That day Dave Gahan died for a few minutes

If you think about it, there aren't many people who have traveled to the afterlife and then come back, having a second chance in the world of the living. One of these people is the singer of Depeche Mode Dave Gahan that on May 28, 1996, he was technically declared dead from an overdose for about a couple of minutes, since that day the English musician has inevitably looked at the world with completely different eyes.

The then 34 year old Dave Gahan He was staying at the Sunset Marquis Hotel in Los Angeles when he took an overdose of speedball, an explosive combination of heroin and cocaine.

When he came to, he asked the paramedic who was treating him if he had overdosed again. He replied coldly, “No, David, you're dead,” as he told it.Dave Gahan to the Chicago Tribune notebooks. “Your heart stopped for a couple of minutes. You were actually dead.” Later, a friend informed him that he was revived three times.

The episode of his temporary death in 1996 came less than a year after an earlier suicide attempt. Following that overdose, the frontman of Depeche Mode he was arrested, taken to prison and forced by the court to undergo a one-year diversion program of required counseling including mandatory drug testing. The British musician has been clean ever since.

In 2005, speaking to Rolling Stone magazine about that tragic experience, Gahan said: “What I really felt was this overwhelming feeling that whatever I did was clearly wrong. All I saw was darkness. I was a finished man.” That darkness may have influenced the album Depeche Modetheir ninth, “Ultra”released in April 1997. Bandmate, Martin Gorespeaking to the press, more precisely to the Chicago Tribune, explained that that incident led to the Depeche Mode to “a couple of points where it seemed very unlikely that we were going to move forward.”

Both Gore and Gahan, following their 1994 tour in support of “Songs of Faith and Devotion”, they lost themselves in excesses of all kinds. THE Depeche Mode they clearly needed a break, their future became even more uncertain when Alan Wilder, who played synthesizers in the group, decided, in 1995, to go his own way. The three remaining members – Gore, Gahan and Andrew Fletcher – got to work on the new album “Ultra”but they didn't go on tour to present the songs from the album live. Dave Gahan he felt he was still too fragile to be able to resist the many temptations and great hardships that a tour inevitably brings with it.

The keyboard player at the time Andy Fletcher revealed to the MTV television channel that the 'Songs of Faith and Devotion Tour' had almost destroyed the band and thus explained the choice not to play the songs of “Ultra”: “I think the fans know what we've been through. I think they understand that we're physically unable to tour right now.”

In 2007 Dave Gahan he returned to talk about when he 'died' in 1996 to the British newspaper The Guardian: “When I died, there was only darkness. In the two minutes that my heart stopped, a giant voice inside me said, 'This it's wrong.' As if I can't choose when this will end. It scared the hell out of me.”