Declan Lynch on addiction
Declan Lynch’s tales of addiction
Adam Faith made me give up the fags
It was Adam Faith who got me off the cigarettes. I was watching a BBC documentary that he did about smoking, and how it might be a good idea to stop — as he had done after a heart attack. And something he said just worked for me. “The heart,” he said, is “a resilient little muscle” doing its job unceasingly. And all it asks in return is that you give it a chance, that you don’t try to poison it every few minutes with another Marlboro.
That was it, right there. Something about this image which Adam Faith created, of this brave little heart doing its best, despite all of our worst efforts, gave me the final push that I needed to stop smoking the approximately 40 Benson & Hedges a day which I had been consuming, and which had been consuming me, for many years.
Like almost everyone else who smokes, I had wanted at some level to give them up almost since they day that I started. And yet after years of listening to the most erudite advice on the matter, of looking at the most terrifying pictures of what smoking does to you, I had finally acted not on the words of some eminent physician or some best-selling guru such as Allen Carr, but those of Adam Faith, a sort of a brilliant English chancer who had been a bit of a pop star, a bit of an actor, a bit of a Svengali, a bit of most things in the industry of human happiness, including, apparently, doing a TV programme about giving up the fags.
To all these parts he brought his transcendent gifts of self-confidence and charm — and clearly they were coming through on this outing, because somehow he nailed it in a way that all the others with letters after their names had not.
Which reminds us of the essential strangeness of these things, how the oddest thing can drop into your head one day and, quite unexpectedly, everything changes.
Of course, I had been prepared for it in a general
“Perhaps the best way to give up the cigarettes, is first to give up drink”
way, as most of us are prepared, by the certain knowledge that smoking is a really terrible idea. Moreover, I was already a couple of years off the drink, so I probably felt it would be something of a shame to have gone through that, only to die in one of the innumerable ways you can die from smoking.
But still it had seemed unthinkable for me to stop, because when I was writing I chain-smoked, and could not conceive of writing without chain-smoking. When I say I smoked 40 a day, when I was writing I would keep smoking until I was finished, and I wouldn’t be counting them
— if it started heading beyond the 40 mark and towards the 60, so be it.
And yet one line out of Adam Faith broke through all that, put me on the nicotine gum the following day, which in turn led me to maintain a much less harmful addiction to chewing Wrigley’s sugar-free gum for a couple of years until eventually I could write without that too.
No, it wasn’t a line from Allen Carr that did it, and I would suggest something else that the smoking guru of all gurus never pointed out to his millions of readers — that perhaps the best way to give up the cigarettes, is first to give up the drink.
Not only does it give you that renewed fear of dying after going to such trouble to try to stay alive — you’d be kicking yourself, really — it eliminates that perennial risk of going back on the smokes after you’ve had the few pints.
There are no official numbers for the amount of people who so nearly give up smoking only to succumb to the weakness brought on by a night on the beer, but I would conservatively estimate it at ‘loads’. In 2003, after performing in the play
Love and Marriage in Stoke-on-Trent, Adam Faith died of a massive heart attack, suffered in a hotel room where he was staying, reportedly with his 22-year-old mistress. That resilient little muscle could do no more.