Depeche Mode frontman Dave Gahan can vividly remember the first time he tried heroin, as a 17-year-old, on a night out in London.
"I snorted it thinking, This doesn't look like speed," he recalled to MOJO magazine in 2013. "I threw up all over myself and passed out in the corner, woke up, and the gig was over. Well, that was rubbish, I'm never doing that again."
But when Depeche Mode began focussing heavily on breaking America in the late '80s and early '90s, the drug entered Gahan's world once more.
"Everyone was doing it in LA, bands like Alice In Chains, Jane's Addiction," he told writer Martin Aston. "I never thought it was scary... the shoe just fit."
It was only when the band decamped to Madrid, Spain to make their eighth studio album, Songs of Faith and Devotion, that Gahan began to truly realise the extent of his reliance on heroin.
"Everyone scrabbled around to find what they thought I needed - booze, coke, hash pills," he recalled in his career-spanning MOJO Interview. "But heroin wasn't provided. I went looking in some subterranean club. I approached some guys who looked like they might be in that vein, but I got a severe beating outside instead. I remember rolling under this car, snow on the ground, and Martin [Gore] trying to intervene, and promptly getting punched. The next morning I told everyone.
"It was awful. It took years to earn back Martin's trust... It's such a selfish addiction. Even if you'd said my mother had died, I wouldn't have cared less... Addiction is a sad, boring existence. Years go by, You're still sitting on the couch, seeing the same dealer, talking the same bullshit."
In the mid '90s, Gahan asked builders working on his Los Angeles home to create a special chamber for his personal use, accessible via the bedroom he shared with his second wife, the band's publicist Teresa Conway. The Blue Room, as it was known, was exclusively reserved for the vocalist's drug taking. Gahan once spent three whole weeks alone in this room, with a friend checking in on him now and then, to see if he was still alive.
In the early hours of May 28, 1996, the singer came perilously close to losing his life to drugs. He injected a syringe full of cocaine and heroin in the bathroom of his suite at Hollywood's Sunset Marquis hotel, and 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.
Talking to The Guardian in 2023, the singer recalled “There was complete blackness and this feeling I’ve never felt before of utter terror. No sound in the room, nothing, but the blackness felt close to you."
"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."
It was the sobering wake-up call that the singer so badly needed.
