Depeche Mode

Depeche Mode have become, perhaps in spite of themselves, the veterans of 80s synth-pop. And yet their long history came close to falling apart more than once - even tragically, as happened in 1996, during a grueling and troubled tour of the United States.

Back from the other side

It was a miracle, a genuine return from the brink of death. On 28 May 1996 the band's singer and frontman, Dave Gahan, at the time deep in the grip of drug addiction, was declared "clinically dead" for around two minutes after a speedball overdose - the lethal mix of heroin and cocaine - taken at the Sunset Marquis Hotel in Los Angeles. His heart stopped, and by the time paramedics arrived on the scene, hope was practically nonexistent. Against all odds, though, they managed to revive him.
When he regained consciousness, still disoriented, Gahan asked one of the paramedics whether he'd had another overdose. The answer would stay with him forever: "No, David. You died". Years later, recounting the episode to the Chicago Tribune, he recalled those words as the moment he truly understood how close he had come to the end. A friend later confided to him that, that night, he'd had to be revived three times.

The years of self-destruction

At the time Dave Gahan was just 34, but he was already trapped in a spiral of addiction that seemed to offer no way out. Los Angeles paramedics had even nicknamed him "The Cat", for his nine lives, given his repeated brushes with death. The May 1996 overdose was in fact just the latest chapter in a dramatic period. Back in 1993, during the American tour for "Songs Of Faith And Devotion", he had already suffered a heroin-induced heart attack while on the road. That same year he had also attempted suicide. For a long time it seemed impossible to imagine a future for him, or for the band.
The rest of Depeche Mode were also going through one of the most difficult periods in their history. The exhausting "Devotional Tour", followed by the "Exotic Tour", had left the group utterly drained. Martin Gore sought refuge in alcohol, Andrew Fletcher was battling a depression so severe it forced him to temporarily leave the tour, replaced by Daryl Bamonte, while Alan Wilder was left carrying almost single-handedly the band's artistic and organizational weight. It was that very pressure that would push him, shortly after, to leave Depeche Mode for good after thirteen years.

The experience Gahan lived through during those two minutes of clinical death radically changed his perspective. He has recounted many times having had a genuine out-of-body experience. "The first thing I became aware of in the hospital was that my soul was outside my body," he recalled years later. "It was as if I were floating in the room, watching the nurses as they frantically tried to save me." Of those moments, Gahan remembers only the darkness. "At first I only saw and felt complete blackness. I've never been in a blacker place than that. I remember thinking that whatever I was doing, it was deeply wrong." Shortly after, he saw himself lying on the hotel bathroom floor, while doctors and paramedics tried to resuscitate him. "In some ways it was even liberating. Then I woke up and found a policeman handcuffing me. It's definitely not a place I'd want to go back to."
Even in 2007 he reiterated that he hadn't seen any light, only absolute emptiness. "A voice inside me said: 'This is wrong.' As if it wasn't my place to decide when it would all be over. That feeling was what terrified me."

The arrest and the rebirth

After being discharged from the hospital, Gahan was arrested for drug possession. The court ordered him into a lengthy rehabilitation program, drug testing and psychological counselling. What at first seemed like nothing more than a legal consequence turned out to be the definitive turning point of his life. The singer himself has said that after a few weeks spent sober working with the band in New York, he relapsed into addiction as soon as he returned to Los Angeles. "I used just once. The dealer left and I turned green. Luckily someone called 911," he recalled to the Los Angeles Times. Dave Gahan has remained sober ever since, and has also become one of the most authoritative voices speaking out about recovery from addiction.

The album of survival

The shadow of that brush with death runs through every moment of "Ultra", released in April 1997. It's the first album the band recorded without Alan Wilder, made at a time when the very future of Depeche Mode seemed uncertain. "There were a couple of moments when it really seemed unlikely that we'd manage to carry on," Martin Gore admitted.
The album's dark, introspective atmospheres inevitably reflect the period the band, and in particular its singer, had just been through. According to a legend never fully confirmed, upon waking Gahan supposedly said the line "Do you mean this horny creep?", later used as the opening line of "Barrel Of A Gun", the first single taken from the album.
For the first time in their career, Depeche Mode also decided not to mount a proper world tour in support of the record. Gahan wasn't yet ready to face the pressures of life on the road and the temptations that had nearly killed him.

Nearly thirty years on from those two minutes when his heart stopped beating, Dave Gahan still regards that episode as the turning point of his entire existence. In 2005 he told Rolling Stone: "I felt like whatever I was doing was wrong. All I could see was darkness. I was a finished man." And yet that very night in May 1996, which seemed destined to bring the story of the singer and Depeche Mode to a close for good, ended up giving it a new one instead. The band survived the loss of Alan Wilder, addiction, internal fractures, and even the clinical death of its frontman. From that rebirth would come a new phase of their career, one that would once again carry them - for many years to come - to the very top of world music.

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21/07/2026