Are you nervous doing interviews or are they just part of what you’ve always done?

What’s nice about having my site is that I can do this after a long period of time.
I’m not coming in here to say, this is my new album, I’ll be doing this TV show or there’ll be this interview in the Guardian next week, it’s not like that it’s just you asking me anything that you want and if I’ve got an answer I’ll give it to you, that’s the nice thing, whereas when you go into an interview like I was doing for the book. I knew that I’d written a very…

frank?

yeah, an extraordinarily frank book where I’ve written about every kind of scandal that you could pull on me. I’d written it for what it was and said ok this is as bad as it got and this is basically what happens to the majority of the people in my business if they were only honest about it, but they’re not, because they’re worried and that’s fine. They want to preserve something and maybe that’s the wisest thing to do, but I chose not to at the time.
When I went into those interviews it was really very difficult because I felt that I’d almost exorcised things and they were just asking me in detail about the demons and they kept coming up with the same thing all of the time. It was always bi-polar this, bi-polar that and it isn’t just black and white like that, it’s a sensation, it’s a part of your life that was one small part of a 30 year career in music and they’ve chosen to sort of go, ok we’ll focus just on this, this bad bit. I knew when I wrote it that if I hadn’t come clean with it and I hadn’t written it they would have done that anyway, they would have dived in for that, so in a way I felt like saying, when they were asking the questions, read the book, it’s in the book!
But I wouldn’t go into an interview situation and insult the interviewer by saying that. Don’t do it, because they’re gonna think I’ve come all of the way down here to interview you and you’re gonna tell me to read the book! Well I might as well have stayed at home and reviewed it!
It will take a lot of time for it to really sink in because others will come, other books will come out where people will see that and they want to vent what went on for real and not do it when they’re… ‘cos if you don’t do it someone will do it when you’re dead and then you’ve got no control over it. That then becomes their truth, so their truth becomes the truth and I really didn’t want it to be like that.
It was never meant to be an easy read because it wasn’t an easy time and it was written at a time when I was very much within myself and it was emotionally, mentally and physically extremely draining and it was full time and it was replacing the effort that I was always making in music. I was doing it in writing the book which is completely different from making music.

Did it feel good to actually get it out there in the public domain, to write about it and tell people?

It feels better now, it was very, very difficult at the time. Very, very difficult doing interviews, doing the in-stores and everything. I was still very uncommunicative, the communicative thing hadn’t returned.

You said in the book: “if I seemed a bit ghost like at the signings and in the documentary that was because only slowly did I feel myself returning to a kind of normality”
Do still feel this?

Absolutely, that’s true.
I think that the documentary is probably the most difficult for me to watch because I really was the lights were on but no one was indoors, you know what I mean? I was wandering through and the voice was very monotone and a large part of that is the medication that I was on at the time and that does make you very zombiefied. Everything is working but the actual expression in your voice, the animation is not there and that’s just the way it is and I think that it was just an effort to do it.
I thought that I’ve got to keep working, I’ve got to keep moving, keep motivating things trying to tell this story and I did, but it is very much a phase that is over and I’ve dealt with it and I don’t really in the future plan to be drawn into again. I think I’ve said a lot about it and I think that if people have questions about it that are outside of the tabloid-esque or the sensationalist side of it then so be it, if they’re intelligent.
Every situation is individual to that person and whether or not they acknowledge it happening to them as an illness or just as a phase they went through. I think basically everybody goes through it to some degree at one point in their life and it just happens to be if you’re in the right frame of mind, in the right place or round the right people when it happens to you that things don’t go wrong and they did go very, very wrong with me. I think that if you’re a performer or a person that has a degree of fame, you are in a cocoon whether you think you aren’t, you are and I stripped that cocoon away when I went to America. I wanted to be away from all of that and then I think with all of the stalking and all of that situation, it sort of caught up with me. It created a real hand grenade thrown into a sort of peace and it was just a wrong thing to happen, it was all wrong and BANG! An explosive, but coming out of that you think well it could be a lot worse, it could have been drugs, it could have been alcohol… it could have been robbing a bank! You know what I mean? Anything a car accident, a dreadful physical illness, that’s the bottom line of it, you thank your lucky stars. And because it is something that is taboo and it still is very much taboo

A lot of people do ask about it as people do genuinely care and they are interested, which is why it is still asked about. But a lot of people have opened up about it as it’s not such a thing to be ashamed of.

I do get quite a lot of letters through from people who have read the book and they’ve felt that it helped them because they were going through similar feelings and they didn’t realise that anybody else was going through or had gone through those feelings.
I think that when people put you up on some kind of pedestal they think that it wouldn’t effect somebody like you because you have all of the safeguards for protecting yourself from that and it isn’t, it’s just a human emotion and it’s just something that is the luck of the draw. It can be a series of bad events or something that happened when you were a kid and you didn’t even realise that it had happened. It could be a dreadful thing that you’ve witnessed, anything at all and it will just floor you.
It’s a very personal thing and I think that taboos are only killed if they’re dealt with and you actually say this is something that you can deal with.
I think that the best spokesman for it, far better than me, is Stephen Fry. I think that he has been extraordinary because he is extremely articulate and he can present on an hour long television show on the reality of the situation by just being honest and saying I’ve got nothing to lose, this is not going to destroy my career because he’s a very intelligent, brilliant entertainer and he said this is what happened to me, he was doing a play and disappeared.
You thought that it was just that, but he’d tried to kill himself in a garage with fumes before that. It was an incredibly honest thing to say and the way that he presented it was quite extraordinary.

Is the whole fame thing, being in the public eye, everything that you expected? As you are a very private person, there is the Adam public and Adam private, is that something that you’ve strived to do?

Yeah, even with the Adam and the Ants stuff, even in the early days I rarely went to award shows, parties or promotional things. I was never interested in that what has now become a celebrity culture. I never felt the need to keep my face in the paper outside of my work. I was able to do that.
I don’t feel the need to be constantly seen or go out to be seen at that place because that’s the trendy thing to do. I’ll only go to something if I really like what’s going on. The only film premier that I went to see was “The Hit” because Terence Stamp was in it, he phoned me up and asked me to go, so I went to see it, as did Tim Roth, as he’s a mate of mine and he said come down and see it.

I think that you also did Saturday Night Fever with Jordan

I think I went to something with Jordan to turn up, yeah! Nowadays it’s almost like people seem to spend most of their time at the film premieres which is ok but it would have to be something that I really wanted to see! And I think that you could always go and see it in private anyway!

Do find it difficult to go to gigs and things as I imagine that you are still recognised? Do you get a lot of attention and does that put you off going to places?

To a degree yeah, I think that its association, if you go to hang out where a lot of celebs go, if you go in and out of Soho House or whatever then the paparazzi are going to be there, but outside of that, no. I’m not going to dress up to go and get some Evian water!

and lastly the Prince Charming Revue and Kings of the Wild Frontier videos (Live in Tokyo) have the masters gone for those. When I spoke to you last you were having trouble tracking them down, are there any plans to get these onto DVD?

There are masters of them, they will eventually get out in some form. It would be nice to have pristine mastered versions of them presented in nice display boxes and again do them right. It could be exciting.