Urgent:Dave Gahan Rushed to the hospital today in a critical condition
Dave Gahan, the frontman of Depeche Mode, requested that builders working on his Los Angeles home construct a unique chamber for his personal use in the mid-1990s. This chamber would be accessible from the bedroom he shared with Teresa Conway, the band’s publicist and second wife. The vocalist’s drug use was the only activity permitted in the so-called Blue Room. At one point, Gahan was left alone in this room for three solid weeks, with a friend sometimes dropping in to see whether he was still alive and in need of anything.
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In an April 1997 interview with Arena magazine, Gahan recalled, “I was romanticizing the thought of death and just drifting away at the moment.” “I did not know how to stop it, and I did not like who I would become.”
But Gahan had come dangerously close to ending it in the spring of 1996. The artist inserted a syringe full of cocaine and heroin, commonly referred to as a “speedball” by American drug addicts, into his arm in the bathroom of his suite at the opulent, discreet Sunset Marquis hotel in West Hollywood during Memorial Day weekend in the early hours of May 28. The musician, who was by now a seasoned drug user, told his dealer, “I am not feeling good,” since he suspected something was up. He had a heart attack and collapsed on the restroom floor within fifteen minutes.
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“There was pure blackness and this feeling I had never felt before of utter horror,” Gahan recalled in an interview with The Guardian newspaper last year. There was silence in the room, yet you could feel the darkness near you.
He recollected in Arena, “The paramedics informed me that I should have been dead,” “I had enough cocaine and heroin in me to kill a horse,” they stated. Gahan was handcuffed to a policeman upon his awakening at Cedars Sinai Hospital and accused of possessing cocaine that his frantic dealer had neglected to take out of the hotel room.
