Fat Tony: The Comeback Kid
The cult London DJ Fat Tony first arrived in Ibiza in 1983. For the best part of the next two decades, his relationship with Ibiza, music, alcohol and drugs would become inextricably entwined. Following a remarkable personal and musical renaissance, Fat Tony talks to L’OFFICIEL IBIZA’s Maya Boyd about those lost years in Ibiza, the launch of his tell-all memoir and a season-defining 2022 residency at Hï Ibiza.
You've been at the vanguard of London’s dance music movement for decades. What is it about Ibiza that has always enchanted you?
Ibiza always felt like such a mystical place because it was somewhere where you could go and be who you wanted to be. Spiritually, physically, sexually. You didn’t have to put yourself in a bracket. London was a very different place back then [in terms of the gay scene]. It was just five streets in Soho, right? It wasn't Peckham. It wasn't all the other areas where now you have more of that going on. It was primarily the West End of London. That was it. So, to go somewhere like Ibiza where the clubs were open until six am, where you were partying 24 hours straight. 24 hours! In clubs with no roofs, dancing under the stars with people who were just the same as you? Unbelievable. It was just so spiritual - you just felt that you were really in tune with the universe. You had that connection, and it was awesome. The music was very Euro, quite trashy, moving on from Balearic house. And Ibiza had that mix of people, the characters that lived on the island. The guy with the long white beard, those iconic faces. People who you just loved to see because they had the freedom of the island. Everyone wanted that freedom themselves! It was an amazing place.
Did your relationship with Ibiza come to define your career in any way?
I think so, one hundred percent. I come back here every year and if Ibiza didn’t have that effect on me, I wouldn't be there. I'd be in Mykonos. Or anywhere else. Listen: I like to tap into madness and I like to leave the madness. Sometimes in Ibiza, I don't get to leave the madness, and that’s what might have once pulled me away. I was getting ready to ready to quit, but I realised I’m hooked on Ibiza. I'm drawn to islands. My residency at Hï Ibiza this summer means I've literally had to fly back and forth. I love the buzz of that! I wake up in Ibiza twice a week! It’s unreal! To play at Hï then fly back Saturday morning to do a festival – there’s something magical about that. It’s the ultimate commute.
Ibiza is notoriously hedonistic yet you've been very vocal about your recovery in recent years. How do you cope with the endless drugs and alcohol?
Listen, I kind of exhausted it all. I exhausted that part of Ibiza, and I took it to the fucking limit. Beyond the limit! You know? There's not a roundabout that I didn't come off my motorbike. There’s not a beach I didn't take acid on. There’s not a bar that I didn't get thrown out of. I go to all these venues now and just think, oh my God, I used to get thrown out of there all the time. ALL THE TIME. Now it's a different thing. Now music is my drug. I know nothing else can get you higher than music. I'm not there for what you can give me. I'm not there for what someone else has got in their pocket. I'm actually there for the music. And that's what sort of magical thing Ibiza has. That’s how I’ve really reconnected with the spiritual side of the island. I can just spend my time going around, being mad, hanging out, not having to do anything. It's just such a beautiful thing. I don't even tell my friends I’m coming here! I just go with my boyfriend, no expectations. We eat in good restaurants. We just chill.
Do you have the same stamina as the old days? Or do you have an ‘off’ button?
I have a quality of life now where I can just say, ‘enough’. That is a really beautiful thing and you learn that when you recover. I'm a firm believer that ‘I can't’ doesn't exist in recovery. You can absolutely do whatever you want to do and go wherever you want to go, as long as you do it with a positive mindset. Whereas before it was always in a negative mindset, because I'd always be out and end up staying out. I know what my limits are now and I know when I need to go home - the minute I start thinking ‘I can’t be fucked’, I’m out of there. It's gone from FOMO to JOMO. What an amazing thing! Before, living in the constant fear of missing out, I’d end up at Bora Bora or wherever else I used to end up, well and truly mashed. Now, I go to a club, I do my job and I walk out of with my head held high. Serene as you like.
How does it feel for you having a residency at Hï Ibiza, arguably the best club in the world, after those kind of highs and lows?
I think this year, what with the book coming out and my residency... It's been a really magical in the sense that I kind of feel like, ‘oh, I've arrived again’. And finally, I feel like I'm enough. I'll be at the airport and I get stopped by like 20 people who want me to sign their books or they want to talk to me about something that's really touched them. That's incredible! For someone like me, who essentially lost all of that… now I have all that back and I'll make sure I have time for everyone. I mean, I'm 56 and I have a residency in Ibiza at the best club in the world. And next summer is shaping up to be stratospheric! I’m bring my Full Fat Brunch over here, the paperback copy of my book [written with the journalist Michael Hennegan] is out. There’s going to be a serialisation of the story. It’s all good stuff.
You’re adored by your fans. What makes you so relatable?
People love stories and they especially love stories of redemption. It's inspiring stuff. In recovery, it’s about the things we do do, instead of the things we don’t do. I love life and I love travelling and I love doing all the things that I never used to be able to do. I'm doing them all. And it’s amazing. But most of all, I make people dance. You can't replace that, and I mean not with anything. Nothing in the world will give you the same energy as a packed dance floor in front of you. There’s not a drug on the planet that can top that high. That’s why I’m here. I found my calling.
I never travelled well, really. That first trip on Concorde was a bit of a fluke, to be honest. There would always be chaos, there would always be drama, and if there wasn’t I would make it. The first time we went to Ibiza was in 1983. The original crew on that trip was me and Gabby Palomino who ran Models 1. She was a Blitz kid – part of the crew that had gone to the Blitz Club in Covent Garden at the very end of the seventies, who people say started the New Romantic movement – and she was one of my mates from the King’s Road. There were a few other people with us but I couldn’t tell you who. I do remember that Gabby would go around everywhere wearing fetish gear. We were hanging out with this guy called Brazilio, who Gabby knew and who owned Ku and a few other clubs on the island – he was one of the original big cheeses. I loved the island from the get-go, it was fucking amazing. We arrived and we were dancing under the stars (Amnesia still didn’t have a roof back then), and it was still quite hippy. The clubs were enormous compared to London and they were just huge open-air dance floors. It felt like paradise. Back then you couldn’t fly directly to Ibiza, so you would fly to Palma and then change, and people didn’t fly as much as they do now, so you really had a build-up. It was so bohemian – imagine going to a beautiful, relatively untouched island in the Mediterranean now, and discovering that they had this amazing party scene with people cut from the same cloth as you? That’s what it was like. So luscious and green, with the most stunning deep-orange sunsets. As soon as you landed, it was like a different world, you almost expected Judith Chalmers to appear. The heat would hit you as soon as you stepped off the plane. Ibiza back then was untouched. There were no chains or McDonald’s and everything else that there is now. The scene felt very free spirited back then, and people were really flamboyant. You just didn’t have the same vibe in London.
I think the first big party we went to was at Privilege, which was then called Ku Club, and I remember I’d been there one night and I disappeared. I ran off with the barman from Ku, which I made a habit of doing in Ibiza – just hopping on the back of their motorbike or moped and disappearing up into the hills for a day or two to do drugs and shag them. My specialist subject would be getting lost in the hills in Ibiza. I’d either end up at some boy’s house or we would be at a party in town and I’d go, ‘Come on, let’s leave, let’s go somewhere else. I know a party happening in the hills.’ And then we’d walk out, try to get a cab and walk for miles. And I’d be like, ‘It’s this way. I know where we are now. I know exactly where we are.’ And we’d walk and walk and we’d be going higher. I’d be like, ‘Maybe the party isn’t this way after all.’ We’d be so, so fucking lost. Seriously.
I went back to Ibiza in about ’86 with Steve Strange and Rusty Egan and we did a thing called London Calling, which was a club night with a fashion show by BOY London. Rusty and I were there as the DJ’s but I never made it to DJ. I met some boy and disappeared off on the back of his moped – again. This time it was for three days. I arrived back at the hotel and got him to drive me around the swimming pool on his moped, with me thinking that I was really fucking fierce. Everyone was there – Paul Rutherford, Jacquie O’Sullivan from Bananarama, we’d taken over that hotel. We were all badly behaved but I think I took the piss, as ever. I’d missed the gig and someone else had to play for me. I was sleeping in the living room of the apartment in the hotel and shagged a boy in Jacquie’s bed whilst she was out. I remember her coming back and being like, ‘Errmm, why is the lid off my Vaseline?’ The day everyone was leaving, they were all sitting on the coach and ready to go when Steve Strange came up to me and was like, ‘C’mon, let’s stay here.’ I mean, I never needed any encouragement so that was it, we were off the coach and stayed for three months. The owners of Ku had given Steve an apartment to live in but neither of us could drive, so the boy I was shagging, who didn’t speak English, became our driver. I was wearing head-to-toe Gaultier when I met him and so was he – that was the depth of our connection. Anyway, he worked at the Coco Loco bar and he just kept giving us free drinks. One of the guys there would make coconut punch and would put MDMA and acid in it and give it out at 1am in the morning and everyone would be off their fucking nuts. One night I remember we were in the car in the hills – I mean these boys drove us everywhere – and Steve Strange picked a fight with one of them and they kicked us out of the car in the middle of nowhere. Steve and I had to walk all the way home. I mean, it was three months of just clubbing and shagging, basically being Tony.
The music scene in Ibiza back then was really quite Eurotrashy. It was the tail end of the disco scene and house music hadn’t hit yet. It wasn’t the age of the celebrity DJ, that era hadn’t started. We had a little repertoire of clubs that we’d go to – Amnesia and Ku, Catwalk in the Old Town and then Loco Mia, which wasn’t a club but part shop, part bar and a real scene – and the queens who were the original fan dancers would have crimped, big hair and they’d all wear long black outfits with pointy shoes and huge fans. They were amazing, and the first to do that. Angels was the hot after-hours club that everyone went to. It had these two big podiums which you could stand underneath and look up to. It was all quite debauched, really – I mean it was debauched in that there was so much energy, it was like a world turned upside down, no one was around in the day and then it just came alive at night. The clubs had no roofs, you’d be dancing under the stars and then the sun would come up and you would be with a group of people you’d never met before but who were your new best friends. It was like Gay Utopia, everyone was so, so free, even in comparison to London. For a gay man at the time it was paradise. It was a lot of fun, but it wasn’t seedy. Then there were all the little underground clubs, and Pacha, of course. It was in Ibiza that I had one of the only times in my life I’ve been violently ill on booze.
One night we were at Privilege up on the balcony with some boys who were drinking Chivas Regal. I obviously kept up with them and I remember drinking so much of it that I blacked out and was vomiting. I can remember being in the back of the car with my head out the window, vomiting all the way home along the motorway. We got back to the apartment and I woke up in the morning and I vomited in the swimming pool. And I’ve never touched Chivas Regal again since. I know this is ridiculous, by the way – I did enough drugs to kill a herd of elephants, but one bad night on whisky and I never touch it again.
I think ’89 was the ultimate summer I had in Ibiza. Gina had his birthday party at Amnesia. Alfredo, Danny Rampling and Nicky Holloway were all there. We’d kind of taken over the island. Gina and I had been there for a month already and it was absolute chaos. I’d done my normal trick of disappearing off with a boy and had been gone for three days. I was doing a lot of acid at the time and Gina wasn’t, so I’d kind of just found my own people. So, I’d disappeared with a boy and then gone on to find my friend Nick who was a straight male model. We’d been out for three nights and we’d had a fucking ball – we got each other’s humour and had been tearing around the island causing chaos. It was fucking hilarious. We ended up hanging out with this really dodgy group of boys who were using dodgy chequebooks, dodgy cards, everything. I just loved it. I was always drawn to those types of boys, the wrong ’uns. Because they were always the ones that you had the best laugh with. So me and Nick had come back to the villa and I walked in and Gina was like, ‘We’re leaving.’ And I was like, ‘What do you mean we’re leaving?’ He said, ‘We’re flying back to London in an hour, you’ve been gone for three fucking days.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, fuck off. I’m having a lie down and then I’ll pack.’ And I remember going into my room, then waking up and it was dark. I got up and I walked around the house and I was like, ‘Hello, hello?’ And everyone had gone – Nick, Gina and his boyfriend Michael. They had just left me on the bed, covered in my own vomit. Gina was so fucked off with me. He had left and taken my passport and my plane ticket because I was such a cunt and just left me in the villa. I had no money – nothing. I remember thinking, Oh my God, what am I going to do? I did for a moment think, What the fuck are you doing? You really need to stop misbehaving and sort yourself out. They’d taken my clothes, they’d taken everything. All I had was one pair of tracksuit bottoms, a Vivienne Westwood pink polka-dot shirt and the Timberland boots I was wearing. The shirt was the campest thing in the world. I was the gayest little cunt, stranded in Ibiza. I had to wait for Gina to send my passport, which took about three weeks because he wasn’t talking to me. I don’t know why I didn’t just go to the British consulate. In the meantime, I remember walking along the motorway to Amnesia to see Jose and Sandrine who owned it. I went in crying and saying, ‘Gina has left me!’ And they were like, ‘You need to come and stay with us,’ and they took me to their house and let me stay with them. I was at their club every night off my nut, but they were so kind to me, letting me stay and giving me drinks all the time. I had no guilt about accepting freebies.
Ibiza really was heaven for someone like me. I had so many Ibiza sidekicks. Andy Stick was a really good one. I’d met Andy clubbing in London. He was this loud-mouthed little shit who just did not give a crap. He would always have sunglasses on and was stick-thin, hence the nickname. He was a good-looking boy and shit did not stick to him. I thought I was bitchy but Andy would open his mouth and it was something else. Me and Andy in Ibiza were pretty ferocious, we’d end up at Bora Bora and be there for three days. I’d be DJ’ing for food and drinks and they’d be like, ‘Oh, you going to play for us?’ And I’d be like, ‘As long as you get everyone drinks and cocaine then I play.’ Like a whore. I think the biggest gig that I ever played in Ibiza was probably at Amnesia itself before the roof went on. It was just before the acid house scene kicked off in London and all the acid house DJs were out there. Of course, I’d wangled myself a gig there and I remember playing early soulful house. All the Spanish DJ’s hated me because I was playing on their turf. There were never any drug deaths back then – it wasn’t like you heard of people taking pills and dying – because the drugs were so much cleaner. People died as a result of taking them, but not from the drugs themselves. I was forever coming off my motorbike in Ibiza. I’d be tripping off my nut, go down to the roundabout where Pacha was, come off the motorbike and be lying on the road with cars nearly running me over. But I think the first person I remember dying in Ibiza was Steve Walsh, a London DJ, when his jeep overturned.
One of the last times in Ibiza, my friend Cozette arrived. She had worked at the Wag with me doing the door and was amazing – we’re still really good friends now. At the time she worked for Jasper Conran and she was the best wing woman. She didn’t take drugs and God forbid anyone offer her any – I’d have them – but she could drink anyone under the table. I was very protective of her in a way. Anyway, I’d persuaded Cozette to come out and stay with me, but by the time she got there it was so fucking weird – Danny Rampling’s wife Jenni had gone missing and so Danny was refusing to play. With Jenni AWOL, God knows where, and Danny freaking out and everyone around them starting to spin out too, I was like, ‘I’m going, babes.’ Instead of the week’s holiday that she had been promised she got thirty-six hours with me and was then dragged back to London on BA. When we landed in Heathrow we were going through border control and someone tapped me on the shoulder and they were like, ‘Excuse me, Tony?’ ‘Yeah?’ And they went, ‘You’re under arrest. Come with us.’ And I was like, ‘Why, what have I done?’ I got taken to one side and arrested. I’d been cautioned for possession and had gone to Ibiza rather than report into the police station to sort it out, so I was blacklisted when I landed. I mean, it meant we got a free ride home. I got strip-searched, which wasn’t so great, although I pretended I loved it at the time. In the end, I got let off as it was a friend’s jacket and I hadn’t known it was in there. Funnily enough, the old Royal Courts of Justice where I had to go is now a hotel and restaurant and I went there for the opening recently. I only realised halfway through dinner that the last time I’d been in that building I’d been in a cell and up for possession. I slept when I got into the police cell.
There was never a time that I came back from Ibiza feeling normal and rested, like I’d had a holiday. I always arrived home hungover to fuck and needing a holiday instead. I never ever wanted to leave the island, I would only leave at the very last moment, when I had no money and no choice. There is one occasion that really sticks in my mind as the worst journey back. As I said, in those days you had to fly by Palma, and then to London. I remember going for my flight back – I’d been out for three days on MDMA and I was off my tits. I was wearing a Jean Paul Gaultier black leather hexagonal black-and-white-football-sleeved jacket, white denim shorts, black Dr Martens boots with the steel toe caps showing and bleached blonde hair.I got off the plane at Palma airport, went and bought 200 cigarettes and then went to the toilet whilst I waited for my connecting flight – and fell asleep. The next thing I knew I woke up on the toilet. I tried to stand but my legs had gone to sleep and I keeled over on the floor. I tried to open the toilet door and was literally pulling myself along with my hands to get out, when I looked up and saw a guard standing over me. They were like, ‘Hello?’ and I was like, ‘Huh?’ I didn’t have a fucking clue what was going on. You know when you’ve not slept for that long and you spark out, it takes a while to come round. I couldn’t remember where the fuck I was at first. They took me to an office where they asked me where I was going. I gave them my passport and ticket. They were talking and looking at each other, then one of them said, ‘Your plane left six hours ago.’ I’d been on the toilet for six hours, asleep.
I sat in the Iberia office crying until they let me ring my mum. I was like, ‘Mum, I’m stuck in Palma. I’ve got no money. I can’t get a flight back until tomorrow night.’ There were so few flights back then and I remember sitting there crying, thinking I was in the worst drug comedown I’d ever been in, and my mum went, ‘Right, I’m going to ring your Aunty Anne. She lives in Palma, she’ll come and get you.’ So I was like, ‘Okay, thanks,’ and stopped crying. Once a mummy’s boy, always a mummy’s boy.
My Aunt Anne is amazing. She’s my mum’s sister and used to be a prostitute in the sixties. Although she will say that she was never, ever a prostitute. She was a lady of the night. She had bleached blonde hair and had left London because she was almost notorious as being one of the top brass of the sixties. The papers called her the Golden Girl of Mayfair, and she profited well from it – she had an E-type Jag. If you see old footage of London and Soho in the sixties, there would be sex cinemas and brothels with posters outside, and she was one of the poster girls. So anyway, she left London to move to Spain with all the money that she’d earned from prostitution. I had to wait for Anne in the airport and there were these little square sofas dotted around. I remember being curled up on one of them asleep and someone kicking me and going, ‘Oi! Oi! Wake up you little sod.’ And I looked up and it was my Aunty Anne. She had thigh-high PVC leather boots on, and this kaftan top which was all tassels with beads on. She was like, ‘Come on, you little sod, what’s happened to you? Get up.’ I looked up and thought, Oh my God. I can’t fucking believe this. We walked through the airport, me in this Gaultier outfit with bleached hair and her with her big bleach blonde hair and outfit, we were a real fucking sight. We got outside and she had this green Jeep with a pink smiling gappy-toothed hippopotamus on it wearing a thong.
My aunt owned some bars in Magaluf with her husband Tino. We drove to one of them where I sat thinking, Oh my God. Across the road was the ‘Here We Go’ bar. And then there was a ‘Ben Hur’ bar. It was hetero football hell and I was dressed up like the biggest gay you had ever seen in your life. It was like being in Blackpool on a lads’ stag do. My Aunty Anne was introducing me to everyone saying, ‘This is my nephew, he’s in show business.’ And she kept making limp-wristed hand gestures behind me, which I could see in the mirror, making out that I was really camp. I mean, I was sat there with bleach blonde hair, a Jean Paul Gaultier leather patchwork jacket, white cut-off denim shorts and Dr Martens steel-capped boots. I don’t know what she meant – how dare she call me camp? I left the bar and went and sat on a wall, praying to God and apologising for all the evil things I’d done in my life, all the times I’d been horrible to people. ‘Please God,’ I was praying. ‘I’ll never be like that again. Please get me out of here.’ I mean, I was getting homophobically abused, I was on my own, being shouted at: ‘You gay cunt, look at the state of you.’ I just sat there and cried. Remember, I was on a three-day comedown as well.
Later we went back to my aunt’s. She had four dogs and what seemed like about seventy cats. There were animals everywhere. I was like, ‘Oh my God, how many animals do you have?’ And she was like, ‘I got six cats, four dogs, eight ducks and chickens and something else on the roof that he doesn’t know about.’ ‘Doesn’t he hear them quack?’ I asked. ‘Oh no, he doesn’t speak any English.’ She said. It was such a mental night, she was mental. The next day she took me back to the airport and she said, ‘Tell your mother I hate her.’ And as I got out of the car I just thought, You know what? I fucking love you. My Aunty Anne is still alive, she came to see me in London two Christmases ago and I took her shopping to Selfridges and to Harrods with my boyfriend at the time, David. She said to him, ‘Has he asked you to marry him yet? He does that to all of them.’ When I split up with Johnny, she went, ‘Well, you really fucked that one up didn’t you? You always fuck it up, don’t you?’ She’s brilliant.
You know, Ibiza is a beautiful place, but all those times I went in the 80s and 90s I wasn’t really there. I was living my best life and really helping to put Ibiza on the map, helping Ibiza to become what it was, but I was doing so many drugs and it saddens me, because I just don’t really remember it. When I go back now, sober, the island seems magical. If you take away the big tower blocks and leave the superclubs you can find parts of the island that still have that beautiful relatively unspoilt Ibiza feel to them. It’s stunning. Just as my Ibiza looks didn’t travel very well to Magaluf – I was like an angel fish put in with a load of old carp – another example of my outfits not really travelling well is when I wore head-to-toe Galliano to go to Jamaica. I’d met John when he’d graduated from St Martins with his Les Incroyables show in ’84. He used to dress me head-to-toe in certain looks. He gave me a load of sailor tops that were cut and twisted and ruched. He made a stars and stripes outfit for Levi’s with Madonna’s face on and gave me the one from the ad. People were quite jealous of our friendship at the time because he would give me clothes and I would trot around town wearing them all the time – these mental sailors’ outfits – and that’s what I was wearing to go to Jamaica with my friend Yumiko. Yumiko was one of those girls I would have crazily intense friendships with all throughout the 80s and early 90s – ridiculously intense but that would never last that long. These girls would come into my life and we’d do loads of drugs and have these mental relationships then they’d burn out really quickly out or they’d be so intense that the girls would get into a lot of trouble and be stopped from seeing me.
I could be so foul to my female friends. I was a bully and I ruled by being top dog. With Vicky Heller I’d be like, ‘You need to do more drugs, you’re boring.’ I never let Cozette touch drugs ever – and went absolutely mental if anyone tried to give them to her. And God forbid any of them get a boyfriend without my approval, they would be in for it. ‘Where did you meet him? He’s rent. I’ve seen him. He’s gay, I know loads of guys he’s shagged or who’ve fucked him.’ I was merciless until they broke up with them. Byeeee. Anyway, Yumiko was this rich Japanese girl who was a bit of a super fan and who used to come and see me in clubs and hang around the DJ booth. We did untold amounts of cocaine together. She said she was going to Jamaica and asked if I wanted to go, so I tagged along. We got there and I was wearing John Galliano baby-blue flared trousers and a sailor top with bleach blonde cropped hair and I looked so, so gay. We got to Doctor’s Beach in downtown Montego Bay, one of the most homophobic places in the world, and people were calling me names on the street and I’m mincing along dressed as a fucking sailor. We were so much trouble, me and Yumiko, staying in this amazing hotel and doing coke on the beach. Yumiko was amazing, she used to buy me presents from Chanel every week – little bits of jewellery. There we were, waltzing around Jamaica, spending her money like it was going out of fashion. We met this guy and went to his house in the hills to freebase coke with him. I’d imagined we were going to some luxury mansion, but when we got there we saw a flint cliff with little huts perched on top, and when we got to the top there was his little shack made of wood, like two Portaloos stuck together. We were freebasing coke off an old Coke can and I got so, so out of it that I was like, ‘Oooh, I really need the toilet. Like now!’ The guy points to a hole outside, so I go and shit in this hole and then I hear all of these noises in the bushes and this massive raccoon shoots out, bites me on the leg as I’m sat on the hole. We ended up going back down the mountain in pitch black and hitched a lift from a lorry to take us to the hospital. I had to have stitches and a tetanus shot. I’ve still got the scars to this day. Anyway, like anything to do with me, it all went wrong. We had spent all of Yumiko’s money and were stuck there in this amazing hotel in Montego Bay with no money, waiting for money from Japan to hit her account. After about three weeks I’d had enough and came back and I never saw Yumiko again. That must have been about 1989, just before Gina’s thirtieth and the Summer of Love and acid house. I was twenty-five and having the fucking time of my life.
THINGS I LEARNED FROM THE 80s
Remember that you’re not the party. Breathe. For over ten years I never stopped and it was constant. Life isn’t a race, you can actually stop and take breathers and nothing’s going to change. Don’t mix your drugs like you do your friends. I would take anything with anyone and end up anywhere – it’s never a good look. Though I still thought I was fabulous.
Look after your fucking clothes. I had so many one-off pieces that Keith Haring had made for me and I lost them all over London. He painted me a jacket and customised my trainers. I still managed to lose all of them. I remember I went home with one trainer one night, I’ve no idea where the other one ended up.
Never take Ecstasy before DJ’ing in a field to 50,000 other people. Never get so out of it in Ibiza that you forget where you’re staying . . . Don’t steal your mate’s purse then ask them for a tenner to get home. Don’t burn all your bridges because you’ll never fucking get back. We’re so busy chasing fame and slagging people off that when we need to get back to ourselves there’s no way to get there.