Clayton celebrates 20 years free of addictions

U2 bass player and reformed wildman Adam Clayton is delighted to be sober and straight 20 years after his addictions reached new heights.

In 1993, Adam hit the bottle while U2 were on tour in Australia, and wasn’t able to perform at their gig in Sydney Football Stadium after an all-nighter. A roadie took his place on bass and the band just about pulled the gig off.

The band had been very patient with party animal Adam, who was once engaged to catwalk diva Naomi Campbell, but he realised that this could very easily be the end of the road for him.

“It was a pretty awful feeling and you promise yourself it will never happen again. I was lucky. I realised that if I didn’t do something about it I’d lose everything. I’d run out of excuses.

“The other members of U2 were beginning to realise that I wasn’t handling my addiction very well.”

He added: “I became a very bitter kind of person that wasn’t living up to my potential. There comes a point, as you age, when that’s not very gracious. I was in a successful band with great people whose lives were functional. They were in long- term relationships and raising families. I hated not feeling good enough.

“I wasn’t very good at relationships, to be honest,” he added.

“Zoo TV was a period of confusion for me. I think that being so successful took me 10 years to get used to. There were a lot of things I could no longer do like going to gigs and not having people talk to you all the time. It was also hard being in a room where everyone knows more about you than you do about them. But if you stay successful long enough, you manage to get the hang of it.

“I think I had a predisposition [to addiction]. The first time I took a drink or drug or had any experience of excitement, my immediate reaction was: ‘I want to do that again. Give me more. Double it.’ That probably wouldn’t have changed if I’d been a plumber.”

Adam, who has one child, figured out on his own that he couldn’t continue his hedonistic lifestyle.

“You kind of give yourself a slap around the face. If you put limitations on yourself, you can remove them as well. Nowadays I can take the Tube in London or the Subway in New York. I enjoy it. And Dublin is a very easy city to live in. But I’m lucky, I’m just the bass player in the band.”

These days Adam says he goes to bed at night looking forward to the next day and feels he has beaten “the devil inside” at last.