In the mid-1990s, Depeche Mode frontman Dave Gahan requested that builders working on his Los Angeles house create a private chamber for his exclusive use, accessible from the bedroom he shared with his second wife, the band’s publicist Teresa Conway. The Blue Room, as it was called, was exclusively for the vocalist’s drug use. Gahan once spent three weeks alone in this room, with a buddy periodically dropping in to see if he needed anything or was still alive. “At the time, I was romanticising the idea of death and just slipping away,” Gahan said in an interview with Arena magazine in April 1997. “I didn’t like what I’d become and I didn’t know how to end it.”
In the spring of 1996, however, Gahan had come perilously close to ending it. Over Memorial Day weekend, in the early hours of May 28, the singer injected a syringe full of cocaine and heroin – popularly known to US drug users as a ‘speedball’ – into his arm in the bathroom of his suite at West Hollywood’s discreet, luxurious Sunset Marquis hotel. A seasoned drug addict by this point, the singer instinctively knew that something was wrong, and told his dealer, “I’m not feeling well.” Within 15 minutes, he had passed out on the bathroom floor, after suffering a heart attack.
In the spring of 1996, however, Gahan had come perilously close to ending it. Over Memorial Day weekend, in the early hours of May 28, the singer injected a syringe full of cocaine and heroin – popularly known to US drug users as a ‘speedball’ – into his arm in the bathroom of his suite at West Hollywood’s discreet, luxurious Sunset Marquis hotel. A seasoned drug addict by this point, the singer instinctively knew that something was wrong, and told his dealer, “I’m not feeling well.” Within 15 minutes, he had passed out on the bathroom floor, after suffering a heart attack.
Gahan told The Guardian newspaper last year, “There was complete blackness and this feeling I’d never felt before of utter terror.” There was no sound in the room, and the blackness felt near to you. Gahan had tried heroin in London in 1979, but it wasn’t until he arrived to Los Angeles in 1991 that it became his preferred drug. By the time Depeche Mode finished the 14-month tour cycle for their eighth studio album, the alt. rock-influenced Songs of Faith and Devotion, none of the band members were speaking to one another, and their frontman was a full-fledged addict on what he would later call a “death trip”. When the Essex band reunited in New York,
When I went back to Los Angeles,” he told Arena, “I used like I’d never used before. I went mental.”
For two minutes on the morning of May 28, 1996, Dave Gahan was technically dead.
“The paramedics told me that I should have been dead,” he recalled in Arena. “They said that I had enough heroin and cocaine in me to kill a horse.”
When Gahan woke up in Cedars Sinai hospital he was handcuffed to a police officer, and charged with possession of the cocaine that his panicked dealer had failed to remove from the hotel room.
