Whitney Houston
Whitney Houston was another 80s star who found it hard to live up to her church-going image. The signs were there that she was taking a lot of drugs. She married Bobby Brown. Once turned up for a magazine shoot and insisted on playing an imaginary piano. Demanded a hotplate as part of her touring rider. Those kinds of things. Their marriage might be best remembered now for the scene in their TV reality show when Bobby explained how he had to help his wife go toilet. “I’ve had to dig a doodie bubble out of your butt”, he reminded her (and the cameras). “That turd was too big … and she couldn’t get it out and I had to help her.”
Depeche Mode
The shiny 80s TotP teenyboppers became stadium-filling global stars by the 90s, and singer Dave Gahan is one of pop’s most famous OD survivors. He says of the early 90s, “My whole life was Spinal Tap at that time”. He moved to Santa Monica and married his press officer/drug partner Teresa in the Graceland chapel, Las Vegas, took to hiding at home with the lights off and the curtains taped shut, and sleeping in a large, coffin-shaped bed. Whenever he went outside, he was so paranoid that he was never without a gun. “I had lots of guns, a 9mm, a .38 revolver, and a 12-gauge shotgun, too…I just thought they were out to get me. Yeah, it was like the bit at the end of Goodfellas with the helicopters. I mean, if there were actually helicopters overhead or cars going by, I’d freak.”
Brian Harvey
In 1997, Brian Harvey was sacked from East 17 for saying he liked ecstasy. Despite this being the view of hundreds of thousands of people his age at the time, the media went mental and the matter was even debated in Parliament, before the band and was taken off the playlist of 11 different radio stations. To be fair, it was probably a little off to claim he’d taken 12 tablets in one night and then got behind the wheel of a car. But getting behind the wheel of a car at all was a bad move for Harvey. A few years later he almost died by running over himself. Harvey said he fell under the car as he leant out of the driver’s door to be sick because he had just eaten three giant baked potatoes smothered in tuna mayonnaise and cheese. Harvey fractured his pelvis in seven places, broke his ribs and punctured his lungs. He lay unconscious for three weeks and had to endure 12 hours of surgery, but did get through it. |