My drugs heaven 'n' hell

YOU NEVER SEE A POSITIVE DRUGS STORY ON THE NEWS, DO YA?”

That 1989 quote from Bill Hicks has become a bit hoary, but the Valdosta, Georgia motormouth was spot on. There are hundreds of millions of people in the world using mind-altering substances – or ones that maintain the status quo – who aren’t junkies, hold down decent jobs, haven’t torn their families apart, don’t hang around playgrounds trying to sell drugs to kids and generally aren’t the kind of societal dregs we’d be better off without.

Last year’s health scare aside – now better, he’s about to embark on another marathon Motörhead tour – Lemmy Kilmister has been a poster boy (well, sort of – Ed) for chemically-enhanced living since 1965 when he amphetamine sulphated his way round round Europe with The Rockin’ Vicars.

“I’ve tried most things, except for heroin which has always been on my ‘not with a bargepole’ list,” were his sage-like words when we met backstage several moons ago in Vicar St. “It’s certainly the only one that I’ve seen kill people. Everything else is down to personal choice and whether or not you can handle it.”

While speed has always been his drug of choice, Lemmy did his fair share of LSD whilst working for a certain Mr. J. Hendrix.

“Acid is great stuff, you just can’t get it no more,” he confided rather mournfully. “If you get acid now it’s made with speed and has strychnine in it. The last time I did it, it was straight to the moon! That’s when I was working for Hendrix and he came over with The Monkees for his first American tour. Owlsley Stanley III invented acid, along with Timothy Leary. He was a really goofy guy, y’know? ‘Hello, my name is Owlsley Stanley III and I was wondering if you’d like to try some LSD#29?’ Hendrix said ‘Sure’ and brought back, like, a hundred thousand tabs in a bag with little owls stamped on them. They weren’t even illegal yet.

“One night this guy, who was the top roadie, said, ‘Would you like to try some acid?’ And I thought, ‘Why not? I’m a fucking expert at marijuana and this can’t be much different'. It ended up like one of those Cheech & Chong films. I’m trying to drive this truck and say to the others, ‘Are there supposed to be four roads ahead of us?’ So, I took another one. For 18 hours I couldn’t see. Just colours and patterns and all of that stuff. You don’t even get an hour of that now and you’re conscious of your surroundings all the time, so it’s not much fun.”

Before you ask, yep, I did enquire as to whether the story about doctors telling him to keep taking speed, because the shock of withdrawal would kill him, is heavy metal fact or fiction.

"I went to a Harley Street quack to see if I could have my blood changed a la Keith Richard, and he said ‘no’ ‘cause what I’ve got in my veins now is chemical paste,” Lemmy clarified. “Put clean blood in and, boom, instant heart attack. The reverse is true in that if I gave a transfusion to someone else, they’d die.”

In between sips of his favourite Matheus Rosé wine, Lem also told me about his sexperimenting with Viagra.

“Everybody needs help from time to time,” he reasoned. “Even when you’re 18, there are occasions when – especially where drink’s involved – the old lad won’t stand to attention. I only take a half now, but first time round I did a whole pill and struck this chick under the chin as I ran towards her! Your dick ending up red raw besides, it’s an interesting drug.”

Another fan of chemically-enhanced rumpy pumpy was Moby, whose 1999 album Play sold more than 10 million copies.

“When I’ve taken ecstasy, the only thing I want to do is be intimately involved with the woman I’m really attracted to,” the boy Melville revealed in 2000. “I’ll be with one woman and the rest of the world ceases to exist. I don’t even know what’s going on around me, I’m so focused on this person. The idea of going out to a club – I see how it could be fun, but to me it’s all about intimacy.”

Shortly before meeting Moby, I hooked up with another of my heroes, Joe Strummer, in Belfast where he was gigging with The Mescaleros. As soon as we were away from prying eyes, Joe rolled up a fat one. Did I inhale? Hey, this isn’t about me!

Mr. S, who most certainly did inhale, was keen to put the record straight vis-à-vis the latest round of ‘Clash to reform’ rumours, which were as prevalent then as Smiths ones are now.

“Never in a hundred million fucking years,” he said as the Jamaican aroma grew ever stronger. “You heard the crowd tonight shouting for ‘Cheat’ and ‘Police & Thieves’. It’d be the easiest thing in the world for me to put The Clash back together again, but like shagging an old girlfriend, I’d regret it the moment we went on stage. Don’t get me wrong, I love Paul, Mick and Topper, but we had our moment-in-time together.”

Asked whether he was proud of what The Clash had achieved, Joe took hold of my hand and staring me straight in the eyes said: “Yeah, as proud as a gnarly old lion. I tell you, what I’m going to have on my gravestone: ‘Here, not of his own volition, lies Joe Strummer. He could’ve lived his life differently, but he couldn’t have lived it better. Apart from doing the Fat Les single, that is!’”

I cried then and cried even more three years later when a colleague rang me up to tell me Joe had died in his sleep. It was a congenital heart defect that got him, not the grass which he credited with getting him into his beloved reggae.

Strummer spoke of the healing values of smoking weed, an opinion shared by massive Clash fan, Ian Brown.

“I’ve never been a big drug head,” he told me a couple of years before the Stone Roses got back together. “I never took lots of ecstasy, I never took lots of trips. I’ve not had an E since 1991. I gave up liquor ‘cause I was in New York, drinking white rum and smoking blunts. Them blunts are an inch in circumference and left me throwing up like a dog. I smoke weed every night but it’s medicine, innit?”

Of course, drugs are also the cause of some wonderfully – or tragically – juvenile rock ‘n’ roll behaviour. It was a brave/stupid person who during the late ‘90s went anywhere near UK rockers The Wildhearts who were, mainman Ginger informed me, of the opinion that “too much is never enough!”

Somebody who did and just about lived to tell the tale was Thin Lizzy/Black Star Riders singer Ricky Warwick, whose old band, The Almighty, witnessed the ‘hearts at the peak of their pill-popping puerility.

“They’ve invented this game of dare and forfeit, which is pure evil,” he winced. “Their roadie had really, really bad athlete’s foot, which they scraped off, put on a mirror and chopped up like a line of coke. I can’t remember whether it was Danny or Ginger, but somebody ended up snorting the lot.

“The sickest one, though, was making another member of their crew take a Tuc biscuit, wipe it round the rim of a portaloo and eat it. No wonder they split up soon after.”

Not that The Almighty were much better you understand.

“We stopped at a service station in Belgium one night, tripping off our faces, and bought forty of those furry catterpillars-on-a-string,” Ricky reminisced fondly. “In our befuddled state, we thought it’d be great fun to cut ‘em up into false eyebrows and moustaches. Unfortunately, the only adhesive we had on the bus was superglue, so we spent the next week walking round with these fucking things on our faces.”

Another very naughty boy was Jimmy Pop who gleefully described his band The Bloodhound Gang as “a rainbow coalition of bad taste, a United Nations of grossness.”

He wasn’t wrong.

“The secret of our success is sticking to gay drugs,” he told me in 2000 over nothing stronger than a pot of tea. “It’s quite simple – ketamine makes you horny, heroin makes your dick shrivel. A while back, I got a little too fond of ketamine so now I only do it when we’re in Las Vegas. When you’ve got someone in the room below you pooping on a glass table for $600 plus tips, no one cares if you’re off your head on cat tranquilliser. Except your parents. The first time I did it, I rang ‘em at four in the morning and said, ‘I’m all fucked up on this Special K stuff'. My mom goes, ‘Special K, what’s that?’ I tell her, and she’s like, ‘You’re snorting cat tranquilliser? That’s... that’s... that’s for cats!’ Y’know what? I couldn’t argue with her.”

Jimmy admitted that drugs had been used as bait to get young ladies to star in their camcorder porn film, which has never received a commercial release. It's probably for the best.

“At a festival last year in Sweden, a girl came back and said to our guitarist, Jared, that she wanted to be a porn star,” enthused Pop. “By way of an audition, he bent her over a table, poured Frosties and milk into the small of her back, and banged her while having his breakfast. It was really perverse, with the two of ‘em laughing all the way through.” You'd probably need to have been there.

The music wasn’t bad but what I most remember about Madchester was how spectacularly off their faces some of its practitioners were. During a 1999 interview, The Charlatans’ Tim Burgess slid off his chair and spent five minutes writhing around on the floor giggling before deciding to tell me about their new record. Worse still was Shaun Ryder, who fell asleep at least six-times during a half-hour natter. After popping out with the rest of Black Grape – “for a McDonald’s” – he reappeared looking like a cat who got, if not the cream, a particularly fine line of amphetamine sulphate. He then treated himself, and me, to three double-brandies before conking out again.

The eco-friendliness stopped the moment Oasis were signed, but Liam Gallagher’s teenage drug-taking was of the natural, organic, low carbon-footprint kind.

“I done mushrooms when I was 15,” he recalled one night, while waiting to go on to the Late Late Show. “Me and Noel used to walk around Lime Park in Manchester. We’d do 250 at a time, man. We used to fucking go mental. Me and my mate Darrell, his mum and dad had gone out and we’d done loads of mushrooms and they’d come in about four o’clock in the morning and we were out on the patio pushing these big giant chess pieces around – and there was nothing there! And his mum and dad were looking out the window going ‘Darrell come in, what are you doing?’ And I’d be pushing this fucking big pawn! We thought it was completely fucking there, man.”

My first time meeting his big brother was backstage at Slane in 1994. Oasis had just comprehensively blown REM off stage and Noel was, well, dilated to see me.

“If it was 1994 I probably didn’t know what continent I was on, but now I’m the most boring man on the planet and loving every minute of it,” he laughed a decade later. Noel had just sold his famous Supernova Heights home, which he described as being “like a bad advert for drugs if you went inside it. Fucking hell, man. There was a seventeen foot fish tank with one fish in it! You find that all the relationships you have with people are based on the complete and utter bullshit you speak at 7am in the morning. ‘I wonder who built the pyramids?’ Who fucking cares!

“It wasn’t really me friends, it was the friends who became friends because they were mates of your mates, and it was like, ‘Hang on a minute, what do you do again?’ And they’d say, ‘Oh, I know such and such a person', and I’d think, ‘What are you doing in my kitchen?’”

Despite engaging in a personal battle with his brother to see who could bolster the Colombian economy the most, Noel never got to the point where he had to check in to The Priory.

“I’m probably tempting fate but I don’t think I’m going to become a heroin addict or hang myself in a hotel room,” he noted in 1999, at the height of all the Britpop craziness. “I’m not a tragic character. There’s this myth that everyone in Oasis is permanently fucked out of their brains. Don’t get me wrong, we have our moments, but none of us is in immediate danger of joining Michael Hutchence.”

Or, bless her, Amy Winehouse who Noel ran into a couple of weeks before she died.

“The last time I saw her was at half-past eight in the local supermarket trying to buy a shopping-trolley full of alcohol disguised as a shopping-trolley full of crisps and Cheesy Wotsits,” he sighed two years ago, when we met in London during rehearsals for his maiden solo tour. “She came up and did the usual: ‘Awwwwright gorgeous?’ I ‘How are you, darling?’-ed her back and she went off to pay for what looked like a month’s worth of booze. I really, really liked her; she was one of the lads and a great soul singer. What she wasn’t good at was picking friends.

“I don’t want to be sexist or anything, but when a guy dies it’s like, ‘That’s rock ‘n’ roll, baby'. When a girl dies it somehow seems more tragic. What I thought at the end was, ‘It’s bad when the music can’t pull you out of it’ – because music is generally a shining beacon in somebody’s life. I took a lot of drugs, but eventually worked out that I prefer music to anything else in the world. I shed a whole circle of friends to – and I’m not being melodramatic here – keep myself alive. Music is the greatest thing that can be bestowed upon you, and if it’s not enough to pull you out of the shit then how bad is it?”

Music seemed to be pulling Amy out of it when I interviewed her in Dublin’s Four Seasons Hotel in February 2007. Our first time meeting had been two months earlier when, having downed four double Stolis in an hour, she went on Tonight With Tubridy and slurred her way through ‘Rehab’.

“It wasn’t great, was it?” she admitted. “I’ve knocked the drink on the head a bit ‘cause I was starting to feel like a freak show – y’know, ‘Let’s stick the telly on and see how pissed Amy Winehouse is’. It’s something I worked out for myself. ‘What do you want to be known for, girl, singing good songs or being pissed all the time?’ I’ve not turned into Sting or anything, but it’s nice to be taken a little bit seriously.”

The determination to clean up her act didn’t last long though, with Amy developing a crack habit that spring, which was subsequently replaced by intravenous heroin use.

It’s a story I recounted last year to Adam Clayton who was also holding court in The Four Seasons.“I think every addict convinces themselves – and everyone else – that it’s going to be different next time,” proferred the U2 man. “In my own case, I was able to drink in a way that was destructive and detrimental to my health – but I was always able to do the gig. Until I couldn’t do the gig.”

Adam, who’d previously been busted here for cannabis possession, was referring to November 1993’s Sydney Football Stadium headliner, which U2 played with a roadie on bass due to him being out of commission.

“You’re in the lucky position of working in music and getting to entertain people... That was a pretty awful feeling and you promise yourself it’ll never happen again. I was lucky – I realised that if I didn’t do something about it I’d lose everything. I’d run out of excuses.”

Founder member of the band or not, Adam was perilously close to being booted out of U2.

“Not everybody understands addiction, but they were beginning to go, ‘He’s not handling this very well’,” he continued. “I became a very bitter kind of a person that wasn’t living up to my potential. There comes a point, as you age, when that’s not very gracious.

“I was in a successful band with great people, whose lives were functional. They were in long-term relationships and raising families. I’d look at them and me and go, ‘What’s the difference here; what’s wrong with this picture?’ I hated not feeling good enough. I can only speculate, but I have a feeling I had a predisposition. The first time I took a drink or drug or had any experience of excitement, my immediate reaction was, ‘I want to do that again, give me more, double it!'"

If Lemmy makes a case for staying on drugs, the best advert for getting off ‘em quick-smart is Duff McKagan, who at the height of Guns N’ Roses’ fame was washing his coke down with 25 bottles of wine a day.

“They were great vintages, though,” he deadpanned when he told me the whole gory story in 2004. “No, things became so fucked up that my pancreas burst. Early on, Guns N’ Roses was so much fun it should have been illegal... and most of it was! Then, at the mid-point of the two-and-a-half-years we toured Use Your Illusion, it stopped being fun. There were riots and cancelled gigs and having to appease Axl so that we could just play the fucking gig.

“Anyway, as if that wasn’t bad enough, my pancreas burst which halted the enzyme you need to digest your food. Consequently I had third-degree burns all the way down from my intestines to my thigh muscles. If they didn’t slit you open to let the steam out you’d die.

“Then,” Dr. Duff continues, “I started getting the DTs, so I had morphine to stop the pancreas pains in one arm and librium to fight the alcohol detox in the other. They were going to cut my pancreas out which would have left me a diabetic, but right before the surgery they did an ultrasound and discovered that it had miraculously started coming back down to size. I’ll never forget the doctor, whose face was white, saying, ‘You’ve been given a second chance, dude. Don’t fucking waste it!'”

Although a regular Narcotics and Alcoholics Anonymous attendee now, what saved Duff – who’s currently temporarily back with Guns N’ Roses for a South American tour – was taking up mixed martial arts.

“They’ve taught me to think sober,” he reflected. “I started washing my clothes. I cleaned my house. I went to the grocery store. I returned home to Seattle and majored in finance at school! It made life and music fun again.”

Guns N’ Roses were merely following the everything to excess blueprint that had been drawn up 20 years earlier by Aerosmith.

“I started taking drugs when I was 16 because it was the natural thing for anyone growing up in the States, or certainly in my home town, to do,” said Steven Tyler, who was surprised that he’d lived to tell the tale when we met before their 1998 Point Theatre show. “Then it got to the point where I’d drink an eight-ounce glass of Jack Daniel’s and fill my nose up with cocaine before I went on stage, and I’d be flying, man. I once had three Porsches and I sold them all so I could snort up half of Peru. I was paying $1,000 a gram for heroin and doing about three to five grams a week. I mean, I would’ve traded my nuts off for a good ounce of heroin in those days.

“I love to be a model to show people that there is hope – that there is something you can do about it, if you get your asshole up around your ears. That’s it. This asshole got himself away from it and, for the moment, I’m doing fucking okay.”

There have been wobbles since – Tyler’s last trip to rehab in 2012 was his eighth – but the singer was a veritable picture of health last month when he was honoured in Washington DC by the National Music Publishers’ Association.

There was no such happy ending for Layne Staley, the Alice In Chains singer, who was a veritable picture of ill health when they played the Dublin SFX in 1993. Nine years later, he was found dead in his Seattle apartment surrounded by crack cocaine paraphernalia.

The day before our interview I was rung up by a Columbia Records lawyer and told that the then 25-year-old’s heroin habit was a no-go area. An American journalist who’d ignored this edict had been unceremoniously booted out of backstage by one of the supersized road crew they had with them.

After 30 minutes of ignoring the pharmaceutical elephant in the room, Staley acknowledged that a sizeable chunk of Alice In Chains’ Dirt album dealt with his struggle to get off smack.

“I had personal ghosts that needed exorcising and I wanted people to understand, and perhaps share, the pain I was in,” he explained. “You can’t do that by being guarded and if the situation arose again, I’d write exactly the same songs.”

Asked how they were coping with the pressures of fame, Layne said that, “The trick is working out how to to relieve the tension. Sean (Kinney), our drummer, is famous for wrecking hotel rooms which isn’t exactly a text-book answer to the problem but it’s better than sticking a needle in your arm.”

Kinney being sat in the corner of the room shivering and sticking ice cubes down his shirt should have alerted me to the fact that the technique was somewhat flawed...