I Joined Bad Manners at 27 — Woke Up on the Tour Bus in America at 3am, Drank a Bottle of Tequila & Went Back to Sleep

Episode 54 | Adrian Cox — Clarinet, Bad Manners & 12 Years Sober: The Jazz Musician Who Left Home at 15 and Didn’t Stop Until His Hip Crumbled

In this extraordinary, funny and deeply moving episode, Jimmy sits down with Adrian Cox — jazz clarinettist, Bad Manners veteran, sober advocate, and one of the most uniquely entertaining recovery stories in the podcast’s history.

Adrian’s story begins at 15 in Burgess Hill, near Brighton — already playing the clarinet professionally at gigs since he was 12, already smoking and drinking in parks, already the kid who brought a bottle of whiskey to every party. At a festival in Butlins, Bognor Regis, a trombone player spotted him and sent a postcard to his sons: met a lad, got no brain, but by chance plays the clarinet, call him. Within weeks, Adrian was on tour, dropped back for his English GCSE, and then called up to join the band full time. He left home at 15, moved to Totnes, Devon — and never really stopped moving for the next two decades.

Living with musicians twice and three times his age, with no parents, no bank account and no instruction manual for adulthood, Adrian fell into a world where cooking sherry by the river at midnight was completely normal. In the first month in their flat, he and his bandmate Russell cleared 80 litres of sherry. By 18, he was getting kidney pains. By 21, a swollen liver — and a doctor telling him to stop. He did, for seven months. On the way home from his follow-up appointment, he stopped at a pub. Within weeks he was back on three bottles of wine and ten pints of Guinness a day.

Then came London, a heavier drinking band, a marriage, a divorce, and in 2007: cocaine. Which led, inevitably, to Bad Manners — the UK’s most legendary party band, where waking up on the American tour bus at 3am to drink a bottle of tequila before going back to sleep was just what Tuesday looked like.

The reckoning came on 27th March 2014. The night before his hospital appointment — where a doctor would tell him he had avascular necrosis caused by alcohol, where the blood had thinned so much it had stopped feeding his bones and the ball of his hip had partially crumbled away — he had the biggest drinking night of his entire life. A box of wine, ten pints of Guinness, three bottles of champagne, five grams of cocaine. He’d had so many near-misses he’d developed a special outfit to wear drinking near hospitals: a Ben Sherman poppered shirt (easy to open for an ECG) and slip-on shoes. He’d been admitted multiple times. This time the doctor told him: stop, or lose your legs.

He stopped. A Swedish concert-goer paid for a private hip replacement. And then cocaine took over completely — until he gambled his way to £138,000 in online winnings, spent it all within weeks chasing the same feeling, and ended up £87,000 in debt to Buster Bloodvessel of Bad Manners, spending months living a double life before a breakdown in Edinburgh and his girlfriend’s phone call ended it.

Cocaine stopped in 2016. MDMA in 2018. But it wasn’t until February this year — now 12 years alcohol-free, living in rural Sweden with his girlfriend and her two boys, with a driving licence, a residency permit, a limited company and a meditation book — that Adrian

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And you can find all my other links at:

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