Depeche Mode

It was almost a return from the afterlife. A miracle that granted a second life to Depeche Mode and their frontman. On May 28, 1996, Dave Gahan was declared "clinically dead" at Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles for about two minutes, after a lethal speedball overdose, that deadly mix of heroin and cocaine. For two minutes his heart stopped beating. For the paramedics who rushed to the Sunset Marquis Hotel in Los Angeles, there was nothing more to be done. And yet, against all odds, Gahan came back: a man literally risen from the dead, to whom life offered an improbable second chance.

According to legend, waking up from the coma he had fallen into, he supposedly uttered the words "Do you mean this horny creep?", which would later be chosen as the opening line of "Barrel Of A Gun", the first single recorded after his recovery and featured on "Ultra". When he opened his eyes, he also asked the paramedic if he'd had another overdose. The answer was icy: "No, David. You died", as he later recounted to the Chicago Tribune. A friend would later confide to him that, that night, he had been resuscitated three times.

At the time Dave Gahan was 34, at the height of his career and, at the same time, at the mercy of a self-destructive streak that seemed unstoppable. The Los Angeles episode, in fact, came less than a year after a suicide attempt. Three years earlier, on October 8, 1993, during the American tour for "Songs of Faith and Devotion", the Depeche Mode singer had suffered a heart attack caused by a heroin overdose, and had been saved by a miracle that time too.

The whole band emerged literally devastated from the "Devotional Tour", the endless tour (over a year long) that wrapped up in 1994 in support of the hugely successful "Songs Of Faith And Devotion". The group was by then divided, broken, especially in their personal relationships. Dave Gahan was by now clouded by heroin and the exhaustion of that grueling wandering. Martin Gore kept drowning his anxieties and personal troubles in alcohol, and Andrew Fletcher was systematically prey to the most crippling depression, a demon that would eventually push him to abandon his bandmates altogether (replaced by trusted session man Daryl Bamonte), starting from the first Brazilian date of the "Exotic Tour", a series of summer shows that served as an appendix to the "Devotional Tour". Holding together the increasingly shattered pieces was mainly Alan Wilder, himself worn out from having to keep the whole thing running single-handedly — a situation that would lead him, right around that time, to announce he was leaving the band with no chance of reconsidering, after thirteen years full of achievements.

Following that episode, the British frontman was arrested and ordered by the court to undergo full detox and remain under medical supervision for years. Dave Gahan found the strength to clean himself up for good and leave certain excesses behind forever. In 2005, recalling those moments to Rolling Stone, he confessed: "I felt like whatever I did was wrong. All I could see was darkness. I was a finished man." And speaking of that dramatic experience suspended between life and death, he later said: "The first thing I realized in the hospital is that my soul was outside my body. It was like I was floating in the room and could see exactly what was happening below me: the nurses around my body rushing into the room from every direction trying to save me." And further: "I think I felt my soul scream because it had left my body and had become a witness to what had happened to it. I was clinically dead, my heart wasn't beating. To me it feels like hours went by. Then I remember suddenly seeing a complete and terrifying darkness all around me. It certainly wasn't a place I'd want to visit again."

That darkness inevitably found its reflection in "Ultra", the album Depeche Mode released in April 1997, the first after Alan Wilder's departure. "We got to a couple of points where it seemed very unlikely we'd carry on," admitted Martin Gore. It's no coincidence that, for the first time, the band chose not to tour behind the new songs: Gahan wasn't yet ready to face the strain and temptations of life on the road.

Over time, the English singer learned to live with his history of falls and rebirths. In 2007, he revealed to The Guardian that he saw no light during those two minutes of clinical death, only absolute darkness. "A voice inside me said: 'This is wrong.' As if it wasn't up to me to decide when it all ends. That thing terrified me."

Today, three decades on, Dave Gahan is in full health and still at the center of the scene with Depeche Mode: a band that has survived everything, even the "death" of its singer.

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09/02/2026