This chapter charts my fall and my redemption, which has been my arc and necessary parabola. For some reason I had to go through all that to get to where I am now. A sadder, yet wiser person … and it’s all been something quite peculiar. I mean, you couldn’t make this stuff up, could you?!

IN THE MIDST of the mayhem and wreckage of my life I encountered a small island that gave me some refuge. In my house in Rozelle I had a bit of a library going on, with all kinds of books in it. Many different people had stayed in my house when I wasn’t there, house-sitters and people just crashing there and things like that. Anyway, someone had left a load of Hare Krishna literature in there. One day I discovered a book about Sri Prabhupada, the guy who brought the Hare Krishna movement to the West. I was immediately captivated and went on to devour all the Hindu and Buddhist books I could find in the library. And then even beyond that I got the Bhagavad Gita and the Mahabharata and the Ramayana and finally one morning after getting a large cheque I went and scored some stuff and then I went and bought the 24-volume Srimad Bhagavatam. I lapped it up just like I’d lapped up Greek and Norse mythology as a child, and Latin as an adolescent, but this was different.

As preposterous as Krishna may seem to a Western mind, to me Krishna became more and more real … and closer and closer as I read and tried to understand the subtle paradoxical nature of Hindu cosmology. I also read Buddha’s Pali Sutras with great relish, feeling the soothing tranquility of his words. All of this moved me and reached me at a deep level. It was consistent with the world as I had found it. And Krishna was a god you could really fall for and long for until you found devotion all around you.

I read the Bhagavad Gita with commentary by Sri Prabhupada, which is a dialogue between Krishna and his friend Arjuna as they stand prepared to take part in a great war that’s about to engulf humanity. Arjuna has confessed he’s lost his appetite for fighting: he is loath to kill his friends and family on the other side. In a beautifully poetic treatise called ‘The Song of God’, Krishna instructs Arjuna on how to live. At Arjuna’s insistence Krishna eventually reveals himself in his universal form, which is too impossibly huge and awe-inspiring for a human being to take in. Krishna returns to his normal form and Arjuna rejoins the battle enlightened and clear about the course he must take. The Gita can be considered as an equivalent of the New Testament – it definitely has the spiritual advice and the solemnity.

One day I was apparently standing in my paisley dressing gown drinking vanilla custard and reading Hindu literature when Stephen Cummings rolled up to make an album with me that would later be called Falling Swinger. He wanted to work with me because he knew I could bring something different to his usual trip, which was becoming a bit stale to him I guess, so I was surprised when he turned up with a bunch of his Melbourne cronies – the same ones who’d helped him make all the stale stuff he was trying to get away from. They were a smug little bunch of characters, and we didn’t get off to a good start. Instead of trusting me Stephen would always ask them their opinion, and their opinion was often the opposite of mine causing long pointless stalemates. Throw into this complicated mix my brother Russell, who was now living at Albion Street with his girlfriend Amy, and one Simon Polinski.

At the time Polinski was one of the most troublemaking little geezers you could ever imagine, and also my engineer and co-producer of this record. He never missed an opportunity for some sort of insurrection and was a thorn in my side as well as Stephen’s. He was and still is an excellent engineer, with just enough lovability to get him through his relentless shit stirring. But overall, as far as Stephen and I were concerned, it was two cultures clashing.

Like Tom Verlaine, Stephen was out of his tree on nicotine and caffeine; you never saw the guy without a cigarette and a fucking cappuccino. He was so on edge he was already into the middle of next week! He was jittery and jumpy, and reminded me of a red setter I’d once seen in an electrical storm. I, on the other hand, was lazy, sleepy and always distracted by the stuff, whether it was obtaining the finances for it, administering it, sleeping off its effects or waiting around for it to show up. I was never at my best back then, and was never giving 100 per cent.

I’m ashamed to say that some aspects of Stephen’s stories are true: there was a ten-year-old boy, William, who delivered the heroin while his mother sat in the car. Everything went through this kid, like ‘Mum said you can’t have any more credit until you pay the $150’ or ‘Mum says this one’s slightly small so she’ll give you a bigger one tomorrow.’ It was far from an optimal state of affairs I admit, but it was this or nothing, and nothing was now intolerable.

Nevertheless Stephen Cummings and I eventually produced a record, which was successful on his own terms and within his own parameters. Unfortunately we tried the trick again sometime later with the same bunch of hangers-on, and the same arguments arose only that time they ended in tears … Here I have to contradict Stephen’s version of events and most emphatically state that the tears were his and not my own. And the album was Escapist.

And so I continued shooting heroin, drinking custard and reading books about Krishna. Eventually Sometime/Anywhere came out and we went to America for a promo tour, where I carried on my pursuit of using the stuff – sometimes ending up in a city empty-handed and having to do gigs as sick as a dog. Other times getting lucky and overindulging, being stoned and sloppy on stage. As the tour wound its way towards the final gig in Las Vegas a guy from Arista arranged for me to go into Exodus Recovery Center in LA as soon as the tour was over. I had one last big night with the stuff and flew to LA early the next day where a man met me and drove me straight to Exodus. I was frightened out of my mind; it seemed like a death sentence. I knew I was about to go through the most terrible upheaval I’d ever faced in my life. I couldn’t imagine how bad it would be.

I don’t remember anything about the first three days there. I was given some incredibly heavy barbiturate that just knocked me out 24 hours a day, and if I vaguely woke up they gave me some more. The next three or four days after that I began to wake up but I didn’t really know who I was or where I was or what I was doing. I wandered around the rehab – which was really just the wing of a hospital and its tiny courtyard filled with cigarette-smoking patients – completely disconsolate and shocked in my hospital gown. People from Australia rang me on the telephone; people I’d been friends with for years, but did I know who they were?

The slime was oozing out of my body in every possible way. I was vomiting up pure bile, and it scorched my throat. I spent a lot of time lying on the floor beside the toilet convulsing. Sleep became the most desirable thing in the world, but it was totally denied me. My brain didn’t have the chemicals to sleep – and it wouldn’t have them for several weeks to come. I was so hungry but every time I tried to eat something it made me violently ill. I was so tired I would’ve given everything I had just for one minute’s respite.

Eventually after about a week this gave way to a searing depression, while my bones and muscles ached like a bastard. It was the worst hell imaginable. I became angry and defiant, and plotted to get out of there. I talked to other inmates about getting the stuff brought in. I was rude and didn’t cooperate with staff and began to demand valium and klonopin pills. I tried to ring some numbers but the people on the other end had been told not to answer – on pain of their lives. Marty and our then-manager Jeff visited me a couple of times but their stays were brief. I watched them drive away, envious.

One fateful night it all became more than I could possibly bear. I was alone in the room I was sharing with a guy from Porno for Pyros. He wasn’t there at that moment though. I was just sitting on the floor feeling totally wretched, totally used up and burnt out: every fibre of my being was screaming out for the stuff. My stomach was spewing forth this green chemical slime, a cold stinging sweat bathed my body, my legs and arms ached like I was on fire. I hadn’t slept or rested or drifted away for one moment: the insomnia was worse than all the other things put together.

I’d continued my reading of the Krishna literature while I was in rehab; Donnette also visited me and brought me more books on the subject. I found reading these books a tiny comfort during the state of agony I found myself in. My mind was brimming with Krishna. In the NA and AA meetings we had in our little unit (attendance was compulsory) I’d heard a phrase being bandied around that God would never give anyone more than they could handle, and I’d read the same sentiment in the Krishna literature.

Sitting there I decided I’d had more than any person could possibly deal with. There was no refuge left to me but God. Instinctively I assumed the position known in yoga as the child pose: my face on my knees, I crouched down flat on the floor symbolically showing the entire universe that I’d run out of ideas for myself and was surrendering totally and unequivocally to whatever was out there. Not a single shred of me remained that wasn’t part of that surrender. It was mental, spiritual and physical. It was a 100 per cent unconditional scream for help – that or let me die.

Instantly it filled me – warm, sweet and healing, and I immediately understood that it’d always been there and was always there all the time. It hadn’t come to me; rather, I’d let it in. It was more real than anything else. It completely blotted out the horror of the withdrawals, the squalid little cubicle where I currently resided. I was connected, it was mainline deep and it extended unlimited grace and mercy to me. The warmth didn’t communicate with me in words, it didn’t name itself and it didn’t judge me. It simply filled me. My ego hadn’t intervened this time, ruining things as it usually did during previous spiritual exercises.

Feeling suddenly delightfully drowsy I lay down on my bed and at once fell into a delicious dream, the most wonderful dream I’ve ever had and most probably ever will. In it I was in a beautiful country setting next to a river dotted with proud swans. Exotic flowers were in bloom everywhere and the brilliant sun gave out warmth but didn’t burn. I was chatting with Krishna, the dearest friend anyone could possibly have. It seemed like we stood there talking for years and years in some gorgeous, endless afternoon.

When I woke up I discovered I’d been asleep for only twenty minutes, but feeling completely refreshed I got up and wandered about the wards offering words of encouragement to those who’d recently arrived as well as attempting to talk others out of their plots to either break out or have the stuff brought in. My behaviour seemed so suspicious that the staff drug-tested me on the spot, but of course their tests came back negative.

Unfortunately my ego had also reawakened and I began to visualise situations where my new-found godliness could come in useful. Over the course of the following hour my gradually expanding ego squeezed the warmth right back out of my head, but even though the wonderful feeling was gone its memory and the certainty of God enabled me and gave me the strength to get through the rest of the gruelling rehab that lay ahead. God has never returned to me since, despite much chanting, a bit of meditating and a fair bit of yoga. That’s because I’ve never been able to summon the surrender necessary to properly open up to it. My surrenders since then have always been accompanied by the doubting voice of the devil, but maybe I can handle it.

The reader will be disappointed to read that this still wasn’t the end of the road for the stuff and me. No, I went back to Australia eventually and slipped back into my old ways just to see what it was like. Yes, just to see what it was like! I already knew what it was fucking like but I still had to have another little try. The hubris was still within me; I thought I could master the stuff even though nobody else ever has. I thought I’d learnt my lesson but no, I hadn’t. I slipped back into it slowly but surely. Which led to another six years of addiction and sorrow and loss when I could’ve walked away right then …

I sold my house in Rozelle and moved to Sweden where I bought a lovely little apartment in fashionable Sodermalm so I could be closer to Elli and Minna, but it was all for nothing as I just carried on with the stuff there. If anything I was worse than ever. An endless parade of rogues and thieves and prostitutes and dealers flowed through my life like characters in an awful story.

A couple of times I got nicked by the coppers there, and I also had a couple of near misses. Once, a copper chased me and another junkie along a street after we’d both just scored from the guy they’d already nabbed. We ran as fast as we could but the young giant of a copper gained on us quickly. I had two caps in my mouth and I wasn’t going to spit them out for anything. Two 500-krona caps that would keep me all right for two days? No way! Being sick scared me a lot more than being arrested. At the end of the street I went one way and the other junkie went another way and, the good Lord be praised, the young copper went after the other guy and not me. I got home sweating and puffing and exhausted, my heart going boom boom boom, but I had my stuff !

Another time I got run over on Gotgatan because I was looking at the traffic the wrong way, the way you do in Australia. But Swedes drive on the other side of the road. I knew my dealer Janne was in the pub across the road, and I was anxious to score after having just pawned a guitar up the road. I was feeling rather poorly because it’d been a while since my last fix. (You understand why the word ‘fix’ is so very apt; I sure needed to be fixed as I fell apart without the stuff.)

Anyway, I ran across the road and was hit by a grey Mercedes. I put out my arm to ward off the car and there was a crack and I was tossed into the air. I crawled off the road and sat in the doorway of a shop. A guy immediately came out of the shop and told me in my wretchedness to piss off from his shop.

The driver from the car had stopped and soon the cops and ambulance were at the scene. The cops wanted me to press charges against the driver, who they said should’ve been going slow enough to stop, but I didn’t want to cause the guy a load of trouble when it had actually been my fault. The ambulance guys said they reckoned my arm was busted and I had to go to hospital but I didn’t want to go to hospital or press charges – I just wanted to see Janne and go home and have a bloody fix! The cops said that if I could lift my arm above my head then I could go home, so with an almighty groan I lifted my arm above my head. The cops and ambulance people had a quick conversation and decided to let me go. The driver of the car was so relieved he slipped me a few hundred krona and told me to buy myself a drink. Somebody later told me I could have seriously sued him and his insurance company would’ve had to pay but now it was too late. And at the time I just didn’t care.

Everyone went away and I walked on down to the pub and scored from Janne, who was still waiting for me. Then I went home to my lovely little flat and had a lovely little fix. My arm was throbbing a bit but it was nothing compared to the feeling of withdrawals. Well that was all good until a few days later when my arm turned completely black. I had to go into a hospital and have it re-broken and reset – now that was painful: stupid and very painful!

And so I blundered on and on. Sometimes finding some money and indulging in the stuff big-time, and sometimes just scraping through by the skin of my dodgy English teeth. What a miserable grovelling excuse-filled existence it was, trying to rake up 500 krona every day (about a hundred Australian dollars) and travelling around Stockholm in the dead of winter meeting dealers in kiosks and churchyards and on train station steps.

In my three years there I had hundreds of dealers, all of whom would come and go or suddenly disappear. There was Juan the Spanish guy, who always had very good stuff but then he’d suddenly disappear without warning. There was Leffe, a taxi driver who married a junkie prostitute and thought he could supply her the stuff and keep her out of the game. But it didn’t work out: he ended up addicted too and she kept on turning tricks. I turned up to their place one day and the police were everywhere and Leffe’s wife hurried towards me and said, ‘Leffe hung himself today. You cannot go in there!’ Of course I was devastated but I still had to sort out my sickness. Instead of being shocked by his death, I saw it as just another damned inconvenience.

Then there were Carina and Janne. Coincidentally I’d known Carina long before all this, when she was about thirteen. She used to hang around with Pink Champagne and I think they might’ve actually had some legal guardianship over that poor waif. Her father and brother and many of their friends had raped her throughout the greater part of her young life. She came to find that the stuff switched off all those memories and allowed her to just be. Fifteen years later she’d become a hardened prostitute who worked so she could take the stuff. And took the stuff so she could work and forget the horrendous memories of unspeakable things that’d been done to her as a child by those who should’ve loved and protected her. She spent a terrible life in and out of jail and rehabs, until she passed away a few years back.

Her boyfriend Janne really loved her and cherished her. He was a two-bit dealer in and out of jail his whole life trying to forget his own demons. Together they had a semblance of a home life in a flat in the suburbs where they had a dog and everything. They just happened to be heroin dealers, but they were kind and generous people who loved each other and had found each other. There was no way those people could ever get off the stuff.

As recently as two years ago when I was visiting my daughters in Sweden I caught sight of Janne hurrying through a crowd at Skanstull subway station. Still doing some hustle, but by the looks of him things weren’t working out so well; Janne was a good man with a good heart doomed to a life of persecution by an idiot system not interested in damage control or harm reduction.

Sweden, with all its great socialist innovation, still had the most draconian knee-jerk response to drugs. They even refused to have a needle exchange program to help prevent AIDS, obviously preferring to take some hard line on drugs that was popular with the voters rather than actually showing some compassion for Stockholm’s thousands of heroin addicts. As I got to hang out with Carina and Janne more and more I met their coterie of friends, most of whom were in the same professions as they were. I found all of them were using the stuff to forget nightmarish childhoods or escape their memories of atrocities committed in the war-torn Balkans. I was the only one among them who’d drifted into the stuff for hedonistic reasons. If those people who’d been so terribly let down by society needed their nepenthe then I believed they bloody well deserved it. If they could’ve gotten their stuff the way other people could get alcohol then they would all have had normal, productive, happy lives. It was the illegality of the stuff that made their lives impossible.

In the end the routine was just sordid monotony. Getting the money and scoring. Over and over. As you can imagine I wasn’t doing a good job of being a father to my kids at this time. I was a hopeless, flaky, unreliable idiot. There isn’t really anything else to say. I’m deeply embarrassed and ashamed by my behaviour and am eternally sorry to my eldest twins.

That said, on a cosmic level something was going right for me. The arrogance, the hubris, the lack of empathy were now somewhat mitigated. I understood how it felt to lose and lose and lose. By the time it was all over all I had left was a bass guitar and a rusty car – pretty much what I started out with.

I look back now and realise it was just something that had to happen. I had to learn to eat some humble fucking pie because it was good for me. On tour in New York I got busted buying twenty bucks worth of stuff and was slung in jail for an afternoon and a night. From this harsh example I learnt to value freedom a bit more and learnt how complicated getting a bust can be when it comes to passports and customs and things. You bring down a lot more attention on yourself and everything is suddenly harder. I still get pulled over and interrogated, and it still scares me and fills me with unease. Luckily I got off with community service, spending a day cleaning a train downtown for my debt to society.

So I left Sweden in 2000 for a couple of years in America after having met an American girl on tour in 1999, and had another pair of twins. Early on in my time there I weaned myself off the gear with a bottle of methadone, which stopped the very worst of the withdrawals. I was no happy camper and didn’t realise at the time that heroin was finally behind me. I worried about drifting into it again, and spent about a month in some dull purgatory, not violently ill but not particularly well either. I felt old and achey and uninspired and had a lot of trouble sleeping at night, but what could I do but just keep going as the hurting hours trickled by like molasses?

Then one day I made a pivotal discovery. I was walking along a beach near where my two new daughters – not even two years old – were sitting with their mother. One got up and ran towards me and the other called out to me in excitement. And then it struck me: for the first time in ten or eleven years I was happy without any chemicals in my body. I was calmly contented and quietly happy. I searched my heart for thoughts of heroin; I was shocked to see the obsession had verily lifted. I was no longer in love with the stuff. I would never care about it again. I’d done my time and had learnt some things about being a decent human being that I might not have learnt if I’d just carried on being cashed up and successful. At the end of it all I’d sacrificed a million dollars and houses and studios and guitars and equipment. I’d lost the love and respect of many people, including my family and friends, some of whom decided to give me the benefit of the doubt, and some who didn’t. I certainly fucked up The Church’s chances, and I fucked up my chances at ever being a record producer, which I could’ve been good at.

In return I had my hard edges knocked off. Man, I was Napoleon-in-rags and I dealt with some hard-arsed bastards out there! Somehow I’m a better person for it. I regret the destruction but I don’t dwell on it. I did my time in hell. And now it’s over.