Why giving up booze is the most punk rock thing you can do

Sunday Magazine Oct 6 2019

There was the Sunday in a cafe I fell from my stool, out cold for four minutes, foam at my mouth, a nurse saying "I think it's a stroke" and my wife and daughter thinking these might be my last moments. In hospital they told me: "Your drinking did this."

You might imagine that was the day I stopped, but it wasn't.

There was the fancy black-tie dinner last winter sitting next to Sir Stephen Tindall, important networking to be done. Somehow that didn't stop me from wandering off to have whisky cocktails and collide with tables and people until I was collected by my daughter, then waking from my sleep in the Uber to tumble out onto our drive and you might imagine that was the day I stopped, but it wasn't.

There were all the mornings I woke with gaps in my memory of the night before. You might imagine it came to an end there, but no.

Sometimes I would say: From now on, two drinks and no more. It would work for a while, but it never held.

Eight months ago, it came to an end, no particularly unspeakable moment that brought it on, just one more awful hangover. I was finally utterly sick of it all, and myself: the waste, the foolishness of it, the selfishness; what I was expecting my wife and daughter to bear.

"You'll be back," people tell me. I can't prove I won't. All I can declare is: I no longer drink, I never want to go back. It's been 30 years since I said that about cigarettes and 30 years since I last had one.

It might be hard, but it's not hard to find moral support. Twenty-something film-maker and musician Morgan Albrecht, in her fifth year sober, tells me: "Sobriety is the new black. Very cool and very trendy, giving up." She has in mind media types like Russell Brand, Daniel Radcliffe, wild and crazy types like the Jackass guys whose most startling next career step turns out to be: sober.

But it's not everyone's cakewalk. She sees also "secrecy and shame around the decision process to be a sober person" and people only arriving at that decision having reached rock bottom and "in such pain that they need to change".

As a young person, she watched the effect of substances on people around her. Sooner rather than later, teenage rites of passage notwithstanding, she could see herself going sober. "Alcohol changed my personality to something I didn't like."

Steve Simpson, 49, long in advertising and the partying that can go with it, has been sober or just over a year. "When I was a young guy I was saying, 'I won't be doing this as an old guy.' But then you find you just keep doing it."

It began with a designated month off, the way he'd done a few times before. "A month's not hard – because you know there's an end date and it's not that far away." But this time he thought: keep going. "The future is now, time to bang it on the head."

How do you make it last? "At dinner parties, five o'clock drinks, bars, I reach for water instead of wine or whisky, keep filling my glass, and see where it takes me.

"I was worried I might be a bit dull without the liveliness booze brings out. It added a little energy. But just a little. You begin to see that people are getting a word in where they hadn't been. You begin to see that no-one misses a noisy drunk all that much."

At 49, Steve Simpson says mates are pretty supportive of him being sober – but that wouldn't have been the case in his 20s.

I had worried I'd make a dull husband. Karren tells me no-one misses a noisy drunk all that much.

You see more when you're sober. You see the changing shape of the evening from slightly stilted to relaxed and cheery and then a bit raucous and manic and on we go towards the village of shambles. You also notice some people slowing themselves down at the very point where you would have been reaching for another and picking up speed. Who knew?

Steve likes the zero alcohol beers for the work drinks. Seeing him without a bottle could make people almost a bit wary, he found, maybe gave them the feeling they were being judged. A zero in his hand has been enough to reassure them he's joining in.

How about the client you take for drinks? For a two to three-hour session he can "definitely still be equally good company sober. I guess the part that you don't have is the kind of bonding that happens at hours five, seven and 10. But I was just sick of that."

Also, that stuff has its dangers. He recalls horror stories of people entertaining clients to generous excess until the booze undoes the host and it all turns to insults and "you probably would have spent those thousands of dollars just to not have those results"

'"You'll be back," people tell me. I can't prove I won't. All I can declare is: I no longer drink, I never want to go back.'

He's decided to leave that stuff to the kids, if they want to do it. "It might once have been expected of you, but the modern landscape feels like you don't have to, and you shouldn't."

Drinkers of Steve's age, of his parents' age, of my age, we all got to know the binge, got to know that the way you do it is drink and drink and then drink some more. Will it always be this way? Steve has young work colleagues who can go all night without it: after-work drinks then BYO dinner then karaoke and enjoying themselves right on through to 2am and they're not drinking at all "and to me that's like the holy grail – dancing, just engaging and laughing and loosening up – revelry without booze."

Alcohol-free revelry? I assumed my new life would be a muted one, the price to pay for going on living. "God," Morgan says, "doom gloom and ginger ale!" The great news is: it's nothing like that. "Of course it's complex, but in my timeline it feels like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz when her life gets switched into Technicolor. It feel like it's a stretch of life that's, meh, and then you're switching on the lights."

She calls the sober portion of her adult life a new history. "Whole workplaces that I exist in now have never known me any other way. There are whole scenes of people who don't know what I look like with a drink in me.

And they think it's funny to imagine. People forget almost daily. I get passed drinks all the time on stage or after shoots, so there's a steadfastness in deciding none at all and sticking to that decision. Not just 'sometimes I don't partake'; it has to be not at all for me."

Morgan says she never would have had the confidence to play guitar in a band before she stopped drinking.

Sober, she finds her life more structured, more routine-oriented. She now loves to be home before midnight. "And as we know, when alcohol isn't getting in the way, sleep is beautiful. The freedom it affords me is astonishing: that decision of 'will I/won't I have a drink at the party' is completely removed. So there's all this clarity and space to do things, like making films and playing in bands."

There was a perpetual lethargy attached to my drinking. I only see that now. Even if I didn't drink for two or three days, it was still there, a lack of energy, the tendency to put things off to another day. Now the fog is clearing, and boy are things getting done. There are a billion trees to help plant, there's an underwater travelator for Auckland Harbour I've been banging on about for years and doing nothing. There are relationships to be restored, illusory ones to be ignored.

"I really enjoy just being on hand," Steve says. "I have had incidents where I've had to pick up my daughter in a taxi and while that's responsible, it's also not a good look. The weird thing for me is I still find it funny describing what is very disgraceful behaviour. There's something deeply illusory about the way you deal with drunkenness like news stories on TV that drunk students have thrown a couch on a fire. Comedy, comedy, comedy, and then someone dies and it's not funny any more."

How did we ever find ourselves in such a place? Through the front entrance: the awkward teen years. I discovered you could fit in if you took a crate of DB down to the river on Friday night. I never stopped drinking.

Steve played in bands. "Rock and beer go so well together… practice, you always bring beers. Soundcheck, you might as well have a beer to make it sound better. Get to the gig and you have a couple before you play, a few onstage and then afterwards it's time to party and it's massive – to the point where you could try to play a gig without drinking and feel completely naked."

Steve Simpson likes to have a zero alcohol beer at work drinks. Having a bottle in his hand makes others feel more relaxed.

His daughter turned 18 last week and is in a band. They had somebody joking they should do a shot before they went on. "I don't want to be too pious about it but that's where it starts."

Morgan, though, "never could play in a band pre-sobriety – a lot of good parts of my personality, like confidence, joy and all of that stuff, needed to emerge. I found: f... it, I could play in a band."

She used to work alongside the music industry "and I used to see firsthand what Steve's describing – the booze-saturated culture" – but she sees change. "Maybe it's more talked about these days, but in the last 10 years I've certainly known more sober musos."

I don't play, I just watch, although I often got trashed waiting to take the stage to be a speaker. What an appetite for self destruction. But what a revelation to discover you can enjoy music even more when your brain's not bent. What a revelation to find that afterwards when your friends are saying: "Right, where are we going for drinks?" You're saying: "I'm great, I'm going home," no need to drain away the memory of what you've just seen.

I would drink when things were bad. I would drink when things were great. It was as though anything of intensity was too much to handle.

'It feels like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz when her life gets switched into Technicolor. It feel like it's a stretch of life that's, meh, and then you're switching on the lights'

There was a funeral while I wrote this; an old friend from my parents' generation, a warm happy memorial, and afterwards, with cups of tea and sandwiches, a sideboard arrayed with bottles of his favourite Jameson, and shot glasses to raise in his honour. Plenty did. Just the one, mind.

I would not have stopped there, I see this now. I'd have raised a shot, and a second shot, a little more noisily, and a third, because now 

I'd be feeling a bit sentimental and a bit lit up, and probably someone else would have the same idea and we'd both pour a fourth and that would set the track for everything that followed, because after that, the drink is what matters most. I'd still be filling my glass as the crowd dwindled and the whiskey and shot glasses were being put away and maybe scan the room and see an unemptied wine bottle and don't mind if I do, and then it would be just two or three left and someone politely waiting and finally carting us on to wherever everyone else had gone and another one and another one until the end of the night at whatever hour that might be. And then in the morning, a pounding head and a day to grind through, waiting for wretchedness to end.

My problem is not that I'm the sort of drinker who's always starting, it's that once I start I don't stop.

Morgan says: "It can really rob you of the joy in life." Steve talks about our place in the food chain, the way a lion carries itself compared to our petty, scuttling, venal human ways. "We've got the big brain but not the self-assuredness of a creature at the top of the food chain and so we're always trying to deal with that." The thing is to embrace your nervous self "and then it's you dealing with it, not the booze".

Find yourself in a place where everyone is having a drink and launch yourself. "It's just saying no the first time. After that it's easy."

It's become a habit for me to register those moments where the old instinct for a drink momentarily comes on. I pause, think about what I'm needing to deal with, and deal with it. No more numbing, no more postponement.

Where do you find support if you need it? Morgan has the company of like-minded people "I have a lot of friends who are sober. I hang out with a lot of people on the same life path as me. I hang with people who don't drink, I'm married to someone who doesn't drink. But that doesn't mean that I don't hang out with normies or muggles. Each to their own, if I don't like what you're up to on the booze, I'll just remove myself, you know? I don't want to judge anyone."

Steve finds mates pretty supportive. "If you're trying to twiddle the knobs to find an equilibrium that works for you, people are sort of, 'Hey, good on you.' They might lament not doing what we used to do but I think most people who've been doing it for decades think about it." Not at 23 though. "I remember at that age if people were spending a couple of weeks on the wagon you'd make it your mission to try to pull them off. You weren't allowed not to drink and once again, funny at the time but…"

Sometimes Morgan misses the drinks connection in her day job in TV commercials. "It's just the way they connect, it's a kind of social buffer – but that's the only thing I miss. I can't think of anything more cool and punk rock than being able to show up at one of those things confident in my own skin enough to participate. I have new history of knowing what my personality is without anything to change it. It's cool to have some self-knowledge. Something to get me out of the house doing something."

Steve says: "A sad thing for me about drinking is you start to look at the events in your life coming up with alcohol as the highlights, where it's like Monday a struggle and Tuesday a struggle but don't worry, there's a good time coming up." You can turn that on its head if you're prepared to take a leap of faith. "While you don't have those party times, you can have a good day every day."

After 45 short years of drinking to excess, I look back at what might have been, vow to make the most of what's left. Morgan, not yet 30, tells me "better late than never. But even I think: why didn't I do it sooner?"