Musician open about dark days indulging in drugs and drink
He’s heard it said time and time before, but Miles McDougall thinks it’s time for men to listen up.
It’s not ‘‘uncool’’ to talk about your feelings. He would know, the Canterbury-based musician spent years touring on ‘‘shaky ground’’, wallowing in darkness, drugs and drink.
‘‘It was like I enjoyed being sad, I enjoyed the darkness and made that part of my creative personality. I lost grasp of who I was and became a character to please people. [Alcohol] was this overwhelmingly negative force and I could feel myself heading towards oblivion.’’
McDougall was in his third year at CPIT Jazz School, now Ara Institute of Canterbury Music Arts, when a skateboarding accident rendered him bedridden for six months. He focused on digital music production, eventually releasing his electro debut album at 19.
Boredom pushed back to DJ work, doing gigs with a baggie of antibiotics still attached and, with infections in the pins in his arm, an emergency surgery and against doctor’s advice, he continued to play the drums.
On tour in the Czech Republic with Auckland-based musician Princess Chelsea, his arm ‘‘exploded’’, spurting blood during a gig, he said. But for McDougall, the rock’n’roll lifestyle extended far deeper than his injured arm.
He toured Europe and America under the stage name Pikachunes for nine years. The alcohol and drugs were debilitating but his ‘‘love affair’’ with his own depressive state wouldn’t die, he said. He signed with Lil’ Chief Records, a New Zealandbased indie pop record label, lived in the stockroom and played the drum kit in the garage.
For a time, he woke up to a breakfast of vodka and orange juice and ‘‘numbed himself’’ with a raft of substances, he said.
After trying to reform in Wellington, then moving to Melbourne and touring Ireland on ‘‘shaky grounds’’, he relapsed again before drunkenly trying to break into his new partner’s home, twice. Nearly losing that relationship, McDougall said, was an ‘‘awakening’’.
He cut out drugs, drink, negative forces and focused on his mental health. Music was put on the backburner and friends were lost but after two years of sobriety, McDougall is frank about where he is at.
A newfound confidence in his music inspired his first Christchurch gig in seven years and a new album is promised. Sobriety has been a hard slog, but he has reignited his passion for food and planned to open an Italian pizzeria in Christchurch in May.
‘‘It’s as if I’ve got a second wind in life, a new passion for life and a drive to be alive.
‘‘Transparency is my only weapon to reach men in a similar place to where I have been, so I open myself up completely.’’