On the nights when he thought he’d gone too far, that he’d drunk too much and taken too many drugs, Matt Willis would leave notes for his wife, in case he didn’t wake up. “Saying sorry,” he says. In the morning, he’d find the note before she did and throw it away. He thought about dying, he says, “quite a lot. I was always terrified of that. Many times, it was at a point where my body felt like it was giving up. It’s very different when the addiction becomes physical.”
Willis, the bass player of the band Busted, has made a documentary exploring his addiction to alcohol and drugs, the effect it had on those around him, and the new research and treatment being developed. Originally, he wanted to focus on the science of addiction – he has become “obsessed” with it, he says, and he reads everything he can – but it became more personal. There was a screening the evening before we meet, which was the first time he’d watched it as a whole. “It was really hard to not just go: what have I done?” But he’s proud of it. In the past, when he talked about his addictions, “it kind of turned into some scandalous headline. I had a [recovery] sponsor early on who went: ‘Keep that shit to yourself, it won’t be good for your recovery.’”
In recent years, Willis, 39, has been more open about it and, increasingly, he heard from not just those with addictions, but people with friends or family members going through it, asking his advice on how they could help. “We have so much stigma around addiction that we forget that it’s a person and that this person is loved by people. The ripple effect is huge,” he says. “It’s really easy to go: ‘Fuck that guy, get him out of your life.’ But it’s hard when you care.”
In the documentary, it’s particularly moving to see how it affected his wife, the TV presenter Emma Willis. In 2008, she started keeping a diary to keep track of Willis’s drinking and drug-taking. She was scared that he would die, she says tearfully.
They have talked a lot in the past, says Willis, particularly when he last relapsed about five years ago. Part of the recovery process, he says, “is you make amends to people you’ve hurt. I never did that with Emma; I don’t think I ever can. I think the way I choose to do it is to be this guy, every day” – the sober, warm, thoughtful man I meet at his agents’ office in central London. “When she notices something, I take it on board and listen, and I don’t argue. I go: ‘You feel that way; that means that I am doing something, that’s not in your head.’ Because I was the mastermind at gaslighting, making her think she was crazy. I’m so ashamed of that, and I never want her to feel like that again.”
Looking back, Willis was always drawn to changing the way he felt. As a child, aged about seven, he remembers going under his bedcovers and taking several big puffs of his asthma inhaler, holding it in until his head felt like it might explode. As a teenager, growing up in Molesey in Surrey, he smoked a lot of weed and, as many teens do, would drink in the park with his friends, but he always took it to extremes. “I’d be drinking to black out or have big cuts on my face from falling over.” With cannabis, he was always trying to come up with ways to make the effect stronger. “It wasn’t a casual smoke in the park, it was always: ‘Let’s get as fucked up as I possibly can.’”
By the time he formed Busted in 2000, he was drinking quite a lot and taking drugs. “I liked cocaine, but I didn’t ever have enough money for it.” When Busted got a record deal in 2002 and quickly became successful, he had the money. “I used cocaine as a way to keep sober. About 11pm, I’d get some and stay up till five – it allowed me to keep in the game, because I was always pissed.” He remembers often peering through the blinds in his flat at 7am, having been up all night, paranoid the police were about to knock on the door, but still taking cocaine while everyone had gone to sleep. Willis was a functioning addict, just about. “I still had a job to do. I didn’t want anyone to know; I was very good at keeping things going.”
The problem was, it was often fun. “I loved it, that’s the thing – it wasn’t always dark and fucked up. It was exciting, and people wanted me to come places and go to parties. I’m in this cool media world – and I was some kid from nowhere. I was always amazed that I was at these things, and drugs and drinking was a part of that.” Alcohol and drugs gave him confidence.
“I always felt uncomfortable in any social situation. I still do a bit. I felt that I’m not supposed to be there, or everyone thinks you’re a dick. Drink and drugs took that away – I became the life and soul. It fed into that idea of ‘this is working’. But really, that’s not me. It’s this bravado, this Matt-from-Busted guy that I turned into.”
It wasn’t as if he was intentionally buying into a rock’n’roll lifestyle, but he was, he thinks, “fighting the pop thing”. Busted were a pop band with a punk edge, who had great, catchy songs but somewhat lacked credibility (it didn’t help that Willis had gone to the Sylvia Young theatre school and the other two band members were former public schoolboys). “We didn’t really fit in anywhere,” says Willis. “We weren’t heavy enough to be in the rock world, but we weren’t really pop enough to be in the pop world. At gigs of bands I loved, people would give me shit and it dawned on me that I’m not a rock star. I was like: ‘Oh, you guys hate me.’”
It probably was good for the band’s slightly wild image that Willis would be photographed drunk and stumbling out of clubs. The singer Amy Winehouse was a friend from school and they continued to hang out. Much later, once Willis got sober, “she didn’t want me around [and] I didn’t really want to be around her and her mates. I was trying to keep myself as safe as possible.” Winehouse died as a result of alcohol abuse in 2011 at the age of 27 and Willis wonders if he could have helped her. “She wouldn’t have listened, but I always think: ‘Would she, if I’d really tried?’ That’s a big regret for me.”
When Busted broke up in 2005, “I had money and time”, Willis says. His addictions got worse. “After a while, the invites stopped. People didn’t want me at their parties, or turning up at their house. I was a disaster.” He remembers going to a gig and afterparty with a friend. “I was a mess. He had to take me home and I remember him saying he was embarrassed of me. I was like ‘fuck you’, but that stuck with me. I think a lot of people felt that with me.”
Willis was sent to rehab after getting in trouble with his record company. “They were ploughing money into my solo record,” he says. Expensive studios and musicians had been booked and Willis just wouldn’t turn up. He spent two weeks in a rehab centre, mostly to keep his label happy – but the day after he left he started drinking again. More stints in rehab followed over the years. Although he did want to stop, it was always half hearted. “I waited till my time was up and got out,” says Willis.
By the time he and Emma were due to get married in 2008, he was drinking heavily and using drugs to cope with it. “I couldn’t stop. I would try to get to 12 o’clock [without a drink], waking up at 9am going: ‘I’ve got fucking ages.’ I would be shaking and feeling like I was going to pass out. Once I started, I couldn’t stop, and then I was using drugs to function. We had a month till the wedding and the state I was in, she wasn’t going to marry me.”
He went into rehab voluntarily for the first time and spent his wedding day sober. “Then I relapsed again and again. But the excitement and fun had gone. It was always dark, always just misery.” When their first child was eight months old, Willis knew he needed to stop. “I realised I was going to be a terrible father and it hit me, because a family was the one thing I always wanted, and I was about to lose it all.”
He was sober and off drugs for eight years, but in the mid-10s Busted reformed and went on tour. Someone on tour had some cocaine and offered Willis some, and he took it without really thinking. Back at home, he had a studio nearby and he would spend all day and most of the night there, using drugs. Things between him and Emma were “very difficult”, he says. She must have come close to leaving him over the years. “Yes, many times. That last relapse was really hard for her, because we had three kids. I’d been eight years sober – we’d thought that it was behind us.” The recovery was different this time, he says. “I went to her and said: I need help, I’m surrendering. Before, it was a case of me promising the world and then letting her down – ‘sorry’ meant nothing.”
Now, he says: “I’m quite strong in my recovery in that I work hard at it.” Keeping a daily gratitude journal helps, as does meditation and daily physical exercise. He is intent on becoming healthier – medical tests he went through after a couple of years of being sober showed “parts of my body were in a really bad way” (recent ones are better) – but he has to watch himself, because he can become too obsessive about it. “I’ve had moments where I’ve had to be sat down: ‘Matt, you’re eating at the bleep of a watch, out of a Tupperware container.’ It’s still addiction, disordered eating … it becomes a control thing.”
He has largely made peace with the voice in his head that tells him he is useless, or at least learned to ignore it better. When he went into acting – he had a part in EastEnders for a while and has had many theatre roles – his inner critic got louder. “I find ways to go: ‘We’re OK, we’re going to carry on.’”
Willis knows his vulnerabilities – the last relapse happened because he was away from his family, on tour, and around drugs. Busted are going on tour again later this year. “We care about each other and they care about me. They know what I want and what I don’t want, what I’m capable of doing and what I’m not going to do.”
One thing that became clear to Willis while making the film is how underfunded addiction treatment is. Spending has declined since the 2012 Health and Social Care Act, although the government announced in February it was making an extra £421m available in England for drug and alcohol addiction treatment. Willis knows he is lucky to be able to afford expensive rehab centres and therapists. “I was speaking to a guy recently and he was on a two-and-a-half-year waiting list. When someone has a problem with addiction, the time to act is now. There are so many amazing charities and people doing incredible things, but they’re not government-funded. Every rehab we went to, you’re talking £7,000 – like, who has that? Especially if you’re an addict.” Numbers of alcohol and drug-related deaths are higher in the most deprived areas. “There are lots of amazing free services, they will welcome you with open arms, but some people have to be taken care of in a very specialised way and that is not being catered for enough.”
Willis has dreams of opening a rehab centre available to all, regardless of their ability to pay – he is going to visit an Italian one based on a working farm, a model he would like to recreate here. “I don’t know if I’m the right person to do it – I get that impostor syndrome when I talk about it – but if not you, then who? The documentary was meant to open conversations and change stigmas, but without anyone funding anything, it’s going to be impossible to do more.”
The documentary touches on Willis’s difficult childhood – his parents divorced when he was three and he describes his relationship with his stepfather as “heated” – which he is about to address in therapy. He is reluctant to say more, partly out of protectiveness of his parents, with whom he has a good relationship, but mainly because he says he doesn’t remember much; when he has had therapists in the past, as soon as they begin to touch on his childhood, he would stop going. “I’m beginning that process now. I’m quite excited in a weird way, and terrified of it, but I think it’s the beginning of something which could be really beneficial.”
At the end of his daily gratitude practice, Willis writes that he is worthy of love, that he is “enough”. “I felt really naff sharing that [in the documentary]. It made me cringe watching it,” he says, with a small laugh. “I have this inner weird blokey thing about all that stuff, which is so unhelpful for everybody. I’m like: why am I feeling ashamed of this? But I do it every day because I need to be reminded of it – and I do feel like that these days, most of the time.”
• Matt Willis: Fighting Addiction will air during mental health awareness week later this month on BBC One and iPlayer
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 988 or chat for support. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
In the UK, Action on Addiction is available on 0300 330 0659. In the US, SAMHSA’s national helpline is at 800-662-4357. In Australia, the National Alcohol and Other Drug Hotline is at 1800 250 015; families and friends can seek help at Family Drug Support Australia at 1300 368 186.
