Singer opens up about addictions in new interview
Sir Elton John has opened up about his alcohol and drug addictions, admitting that he “wasted a big part” of his life on cocaine.
The 65-year-old singer, had a well documented battle with alcohol and cocaine until 1990, and now says he wish he could have become cleaner sooner so that he could have enjoyed his life more.
In an interview with the Today show, Elton said: “I wasted such a big part of my life, when this epidemic was beginning to happen in the early 1980s. And I was a drug addict and self-absorbed.
“You know, I was having people die right, left and centre around me, friends. And yet, I didn’t stop the life that I had, which is the terrible thing about addiction. It’s that bad of a disease.”
”I never considered myself a drug addict,” he said. “I thought drug addicts were people who stuck needles in their arms – and I was the biggest junkie there was. I came very close to dying. I’d have an epileptic seizure and turn blue and people would find me on the floor and put me to bed, and then 40 minutes later I’d be snorting another line.
“It was fun in the early days because I thought, being shy, that cocaine, because it made me talk, was the key – ‘I can talk now, I can be one of the gang, I can fit in’. I lost all my friends and the people that loved me didn’t want to know me. My mother left the country.”
Elton John has a very different life now, as he welcomed his first child, via a surrogate mother on Christmas Day 2010.
The singer has revealed he’d love his son Zachary to have a little brother or sister, as he knows how hard it is to be an only child.
