Glenn Hughes: Liverpool is the place for me

Apr 25 2008 by Mike Chapple, Liverpool Daily Post

Nine months later, Glenn’s pal Bolin, who had replaced Blackmore in Purple in mid ‘75, was dead from multiple drug intoxication. He was 25.

This did not, however, persuade Hughes to change his ways.

“If you are from the 70s school of rock, heavy drinking was kind of the norm,” he explains matter of factly.

“There was also a very affluent drug culture. I was never into heroin, but the cocaine was another thing entirely.

“I never thought it could cause the deep psychosis that eventually began to effect me.

“By 1987, I’d become really, really, hooked and just locked myself away, living like a hermit. I was in denial until Boxing Day, 1991, when I walked into the bathroom and looked in the mirror.

“I don’t know what it was, call it divine intervention, but I suddenly realised that it was time to clean up.”

He was by his own admission “coked out of his brain” and finding it hard to even breathe. He managed to get to a hospital where the doctor said that if he’d stayed at home he would have died.

Enter the Betty Ford Clinic – and now he’s been clean for 17 years.

His much-missed chums, such as “Bonzo” Bonham and Moonie, were not so lucky.

“They were all iconic musicians who could not get a grip on the fact that their lifestyle was a disease – a big mighty, tremendous beast that they were grappling with.

“Some of the younger bands now will probably say we can handle it, talk about musicians like me being old farts, but everyone is going to be old sometime and I’m just glad to be alive to be able to enjoy it.

“The drugs, drink and private jets – I have far more than that now because I have my own feelings back.”

With them has come a burgeoning solo career.

Although he pledges that there will be “at least two Purple greats” on the Academy set list, he will be also performing solo work including songs from his new album First Underground Nuclear Kitchen, which he considers his best.

“This album should set the blueprint for rock, funk and soul,” said the singer, whose influences have always been primarily black, artists such as Sly, Otis, Marvin and Stevie.

“People keep coming up and saying ‘Hey, how can you be singing better now than you were then?’ And I say how can I not be better when I’m not drunk and taking drugs all the time.

“I’m focused like an athlete now.”

* GLENN HUGHES plays the Carling Academy Liverpool, on Saturday, June 7.

mikechapple@dailypost.co.uk