Ghost Story - Listen Now: How Do You Cope?

Episode Date: March 10, 2025

With 1 in 6 people experiencing symptoms of depression or anxiety, it’s never been more important to find out how people are dealing with these challenges. In this podcast, comedian and broadcaster John Robins brings his trademark approach of heart and humour to the conversation, sitting down with guests and experts each week to ask the very simple question - How Do You Cope?Tune in every Monday for new episodes of How Do You Cope? with bonus minisodes landing every Thursday.Listen to How Do You Cope? on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/how-do-you-cope.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hello, I'm John Robbins and I'm dropping into your feed today to tell you about a podcast I think you'll like. It's called How Do You Cope? A podcast where we dig deep in what it means to be human. Each week I sit down with extraordinary guests, people you may know, people you might not, to ask the very simple question, how do you cope? From grief and mental health struggles to moments of self-discovery, we explore the journeys that have shaped their lives and helped them grow. But this isn't just about the struggles, it's also about the hope and strength we find when we push through. Whether it's hearing how someone turned a setback into a new opportunity, or how they found light in the darkest of times, every episode is a reminder that even in our most

difficult moments, we're never truly alone. New episodes are available every Monday, wherever you listen to podcasts. There'll also be bonus episodes filled with extra good stuff on Thursdays. Or if you're a Wandery Plus subscriber, you can listen to episodes early and ad free on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or the Wandery app. I'm about to play you a clip from my episode

with Justin Hawkins, where he spoke about leaving the band The Darkness to help him recover from drug and alcohol addiction. If you like what you hear, search and follow How Do You Cope wherever you get your podcasts. So welcome, Justin, to How Do You Cope. We're recording this a little bit later than we usually record these, so we've both got our mugs of sleep tea. So if they take effect throughout the podcast and it becomes too meditative, people listening may just fall asleep with how relaxing our chat is. I think it's going to affect the cadence. Very much so.

It's going to be like an ASMR recording. Oh, I hope so. Should I lean in a little bit more? Yeah, you can't do it. Actually. recording. Oh, I hope so. Should I lean in? Yeah, you can't do that. Well, I wonder if maybe we could start with what it's like to sort of not quite have control of your own narrative over the years, especially when, you know, the darkness really became massive. Did you notice a sense that there were elements you were no longer in control of? That narrative, the one that is the common perception of the darkness trajectory, is that we came from nowhere and then we were huge.

And then I took all of the drugs, fucked everything up, and then we stopped for a bit and then we started again. And I think, I don't know, I always think there's this sort of, there's a morbid voyeurism about people who do what I do because we like to go, oh, look at them, they're fucked up, aren't they? But at no point do they go, let's try and help this person. They'd rather watch it unravel and, you know, observe the chaos and the dissent

and then just go at the ends. Yeah, well, didn't see that one coming. Then sarcastically, you know, I did an interview where I've I applied some crude mathematics to the amount of money that I'd spent on drugs based on a typical week and then with some multiplying factors and I sort of arrived at a figure of about probably 150 grand is what I thought I'd probably spent on cocaine in three years.

And then that's a figure that's just been thrown back at me again and again, but the only reason why that interview happened in the first place was because I was told, we've got this story about you, we're gonna run it, and you have an opportunity to give your side of it or we'll just run it our way. It won't be nice. So your best option is to take part in this. So I felt obliged to at least, as you said, you know, to use your expression, try and control the narrative a little bit and actually put a bit of my flavor and my voice into the thing.

And then I knew that I'd always have the opportunity to do that joke you know like it was a massively inflated number and it couldn't have been more than 149,000 pounds I spent you know I just thought that would keep me going so I knew it was gonna haunt me and because that's the nature of it so suddenly I was the poster child for rehabilitation and it was really irritating so I was trying to do music that's the nature of it. So suddenly I was the poster child for rehabilitation and it was really irritating because I was trying to do music and that's not really what I signed up for. Let's go from coming out of rehab then.

Have you got a team around you or people advising you about how to sort of get back into the world of music and press? Because rehab, from my understanding is sort of almost like a little bubble. They sort of keep you away from everything, get some therapy going. Did you have a sort of like a team to negotiate that return? You make it sound like I was away for a long time. Well, were you?

Well, how do you understand it? What's your? Well, there are different types of rehab. So there's like a medical detox. That took a little while for me. Yeah, group therapy or 12 step work. You might be pretty much cut off without your phone or you might be able to leave and come back and just be like it. Mine was the first one. Right. It was residential, cut off, surrounded by people from all different walks of life. I think I was probably the only person that you'd describe as high profile that was in there. I remember checking in and I was really in a mess because I think it was my idea to go there

because I had tried a few other things and you know like one-to-one therapy and I've been to some 12-step meetings and stuff like that and I thought well I'll give this one a go when I got my doctor to refer me and then I knew when I got my doctor to refer me. And then I knew when I was going to be checking in, so I just did everything that I had in stock the night before. Drank and partied is the colloquial expression, I think. Right up to 8am when I checked in. And then it took me a few days to detox. right up to 8am when I checked in. And then it took me a few days to detox. I was shaking quite a bit, which I wasn't used to.

That was new. And then I couldn't really start the programme till about nine days in, I don't think. So I was there a bit longer than you're supposed to be. But then it's 28 days of residential, minimal, if any, contact to the outside world. And you prioritise your recovery. There's lots of things like group therapy, which I found really rewarding. There was some one-to-one stuff. I did some of that eye movement, reprocessing

and desensitisation. EdmR or EMDR, I always get the two letters mixed up. Yeah, loads of different types of guidance and some 12 step things where you actually go off site in a bus with everybody and sort of attend meetings. Because a lot of people who were there, I don't think had considered that an option and would be an ongoing kind of aftercare support network for you. But I didn't, when I came out, I think I prioritised my recovery in a different way by just leaving my band and abandoning all the friendships and acquaintances that I've, you know, people I've been misbehaving with.

And that might sound quite to someone listening who is in that world of wanting to address their drinking or their using, that might sound impossible, to cut out friends or entire social circles or work situations. And it is quite drastic, but would you say it was very necessary in those early days? Yeah, I don't think I would have remained sober. It's been 18 years, I've come up to 19 years now. And it's because for the first five or six years, I kept out of everybody's way. I carried on doing music in a different way but like with

people who understood the part of the gig was you don't drink when you're near me. Didn't have the magic of the darkness. There were nice people, great people actually, but that's not what it's about. There's something when you get a band like The Darkness, like the hole is greater than the sum of the parts. But I couldn't do it at that time, probably wouldn't have survived it, I don't think. It sounds dramatic, but it's probably true. You talk about the magic of the darkness there, and I think often we focus on drugs and alcohol when they go wrong, when they stop working, when they start to do more damage than the sort of the stuff that they give us,

the good stuff. So I wondered if you could talk about that magic period and what part drugs and alcohol played in that because one has to sort of accept the good times that you then have to, that you then sort of grieve in a way for a period. Yeah. I've been a professional musician for three years,

I think, before The Darkness started, because I was doing music for adverts and occasional bits of film scores and stuff like that. And then I sort of fell ass backwards into being a rock star, because we didn't have a singer for the band that I was just playing keyboards with and just being an additional peripheral character in. It was my brother's band.

And it was just like, oh, it didn't really matter what the keyboard player was doing, just fill out the sound a little bit. And that's what I was doing. And so they spent about two years auditioning for singers. And I was watching all these people coming in and going, So they spent about two years auditioning for singers. And I was watching all these people coming in and going, and I was kind of thinking, well, I know what I'd like to see in a front person.

And I think I know how to do that, you know? So there's probably a little bit of method acting or something like that where I just sort of turned into that person. And then we started doing the darkness with me singing. And I think like the first gig, I was terrified for the first song or maybe the first two songs.

And then I took my t-shirt off and I was not in shape at all. And it was like a really liberating moment. And I think a sort of next gig, I was a bit closer to the front of the stage, but then the third gig I had my feet over the edge of the stage and all through that stuff, I was kind of not sober, but not into drugs and not partying hard or anything.

And it was actually really anti-drugs from when I was like 18, cause one of my friends died when we were all dabbling. It just went badly wrong. So, so we, so I was really anti-drugs. And then I was trying to impress somebody who I was interested in romantically by doing some drugs with them.

And then what I discovered was the next gig I did, I had so much confidence, it was preposterous. It was a performance enhancing drug in those first moments of experimentation. I really quickly started to depend on it or just feel like it was part of my show and it was just like fed the character that I was becoming. It became my main kind of source of nutrition and inspiration and turned me into that. And as, as the darkness became a sort of entity that public were aware of, did, did the drugs almost give you like a sort of competitive advantage? Cause the music industry and, you know, comedy was the same at that time, particularly suited to addiction,

those moments of high adrenaline late at night, being very wired at odd times of day. So you're sort of trying to EQ your own chemical metabolism yourself. Maybe it's the same in comedy, but I think when you recognize how that rollercoaster thing works on a daily basis, when you first experience that, you don't have the capacity to establish a routine, because it's all really new and every night seems different and every night's amazing in a different way and you're celebrating different aspects of it in a different way and then there's just a collective euphoria and a disbelief that you're actually able to make a living doing something that you only you didn't really dare to dream about and then you're doing it and it's like yeah, we better make the most of this you know and that's how you that's how you do it that's how you invariably end up

doing it