober then it's something that I'm gonna have to work at. Just as, in the same way that when I was actively using daily, I had to work at that.

The ingredients to staying sober are a lot simpler. Being an addict at times, I can make it a lot more complicated if I want to. I mean having an addictive nature is something that I think you're born with you know. And I just find that now I feel very new again. Everything's very new. It's learning how to live life on life's terms again.

Without a crutch, you know that's something to kinda always be in the back of your mind that's your little helper kind of thing. And you know, I think it's something that in time will become a lot more comfortable. It's just that it's so new that it's something that I have to work at every day.

I have to stay in touch with sober friends and people I got clean with or people that are there to help me. You know I have a sponsor and I go to meetings and stuff like that. It's good for me to be around, cause I don't think that, uh, it's very difficult to, if you're not an addict, um, trying to explain that to someone else is a very difficult thing. If you're in a room with a bunch of other people who have the same kind of problem, it's just a comfort in itself. I find that just sitting in a meeting for an hour an a half I can just sit there and listen to other people, and quite often somebody else who's sharing in that meeting about the way they feel or about being an addict or about what they've been going through in the day will help me you know. Everybody kind of helps each other, that's how it works really.

John: It's my understanding anyway from people who've been clean for a long time that it does get easier to maintain sobriety. As far as you know, people who've been clean for longer periods of time, is that the case for them?

Dave: From what I've learned so far, it's a day to day thing. Of course in the early stages, you're more susceptible to relapsing. But as time goes on, for me personally I can't deny the fact that 75 percent of the time now my life is a lot better. I'm a lot happier in my own skin. But at the same time if you slack off, if you choose to kind of get a bit complacent and kind of fall back into kind of old habits, and I mean like withdrawing from people, isolating and choosing to hang out on my own and not making the effort to pick up the phone and talk to people about how I feel and go and meet people for coffee and get myself to meetings.

If I don't do the legwork, I'm not gonna stay sober long. It might not be that I pick up, but I'm talking about a sickness in the head. Of just being like, stuck. That's a horrible feeling for anybody and I think a lot of people go through that just with being depressed and being in this kind of low-grade depression where everything and anything that comes your way seems like such a big effort. And that's when you end up staring at the Weather Channel for 12 hours a day, and I don't want to go back to that.