"You could feel the darkness around you," recalls Dave Gahan.
Depeche Mode's Dave Gahan spoke about the two minutes he was technically dead when his heart stopped beating after an overdose of heroin and cocaine in 1996.
Speaking to Alexis Petridis of the British newspaper The Guardian, Dave Gahan recalled the "absolute terror" that gripped him after he collapsed at the Sunset Marquis Hotel in Los Angeles on May 28, 1996.
“There was complete blackness and this feeling I had never felt before, complete terror. No sound in the room, nothing, but you could feel the darkness close to you,” he described.
"I had what people call an out-of-body experience, and then the next thing I know, I was sitting in the back of an ambulance being taken away," he recalled.
“At that particular moment the only real thought I had, which was terrifying, was that I wasn't going to be the one to decide what was going to happen. I thought I did it," he confessed.
“I was stuck with the idea of 'if I leave, I'll leave with a bang', having what I thought was a good time, surrounded by other damn loser losers. It will come to all of us, but you don't really know when," he added.
The incident eventually helped Dave Gahan break his drug addiction.
In the same interview, the singer spoke about his memories of his Depeche Mode colleague Andy 'Fletch' Fletcher, who passed away in May 2022 aged 60.
"His personality was huge. He was the voice of reason if we were going too far with a song,” explained Dave Gahan.
“We've been doing this for a long time – me, Martin, Fletch. So this is a monumental change. Not a monumental musical change, he didn't do masterful things on the records, but what Fletch represented within the band was identity," he stressed.
Depeche Mode have recently announced that their new album 'Memento Mori' will be released on March 24th and have unveiled their new song 'Ghosts Again'.
