Matt Willis has laid bare his lifelong addictions to booze and drugs in a searingly honest BBC documentary in which his TV presenter wife Emma admits she feared he would die.
Emma, host of ITV ’s The Voice, is shown tearfully going through the diary she kept in the weeks leading up to their marriage in 2008, trying to chart what he’d drunk or taken.
And the Busted star admits he wouldn’t have coped without her by his side.
“I’ve thought about that a lot. I dread to imagine where I’d be without her. I mean, it’s weird to declare your love in such a public sphere, but I’m so grateful and thankful for her in so many ways. A lot of people don’t have someone like that, and especially not someone that’s going to stick around when you put them through hell.”
Matt, who turned 40 yesterday, says he sometimes can’t believe she didn’t leave when family and friends were telling her to get out. “I thought she would - many, many times.
“I’m so grateful that she didn’t and that she could see something in our relationship that was worth holding on to.”
In the film Emma, 47, speaks about the time he relapsed in 2016 while on tour with the reformed Busted, who originally split up in 2005. “I thought he would die. He had relapsed massively when I thought it was all good,” she says.
At her wits end, she was urged by friends and family to leave him. “People said ‘get out now’ but… you love someone,” she weeps. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Despite by then being a father of three, Matt had been tempted by cocaine rather than booze thinking that would be OK because he was an alcoholic. He was wrong and barely saw his family for four months. “I was doing six grammes a day,” he remembers.
Matt went to rehab again, as he had done to get sober in time for his wedding to Emma. The bass player says that the information in the diary she shows in the film was nowhere near the full story. “That’s f***ing half of what I was doing,” he says. “Because you’re secretly hiding things around the house. You’re going out. So there’s always what people see and what’s hidden. And what’s hidden is always worse.”
For the documentary, he looks into the science behind why certain people become addicts and concludes that his rock’n’roll lifestyle is not to blame. “I was behaving in an alcoholic way, with everything I touched, from a very early age,” he reasons. “I think whether I’d worked in music or in any other career, it would have ended up the same way.”
The documentary comes as he and his Busted bandmates Charlie Simpson and James Bourne prepare to go on tour again later this year. Emma hasn’t told him not to go. “She’s never told me not to do anything apart from take drugs,” he says. “I’m very lucky to have this job which I really, really love.”
He reckons he can manage the tour by surrounding himself with people who will look after him. “I have no problem with being around people drinking. But people doing drugs, it does something to me - that still scares me. Because it was the last thing that took me down. I think it’s still raw. And it was so quick.”
In the film he also speaks to other addicts and to a therapist who suggests his difficult childhood - his parents divorced when he was three - could have played a part.
One of his coping mechanisms for staying clean is to write a daily “gratitude” list.
“When I first started I was so resentful they made me do it. I was like ‘this is bullsh*t’” he says. “If I told my mates down the pub 20 years ago that I’d be doing that, it would seem so lame. But it’s not.”
Because he grapples with feelings of low self-worth, he always ends with the affirmation: ‘I am enough’. He sighs: “I struggle writing that sometimes because of the naffness. But it reminds me that you are not responsible for what happened to you, but you are responsible for what you do about it.”
He knows it’s pointless to wonder what advice the 40-year-old Matt Willis would give his teenage self.
“I had so many people sit me down at different points in my life from the age of 17 onwards and go, ‘Matt, there’s a problem here.’ And I didn’t listen, so I definitely wouldn’t listen to me - especially not a boring version of me like I am now.”
Matt’s motivation for making the documentary is that it might inspire others with addiction issues to seek help. He believes it has also made his marriage stronger.
“It’s been really powerful for us as a couple and beneficial for everyone around us,” he says. “We didn’t really talk about certain aspects because we were scared to. You don’t want to be always dredging up the past.”
He knows that he’ll never be free from his addiction issues, but has made peace with that. “I’m not that guy these days, and I feel very good about that,” he says.
“I can be the person that I want to be, rather than the person that I dread. And if I have to write down ‘I am enough’ every day for the rest of my life, I’m going to f•••ing do that.”
* Matt Willis: Fighting Addiction, BBC1, 17 May, 9pm
