Prologue: Walking Through Walls
A Journey of Addiction, Music, Healing, and Rediscovery
You’ve Got To Share What You’ve Got,
To Get Back What You’ve Lost
This is a prologue to 25 daily journal entries that will be published here each day from 16th August 2023 - 20 years to the day after I wrote them. The journal I’m about to share is something I’ve kept private for 20 years. I’ve never been proud of the time in my life that I followed the dark downward spiral, but I am proud of the 25 day detox I took to step onto an upward spiral. If you’d like to be sent each day as it’s written….
Since enrolling in the rehabilitation and detox centre at Thamkrabok Monastery in 2003, I have searched for forgiveness in every soul I ever met for the mistakes of my past, and only at the age of 40, when I finally moved out of my beloved Soho, did I realise that the forgiveness I needed, could only come from one person: myself.
Being plunged into a Buddhist monastery a month after my 28th birthday, to face demons and learn how to be a ‘functioning’ human being was complicated enough for me, so for those of you about to read and digest my daily journal of that experience, let me give some context before you plunge in.
What was happening in my life before I went to the monastery?
After being thrust into the indie music limelight of the mid ‘90s, aged 19 with my first band Jocasta in a worldwide record deal, all the attention typical for any emerging pop star didn’t last very long. I was shown the door out of the industry at the age of 22.
The ten years I devoted to learning my craft as a songwriter, performer and sculpting my first album with the band I started with a school friend, was terminated on the day that album was released. Sony had new employees who were not the people who had shown such love and excitement for me, the band and our epic vision for a new rock music that artistically, we did achieve on our first and only album No Coincidence.
Stories of callous major record labels are quite common, but I’m not sure there’s one quite as crushing as dropping the artist by fax, on the same day their first album is released. But that wasn’t the only termination.
On the outside, I was a model indie pop star with typical BritPop bravura, swagger and confidence. On the inside, I was an introverted, skinny, fragile, vegetarian, mixed-race son of a lesbian from a sheltered arts and crafts background, more interested in string arrangements than rock ‘n’ roll.
But which one of those was crushed by the music industry? Both.
However, there was only one that I went on to rescue.
Difficult, or just Different?
I’d like to say the network of showbiz family and friends at that time were of great support, but the truth is that, like some of my band and the record company who I thought of as family, most people just treated me like some sort of contagion, and I became persona non gratis. Like a porcupine balling itself away, I retreated into a cocoon of shame and drugs, that until then, I’d only really experimented with. I would now join in with everyone else, to cancel out my own dreams.
It’s an unfortunate, but a common reality that everyone wants to be your friend on the way up ,and nobody answers your calls when you’re on the way down again. At 22 , I wasn’t aware of that. I was naïve, inexperienced, rigid and robotic in the absolutisms of my undiagnosed autistic self. In the 90’s, I would have been (and was) described as being a difficult ‘arty type’. Now I’d be called a neurodivergent creative. Hyper focused on everything in my head. Suffering with inattention to everything outside it.
Being dropped from your record label on the day your first album is released brings its own lasting trauma. But surviving in a new ecology without an income, surrounded by folk who (through no fault of their own) took a position of judgement, mistrust and palpable distance, was tough for a 22-year old kid who had no experience in anything other than Druidry, Aeolian harps, poetry and…writing songs.
I took a bite of rock ‘n’ roll. But the chunks it took out of me, left me mangled.
There’s a lot of music industry folk who would say “Well that’s the way the business works.” Thank god most of them are now old enough to be irrelevant in the face of a growing progressive music sector who are reshaping the industry to actually care about the music creators, as well as the business.
Send Self-Love to your past selves
I have a lot of love for that 22 year old kid, especially since today, I now know what he didn’t know then. He was/I am autistic. Managing rejection from colleagues and family is one of the toughest things anyone can go through, whatever end of the spectrum you’re on. Doing it with a developmental disorder that you don’t know you even have is something else entirely.
But I’ve done enough soul work and therapy since to forgive him for things that others didn’t (or still haven’t). That 22-year-old kid never did get back the things he lost, but he built a new path of equal, and perhaps, greater value.
We’re doing okay now, and have released 26 albums in the interim, with this year’s album receiving 4-star reviews in Mojo and The Times. I couldn’t be happier today.
Rock Smoking Bottom
By the time I was 26, living alone in Soho, working as a chef, day dreaming that I might be able to restart my career in music, I was leading a double life that horrifies me to think of today; songwriter/producer by day, West End dwelling night-owl struggling with addiction by night. The musicians, record label folk and fans had all gone. Between midnight and 5am in the morning, I spent my time on the streets begging for money and socialising with the blanket brigade in search of drugs.
Age 25, signed to Universal as a songwriter/producer, I’d long started to believe (with their help), that I wasn’t good enough to be any kind of ‘artist’ anymore. This was not true, but boy did I believe it. Again, I trusted in mammoth corporations to know what was best for me. Such was my idolisation of Sony and subsequently Universal (who dropped me straight after I returned from rehab, when I’d got clean).
By 2002, aged 27, on housing benefit and going nowhere with Universal, I started wondering about the father I’d never met.
Revelations of Bloodlines: The Clairvoyant's Insight
I was conceived when my mother travelled with her band to Zambia to do a residency at the Intercontinental Hotel in Lusaka. Her cabaret show caught the attention of a family who welcomed her and got to know her during her stay in Africa. In particular, two handsome young gentlemen showed her the sites.
One Indian man and one African man.
It was 1974, and my mother, Polly Perkins, who began her career as a Windmill dancer and 60’s pop starlet was now a militant feminist and lesbian, who wanted children. She made sure that, by the time she left Africa, she was pregnant. As you can see in this episode of the Sweeney that was filmed 8 months after her trip (3 weeks before I was born), she succeeded.
Until I was born, she didn’t actually know if I would turn out to be half African or half Indian. I think we all know now. The mystery of my parentage is very much part of who I became. It never bothered me and I grew up with two mums and a legendary league of loving lesbians as extended family. Growing up, I got to imagine ANYONE could be my father. And I relished in that imaginational realm. One week it was Lennon, another week Gandhi, sometimes (but more rarely), Jim Morrison, and the most improbable of the lot – Quentin Crisp was a fantasy father for a while too. But when part of your life’s canvas has been left blank from the start, anything is possible.
By 2003, in a functioning haze of addiction and conveyer-belt-pop production, the thoughts about ‘who my father was’ began to stir again. Wondering and imagining in my broken down bedsit on Frith Street, I wrote a new song that asked for an answer in the lyric: “Show me what you mean to me”. The song ended up on what would become my very first solo album Lokutara, which I wrote during the rehab in Thailand. I never imagined the question I asked in the song, would be answered a few weeks after writing it. My trip would finally deliver into my life, the father I’d never met.
The Sun rises in the East
At that time (2003), the relationship I was in came crashing to pieces in a rupture of addiction, betrayals, chaos, and heartbreak. I’d never been betrayed by the people I loved, until then. And my resulting self destruction affected some of the most important people in my life, which led to a painful point of no return.
Let’s just say I lost a new family I’d only just found.
A parting gift from a member of that family, was Thamkrabok Monastery.
It was suggested to me that I get help for my addiction, and that I consider going to a Buddhist monastery in Thailand, where their methods include taking a ‘sajja’ - a vow of action. And drinking a healing herbal mixture that induces vomiting.
The monks at this monastery also created music from rocks in nature with a therapeutic approach. And the treatment programme was free.
That’s all I knew, but it was all I needed to get started.
I told my mother I wanted to get clean, and within 4 weeks, with support from a family friend to arrange the trip, I was at the gates of a Buddhist monastery in Thailand, to initiate myself in healing rituals that would change my life.
One of the most healing elements of my experience was really quite simple. When your community don’t show condemnation for your actions, and offer understanding instead, healing just begins. I was ‘accepted’. Which was the start of a cure for an illness that had been exacerbated by losing my place in the world of music. A place that I had dreamt of existing in since I was a child.
Thamkrabok have been treating addicts since the late 1950’s. With a 66% success rate, they know a thing or two about addiction. And about magic and miracles. Full blown cosmic energy harnessing magic. And fully developed daily miracles on a par with ET flying Elliot across the moon on a BMX.
One ingredient of the monastery’s magic is that there is no condemnation towards anyone who chooses to take drugs. They don’t condemn it. They see addiction like anything else in life, as part of someone’s journey. They are not on a mission to ‘end drug-taking, and indeed, their award-winning work came about by accident as a result of applying their own Buddhist practices to those suffering with addiction. In the words of the high monk and my dear friend ‘Ajahn Tong’:
“We do not judge, but we will offer a helping hand to anyone who is 100% committed to end that journey, if they are powerless to do so alone”
I was powerless. And I reached for that helping hand. I hope this journal may be a helping hand for others who find themselves on a similar journey.
Tomorrow I’ll publish my first diary entry of my journey to Thamkrabok with a new entry every day for the 25 days of my treatment. I feel pretty vulnerable doing it. But I’m trusting that the world we’re living in today is a much more understanding and compassionate world than the one I was in 20 years ago.
What that journey ended up giving me was more than just the first few steps into practicing sobriety. It gave me back the most sacred relationship in my life that got lost by being in the music industry: my relationship with music.
I hope you enjoy joining me (and my 28-year old self!) in ‘Walking Through Walls’.
I support these organisations who are shaping a system change to integrate mental health awareness and well being, into the music industry. Please do read about their work.
The Creative Well
Music Mind Matters
Waterbear College of Music