In the mid '90s, Depeche Mode frontman Dave 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 needed anything/was still alive.
"At the time, I was romanticising about the idea of death and just slipping away," Gahan recalled in an interview with Arena magazine, published 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.
Talking to The Guardian newspaper past year, Gahan 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."
