Nobody could say that Anthony Kavanagh does not know how to laugh at himself. The day he was fired from his record label, he trudged across London in the rain, walking and walking, as the realisation sank in that he was no longer a pop star. Soaked, he went into a pub and the woman behind the bar offered him a grubby tea towel to dry off. Washed-up indeed, he thought.
His memoir, Pop Scars, is sprinkled with darkly comic takes on what his life had become after 90s pop stardom. Known as Kavana, he had a Top 10 hit in 1997 with his cover of Shalamar’s I Can Make You Feel Good. “I’ve always somehow been able to find the humour, even at some of the darker times,” he says.
And there were dark times. Making a joke about a Neil Sedaka song (“Oh, Carol. Oh fuck, more like”) to describe the reality of waking up in a stranger’s apartment; fragments of a memory of driving down Sunset Strip with Sedaka on the car stereo; the realisation he had been paid for the sex he couldn’t remember. Smoking crack in a skip in Hackney with a homeless woman he had just met, and whom he trusts with his bank card to go and score more drugs (“Note to self,” he writes, “never give a stranger your pin code when high”). There are funnier, less serious incidents – he earned a lifetime ban, he says, from the daytime TV show Loose Women after slurring his way through it and being “unhinged” backstage – but in general, it’s a fairly bleak account of addiction, pain and what happens when the pop machine spits you out.
He is very hard on himself, I say, when we meet in the offices of his publisher (at 47, he retains the boyish looks that made him a teen favourite). “Well, I had that narrative for a long time. I think when you have a lot of rejection …” He pauses. As an alcoholic in recovery, and three years sober, he is kinder to himself now. “But looking back, that’s definitely how I felt.”
Writing the book has helped. “It’s given me some self-esteem which is, I think, what I’ve been lacking for a long time.” He worried he wasn’t a big enough name to be interesting to anyone now, until he started to view the book as a memoir of addiction, “and that includes the fame part, because really I was only chasing a feeling. Approval, basically.” And what happens after fame disappears. “I have a bit of empathy for the young me, because although I was driven and ambitious and smart, I was also very naive.”
Growing up in Manchester in the 1980s, born to parents who already had a 20-year-old daughter, Kavanagh wanted nothing more than to be a pop star. Smash Hits magazine was his bible – every fortnight, he’d bring it home from the shop, “take it in my bedroom and go through the pages. It was just an escape into this fantasy world.”
Bullied, and with the dawning realisation he was gay, he found school an ordeal, but he also had an iron belief that he would be a famous pop star one day. Where did that come from? “Delusion?” he says with a laugh. “Maybe wanting to escape. I just had a feeling, and I would go around telling everyone that it was a given – I was going to be on Top of the Pops.”
When he became successful – Top 10 singles in the UK, adored in Asia – the picture he gives is of an excited and confused teenager in a bewildering world. It would have been easier, he thinks, if he’d been in a boyband, because at least there would be backup. He had body image issues: he had been overweight as a young teenager, and people around him still commented that he was “chubby”. “I used to get a bit fearful sometimes in the photoshoots.” Mostly he was afraid of being outed, when his success with his teenage girl fans depended on him being a “straight” pop star. “There was fear in general, regardless of being a pop star. I hadn’t told my parents. I didn’t tell my sister till I was 18. It was a different age then.”
Sometimes, on tour with other artists, he would share a passing glance with another man and wonder if they were interested. “You’d have a little feeling, but I dared not say to you, in case you then tell somebody else.” On one tour, he and Stephen Gateley, from the boyband Boyzone, spent the night together.
Keeping his sexuality hidden must have been incredibly difficult. “It was, and that’s where alcohol came in as a comfort. It’s crazy when I look back now, the time that we were in. It was a constant act, and it was exhausting – but you just got on with it, because I was so lucky for this to happen to me, and I must be grateful. I put everything into the ambition.”
It’s strange, Kavanagh says, to be doing interviews again at a time where he doesn’t have to hide his sexuality, and there is more understanding of the pressures on young pop stars and power dynamics in relationships. “We didn’t talk about mental health. Today you hear they give artists aftercare or therapy, but there wasn’t any of that then. I suppose I didn’t have the knowledge to ask, either. What would I have asked for? We didn’t use those words back then. And when it’s so fast, fast, fast, and there’s a lot of ‘yes’ people, and you’re told how fantastic you are, that’s enough sometimes to make you feel OK.” It made it harder, he says, when only a few months later, the fame bubble popped. “Especially if it becomes your identity,” he adds.
Even when he was successful, he says, “I was never satisfied. I won a Smash Hits award – like, that was the holy grail to me. It doesn’t get much better than that. But then, I think maybe the addiction side, you want something else. I kept wanting more and more. At 21, I decide I’m going to go and live in America, I’m going to make it there.” He laughs at himself – the young man who had just been dropped by his record label, and who genuinely believed he could move to Hollywood and pick up an Oscar. “It’s like, OK, that’s a normal thing to do.”
It actually started well: he got an agent, and a small part in a soap within the first week, but only for a couple of episodes. He was trying to release his own music, become a songwriter, go to auditions, but mostly he was lonely, burning through his money and drinking more and more. Sometimes drugs, too, including crystal meth. But, he says, “Alcohol was the start and the end. I would never have taken drugs without alcohol. But yeah, I was like a loose cannon for some of those times, got myself into some situations.” Such as waking up in a stranger’s flat, realising he had been paid for sex.
Kavanagh ended up living in a motel, then eventually returned home after seven years – in 2006 – penniless. It meant losing his parents’ home, which he had been paying the mortgage on. “That comes with a whole load of guilt, because I’m moving two elderly parents, they’ve lost this house. So that’s more reason to drink.”
His years out of the UK meant everyone had forgotten about him. He looked around at the people who had grown up with him – former pop stars and actors such as Ant and Dec, and Billie Piper – who had successfully reinvented themselves, and felt as if he’d made a mistake. “So then there’s shame and regret with that.” He smiles. “There was no jungle [the I’m a Celebrity … reality show] in them days to go on when your pop career is washed up. When I disappeared … ‘I’ll make it in Hollywood!’” He tried to stage a comeback, releasing a “best of” album and appearing on reality shows including Celebrity Big Brother and Grease Is the Word, but he sabotaged many opportunities by being drunk. He started hanging around with the singer Amy Winehouse, who had her own alcohol addiction, and crashing at the flats of his few remaining loyal fans, drinking more.
Signing on at the jobcentre back in Manchester, he was scared of being recognised – people had started, dishearteningly, to ask him: “Didn’t you used to be Kavana?” “I was so wrapped up in my own shame,” he says. “I was having to drink.” And alcohol worked for him, he says, “for a long time. I’m not sitting here saying: ‘Oh, it was tragic, it was awful.’ Alcohol got me through my father’s death. It kind of got me through my sister’s death [from cancer in 2019]. It got me through feeling nervous, it got me through going on stage, homesickness. But I didn’t realise what it was doing to me.”
By the time he was essentially homeless, living secretly with his mother in her sheltered housing flat, Kavanagh was deep in addiction. He applied for a place at rehab mainly, he says, to have somewhere to live, and was sober for six months before spectacularly relapsing on a songwriting retreat, and drinking neat vodka in a phone box. In London, he would go through a cycle of attending AA meetings, then drinking again. By the time he was buying three-litre bottles of cheap cider to drink in the mornings (along with tins of cat food, to create, he thought, an air of respectability), he knew he was in trouble.
“Alcohol became as important to me as oxygen to survive,” he says. “That sounds quite melodramatic to somebody that has never experienced that, but I knew the game was up. I wanted to stop, but I physically couldn’t.” He would often spend the rest of the day at a Costa coffee shop, pretending to work on his phone and sipping wine from a paper cup.
One day, an email from a lawyer came through. A newspaper had agreed to settle a defamation case he’d long forgotten about from the 90s, and the sum was more than he had seen in a decade. “I’m drinking wine out of the coffee cup, and just that divine timing,” he says.
He called his AA sponsor, and asked for help to find a private rehab clinic. “At that point I needed to be locked up,” he says. A friend drove him there, and Kavanagh remembers the friend telling staff he thought alcohol had caused him brain damage. “To think that I’d got myself in that state.” Kavanagh thought alcohol would kill him. “I’ve seen it happen to others, and I think it scared me that last time in rehab.”
For whatever reason, rehab worked, and Kavanagh has been sober for three and a half years. He wakes up, “and I pray to a god that I don’t understand, and just say, ‘You drive today.’ I go to meetings, I try to be of service. Anything that takes me out of thinking and negotiating things in my head, I’ve learned, is what helps. Connecting with others.”
Kavanagh wrote his book during the first year of sobriety. “I’ve got access to this new life now, but I just have to remember that that’s where it took me last time.” He is proud to call himself an author, and might make some music again at some point. He’d quite like to do a one-man show.
Does he still crave approval and recognition? “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t crave approval. I’m not sure about being hugely famous, because I know how fleeting it can be, but there’s definitely something to be said about putting something you’ve done out and getting positive feedback. Or people connecting to me.”
Pop Scars by Anthony Kavanagh (Bonnier Books Ltd, £22). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
In the UK, Action on Addiction is available on 0300 330 0659. In the US, call or text SAMHSA’s National Helpline at 988. In Australia, the National Alcohol and Other Drug Hotline is at 1800 250 015; families and friends can seek help at Family Drug Support Australia at 1300 368 186
