Did Depeche Mode frontman Dave Gahan sleep in a coffin?
Depeche Mode are one of the most significant musical outfits that Britain has ever produced. Pioneers of electronic and industrial, their eclectic oeuvre has a little something for everyone, with their early material rightly categorised as more straight-up-and-down 1980s pop.
However, the band acutely understood the existential need for artistic development and quickly shed the spectre of ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’ moving to more atmospheric, rousing pieces such as the timeless ‘Personal Jesus’ and the heady ‘Enjoy the Silence’. Their back catalogue speaks for itself, and they’ve inspired a host of subsequent legends ranging from Nine Inch Nails to The Killers.
For a long time, running concurrently with the stellar musical output of the band, was the extent of the excess that they went to. The Essex group made their name as an unrelenting force of partying during, and at different points, it took its toll on the members, with guitarist Martin Gore suffering stress-related seizures in the early ’90s and admitting long-term alcoholism and frontman Dave Gahan having numerous brushes with death.
Now, Gahan is one of the most prominent former heroin addicts and voices on recovery, as he has many critical lessons to teach. At one point, during the early ’90s, his addiction was so bad that the paramedics gave him the moniker ‘The Cat’ due to him gradually striking off each of his nine lives.
Reflecting on the state he was in during this period, in 1993, he suffered both a drug-induced heart attack and a suicide attempt. Then, in 1996, he overdosed on a speedball, a potent mixture of heroin and cocaine, which led to his heart stopping for two minutes before he was finally revived, and he decided to change his ways.
Gahan has lived such a storied life that he is the band’s most famous character – despite Martin Gore being their primary songwriter – and there are many tales surrounding the frontman. One of the most famous is a rumour that Gahan used to nap in a coffin during their 1993 ‘Devotional Tour’, which just so happened to be one of the years where his excess was at its peak.
At the time, it is said he was going through a vampire phase, so as a joke, a coffin was delivered to him when the band were on the South American leg of the tour, and Gahan reacted to the gag in the best way possible – by reportedly napping in it before shows.
“I definitely could have been a vampire, in my own head,” Gahan later told Uncut in 2001. of his vampiric stage “Even the bed I slept in in Los Angeles was in the shape of a coffin—a huge double bed shaped like a coffin! My whole life was Spinal Tap at the time.”
