Top music critic reveals the worst hook of his life
Never Enough: A Way Through Addiction Barney Hoskyns Constable €23.79 ★★★★★
In 1981, in the basement of his parents’ house in London, the 21-year-old Barney Hoskyns – one of the most respected rock writers – asked a friend to inject him with heroin. Encouraged by more than just the Keith Richards/Lou Reed vogue for ‘Wasted Elegance’ promoted by the NME, where he worked at the time, he was ‘fundamentally unhappy’, lost, shy and miserable in his own skin.
As he found out, one shot can get you hooked and a thousand are never enough. ‘I want to feel like this always,’ he thought in its first euphoric rush. ‘Smack insulates you against the cold, stops time from hammering at your door.’
For three years, the addiction took its miserable course. He bought used syringes in New York and shot up in a railway station.
But however seedy the reality, his lifestyle took on a superficial rock’n’roll sheen: he claimed for a quarter-gram on expenses when interviewing Johnny Thunders, lived in a junkie crash-pad with Nick Cave, and was dispatched by the NME to spend three days on the road with Prince.
But Hoskyns’s story has an unusual twist: he came from a supremely privileged background and was educated at Oxford. His father was John Hoskyns, head of Thatcher’s policy unit; when Hoskyns accompanied his father to Buckingham Palace for his father’s knighthood he did so ‘with a packet of smack snug in my pocket’. His parents discovered his habit only when he began to go cold turkey at their country house on December 26 when the trains back to London were cancelled.
Elegantly written, almost poetic at times, his book analyses the cause and effect of addiction and its vice-like grip on the body and mind. Hoskyns doesn’t believe people are born addicts but he always had compulsive tendencies, manically collecting toys and football cards when a child, and becoming cripplingly obsessive when in love. He eventually came to the realisation that his addictions were ‘protective repetitions designed to eliminate difficult choices, narrowing consciousness to something I could manage and temporarily control’. There’s a dash of self-pity in the mix: he feels heroin loves him in a way he can’t love himself.
Eventually, he breaks the habit and starts attending recovery groups with fellow addicts from all walks of life. For months any strong feeling, good or bad, causes him to ‘hallucinate giant syringes floating like zeppelins’. The lure of the drug is so fierce and profound that even today his most powerful bonds are with ex-users, and he can’t imagine life without them. ‘How do you stay clean for over 30 years?’ he asks himself. ‘I don’t. I stay clean for today or for this hour or whatever unit of time I can manage.’