Entrevista en The Telegraph
"I thought I was going to die,†says Tom Chaplin, with grave earnestness. “I’ve had that feeling before but this time it was very intense. I had been on a massive bender for days and I couldn’t breathe, I was having a panic attack, I was standing next to a wall thinking, I’m going to keel over and that’s it.â€
Chaplin is talking about the exact moment his life changed, one night in early 2015. As the baby-faced, angelic-voiced singer in multi-million selling band Keane, he became, in his own description, “a raging drug addictâ€.
Now he is back, with a powerful debut solo album, The Wave, in which he addresses his struggle with personal darkness and redemption. One song, Worthless Words, vividly deals with the day Chaplin thought he was dying.
“I’d wake up and think, ‘I’m going to be OK today’, but somehow I’d find myself dragged into this unstoppable desire to go and get high. Often it would be when my wife left for work.†He quotes his own lyric: “Three days later, I’m fighting for breath / Death sees me look out over the edge / A soft sweet whisper says ‘careful where you tread.’ Because in that final binge, I could hear my daughter saying: ‘just hang on one more moment, see if you can do it.’â€
Leaner, greying at the temples, considerably wiser, at 37 Chaplin cuts a quietly impressive figure. He talks about his problems without self-pity. “I don’t want to say I suffered with addiction – I hate that. I did this to myself.â€
He knew he was reaching rock bottom on the night he almost died. “There had been a change in other people’s behaviour. The people I loved were giving up on me. My wife said: ‘I want to tell you that I love you because I don’t know whether I will get a chance to again.’â€
But all this time he had kept one lifeline. “I had been seeing this psychoanalyst for four or five years, it was the one thing I kept sacred, so there was a part of me that was thinking, ‘you’ve got to try and get back to sanity’. And it all came together in that moment. I thought, ‘I’ve had enough of this.’ I just couldn’t do it any more.â€
This is the story told in The Wave, transformed into some of the most gorgeous, anthemic, uplifting music of Chaplin’s career. What makes it even more extraordinary is that it marks Chaplin’s recorded debut as a songwriter. As the voice of Keane, he was always singing his bandmate Tim Rice-Oxley’s songs. “I don’t think I had access to the parts of myself I needed to in order to write good songs. I don’t care what anyone says, I think drugs and creativity are thoroughly incompatible.â€
Chaplin grew up in Hastings, East Sussex. His father, David Chaplin OBE, was headmaster of Vinehall School in Robertsbridge, which the members of Keane all attended. “It was a very middle-class existence, with a straight path and quite clichíéd ideas about the way life is lived. I kind of grew up with no idea of how bad things could be.â€
They formed Keane as school friends in the mid-Nineties. “I used to do 50 per cent of the songwriting in the days before we were a success – make of that what you will.†They did not release their debut album until 2004, by which time Rice-Oxley had taken the mantle of the group’s musical leader. Hits like Everybody’s Changing and Somewhere Only We Know carried the trio to global stardom but it came at a strong personal cost to Chaplin.
“The environment is intoxicating: the money, the adoration, the sense of people around you singing your praises all the time.†It provided cover for deepening insecurities. “Fame was a very elaborate defence, putting myself out there and looking for all the money in the world like an assured frontman. It is a kind of mask.â€
He became extremely conflicted about his singing voice. “On the one hand, it is a beautiful instrument and I am in sole charge of it. But it seems to suggest a kind of pure and angelic quality in me as a person. And there is real darkness in my soul.
“Crushing that part of myself, it came out in peculiar ways: panic attacks, anxiety and depression. It ended in addiction.â€
Chaplin was admitted to the Priory in 2006 and gave interviews afterwards suggesting he had made a full recovery. He married girlfriend Natalie Dive in 2011. In 2013, he broke from Keane, driven by a desire to write songs again. But anxiety over his solo album presaged a new crisis: “I got back to shovelling coke up my nose.â€
In 2014, his daughter was born. “It coincided with the worst of my drug abuse. It was a succession of crazy binges that soon weren’t binges any more, they just started to be strung together.†He describes his year of full-blown addiction as “a living hell†but also tries to draw out positives. “I feel a lot of the tension and the resolution, the conflict, the darker emotional stuff that is required to be inspired, I lived that. And then I was able to write the album from a point of view of reflection.â€
Keane fans won’t be dismayed by the results. The Wave is imbued with an optimistic spirit of survival, full of pop songs that are lyrically acute and melodically rich. “It kind of reflects the therapeutic process I went through.â€
Chaplin has repaired his relationships, and says the past 12 months have been the happiest of his life. He lives with his wife and daughter on the Kent-Sussex border, close to where he grew up. “Through the periods of my worst addiction, I did keep my family at arm’s length, but now I can’t get enough of sharing times with my parents. It has been one of the lovely changes as a result of getting well.â€
Relationships with his former bandmates are good, too. “There was a bit of a cooling off period, which was perhaps inevitable if you spend 20 years together. But we have a deep love and respect for each other that is always there. †He does not rule out a Keane reunion: “I don’t want to try and predict the future.â€
For the moment, he is focused on his solo album. The opening single, Quicksand, receives its first radio play today. Chaplin is acutely aware that he is stepping back into an environment that almost destroyed him.
“It is fraught with danger and I have thought about that very deeply. I am savvy enough to realise you are never out of the woods. But this time I feel prepared.â€
Tom Chaplin’s debut solo album, The Wave, will be released by Island in October. A single, Quicksand, is out later this month
