“He’s a very educated cunt, and that’s the scariest kind of all.”

Richard Spencer, a terrifying (but also completely douchey) neo-Nazi figurehead, does not have fans in the band Depeche Mode. In a new interview with Billboard, frontman Dave Gahan responds to Spencer’s recent (and rebuked) declaration that “Depeche Mode is the official band of the alt-right”:

“First of all, he’s a cunt – and he’s a very educated cunt, and that’s the scariest kind of all. I think over the years there’s been a number of times when things of ours have been misinterpreted – either our imagery, or something where people are not quite reading between the lines.

“My son Jimmy, who is 24, he was kind of shocked by it… He was one of the first to say, ‘You got to make a response immediately.’ Because people read shit – unfortunately, as we know – and they interpret it as being real.”

In a statement to Esquire back in February, the band said: “That [claim is] pretty ridiculous. Depeche Mode has no ties to Richard Spencer or the alt right and does not support the alt-right movement.”

Gahan also noted, however, that he feels like the band’s sound can be misinterpreted: “If anything, there’s a way more sort of socialist – working class, if you like – industrial-sounding aesthetic to what we do. That’s where we come from. We come from the council estates of Essex, which is a really shitty place, just 30 minutes east of London, where they stuck everybody when London was getting too overpopulated in the late ’60s. So I don’t quite get what he was [saying].”