Justin Hawkins has opened up about reaching “rock bottom” during the height of his drug addiction in the early 2000s.
The Darkness frontman, now 51, reportedly spent £150,000 of his estimated £6 million fortune on cocaine. His excessive lifestyle eventually led him to leave the band in 2006 and enter recovery.
Last month, Justin celebrated 20 years without drugs or alcohol, while acknowledging that maintaining his sobriety remains a matter of taking life “one day at a time”.
Appearing on the latest episode of Andrew Gold’s Heretics podcast, he said: “I sometimes think about what it would be like if I had a sip of alcohol now, and I think it would probably burn.
“It’s been so long now that I can’t even imagine drinking. So, if you ask me what it tasted or felt like, that’s a difficult question to answer honestly.”
He added: “I can still remember the smell of cocaine and the numbing sensation.
The Darkness star Justin Hawkins recalls reaching “rock bottom” during his drug addiction as he marks 20 years of sobriety
“I remember bits of my nose falling out and things like that, with whole tubes of the mucus structure coming out. Yeah, I did a lot of it.”
When asked what finally convinced him to change, Justin said that “some stuff happened that was so cataclysmically awful” that he had to turn his life around.
He chose not to reveal exactly what had taken place, explaining: “Something bad happened. Something really bad happened, actually.
“But those are what you might call the wake-up calls, aren’t they?
“There were a lot of moments that I’m only going to refer to euphemistically, because some things happened that were so cataclysmically awful that I changed my life. I’m not going to sit here and talk to you about it.”
He continued: “There are moments when you feel shame and realise you’ve hurt other people, and that’s what makes you stop.”
Justin said the appeal of alcohol and drugs initially came from believing there was a connection between the positive events in his life and how much he was consuming.
“You see that because you want to see it,” he explained. “Then the drugs don’t stop because of anything positive.
“If somebody had said to me in 2006, or thereabouts, ‘If I gave you £5 million, would you stop taking drugs?’ I would have said yes.
“Then I would take drugs and mess it up, because something positive isn’t what stops it. It’s something negative. That’s why people always talk about rock bottom.
“Somebody dies or something dreadful happens, and then you have to take stock and say, ‘Hang on, that’s my fault. I’ve got to stop doing that.’”
In a 2018 interview with The Sun Online, Justin revealed that one of his lowest points came when he woke up in first class on a plane wearing a microphone fancy-dress costume after soiling himself.
The Darkness star, 51, famously spent £150k of his estimated £6million fortune on cocaine, living a life of excess which caused him to quit the band in 2006 (pictured in 2004)
His addiction became such a source of friction within the group that he went for two years without speaking to his brother Dan – who was also the band’s guitarist.
In order to get sober, Justin went on to endure a month-long addiction treatment programme at the Priory clinic in Roehampton.
Speaking to the Independent, he confessed: ‘I became secretive, volatile and verbally abusive, a really unpleasant person to be around.
‘There were lots of periods I don’t even remember; blackouts.’
The Darkness called it quits in 2006 after their rock and roll lifestyle took a toll. However, in 2015 they decided to give fame another go, and released a fourth album.
Speaking at the time, he told The Daily Mail: ‘I had to make a lot of tough decisions when I left the band, but leaving my brother was the hardest.
‘After a while, though, any awkwardness between us disappeared. We started writing songs together and that laid the foundations for this return…
‘There are the bands who have a little success before a slow decline. Then there are the ones who ride the roller-coaster, where your mood swings constantly between jubilation and despair. I prefer the rollercoaster.’
