In the book, you talk about your life being ‘meaningless’ and that you were a ‘wander-ing vagabond.’ Tell us how you got to the point where you had a long way to fall, and how you then managed to fall such a long way?Wow! That’s a tough one to answer without getting very deep... This subject is the axis on which the whole book spins and all I can do here is give you a very brief overview... I’d got into DJ-ing and done quite well. It was 1990, Acid House had exploded onto the club scene and I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. I was working hard, but playing even harder. I neglected the needs of my young family and got into a hardcore party scene. I was first onto the dance floor and last off. For a while, I mixed with the best, but by then, the opportunity to succeed in the DJ world, as well as family values and morality, had all become a lot less important to me than my next drink.

When you reach our age and life is going well, it is easy to talk about ‘struggle’ and how hard it used to be. For the benefit of those who think they have had it tough, can you give us an idea of just how low your lowest points were and the depths to which you had descended?I remember waking up one morning in the late 1990s in what had once been my lovely flat. But the television, VHS and music system were gone. As I sat in my now empty room, all I had left was a duvet on an uncovered mattress, a half-empty ashtray and a pile of empty beer bottles. I had literally sold everything to buy drink. My fantas-tic record collection that had cost thousands of pounds and taken years to build up had gone for a pittance to pay for booze. And now I was scratching around in the ashtray to find a cigarette butt to smoke! This was as low as I had ever been...

The brutal honesty with which you speak is shocking, but also refreshing. As we reach the point where the story turns a corner, tell us about the exact day you found the strength to walk away from the life you knew and begin a new one and how difficult that decision was to make?It wasn’t difficult at all because I had reached the point where I wanted to end my life.

You must have heard the saying ‘Today is the first day of the rest of your life.’ Was it like that for you? Was it difficult to make the commitment or were you on the mission from day one?From the very moment I made the decision to turn

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INTERVIEW