Darren McGarvey on the state we're in, and his secret relapse

The Herald Scotland

a day ago

Darren says that night in Central Station was the last moment of a relapse into substance abuse that never became public. He was appearing at events espousing the principles of recovery and healing but in private was in the grip of a relapse. He remembers buying over-the-counter painkillers from lots of different chemists, he also remembers the codeine high wearing off and working out how soon he could get more. By the end of the week, he was taking paracetamol and ibuprofen together, his digestive system was in meltdown, and he decided the best way to cope was to take up smoking again and use laxatives. Next came nausea, headaches, his weight plummeted and yet he couldn't see he was in trouble. He couldn't see he was in danger.
I ask him how he navigated that difficult period as a public figure who had famously 'recovered'. 'It began as 'it's just over-the-counter pain killers' so you can still be compos mentis. I wasn't drinking and it wasn't crazy cocaine use. But it was when I tried to stop and I was experiencing withdrawals which are quite difficult when you're coming off opiates. So that can go on for a while and you minimise it and you don't think it's a big deal and instead of letting people know I was struggling, I decided to try to mastermind my own detox.'
Darren rose to prominence as rapper Loki (Image: Newsquest)
The obvious question is why he wasn't letting people know. 'If I'd told them, they would've known I'd been dishonest and no one wants to be found out for that,' he says. 'I carried a lot of shame, and I had a book coming out and I didn't want to worry people. There was a part of me that thought I can't tell anyone because they're going to hit the stop button and writing that book was f*****g hell, in lockdown, my kids were so young. The crux of it is I wasn't engaging with my recovery, I wasn't in a group doing the stuff that I know keeps me well, so it's 100% my responsibility that I relapsed.'
The last moment of the relapse, in Central Station, was as grim as it gets. 'I only drank for one night but what happens if you're an alcoholic is when you drink, your mind wants to drink at the level you were always drinking at before and your body doesn't have a tolerance for that so you get sick really quickly. It was a painful reminder that my real battle is beyond class-politics and careers and all of that. I'm one of those people who if I don't stay well, I'm at risk of dying from this stuff.'
Some of this struggle is in Darren's show at the Fringe, which is part lecture, part rap, part funny, part deeply uncomfortable. But the reason I'm feeling a bit awkward over the story about Central Station and whether he should be telling me and whether I should be telling you is because the show, and his new book, talks about the price that he, and other people, have paid for being open about their trauma; he also talks about the part the media plays in it. The expectation – and we're doing it right now in the café in Edinburgh – is, or was, that Darren tells people like me his stories of poverty and addiction and I tell you and we're supposed to learn something from it. But Darren is fed-up with the expectations. In one of the pivotal moments of his show, he points at himself, his public self. 'The man standing before you today,' he says, 'is not me.'
Darren knows there are contradictions at work here. The mission of his show and his book, Trauma Industrial Complex, is to warn about the dangers of oversharing your life and traumas on TV, online, wherever. But the 41-year-old is also aware of the paradox it sets up in his life: the fame and success he's achieved came about in large part because he shared his traumatic stories and he knows, to his frustration, that the continuation of the fame and success depends in large part on him continuing to share the trauma. He sometimes feels, he says, like an artist waking up one morning to find he's trapped in his own drawing.
Darren's book, and the show, is a response to all of that. At one point in the show, he has his head in his hands and says he isn't cut out for life: 'Why does everything feel so hard?' he says. Later – the lights on his face spelling out one word: TRAUMA – he reels off, rap-style, incidents from his childhood in Pollok with his alcoholic mother, including one of the most infamous from his book Poverty Safari: 'My mother is annoyed because I won't go to bed. She walks into the kitchen and takes a knife from the drawer…' He asks the audience if we're feeling uncomfortable but says that's too bad and he will not wrap things up with a nice little TED Talky ribbon because the truth, he says, is that is 'not how trauma f*****g works'.
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Darren says quite openly that some of this is a performance – it was his performances, as the rapper Loki, that got him noticed in the first place – but the reason he got noticed, and the reason he's been such a success, is that the performance is based on truth: he really is struggling with who he is. As his success grew, he says, the people he interacted with became gradually less representative of where he grew up and more representative of the spheres he'd spent his youth calling out and criticising. It's caused issues for him and raises questions about class: which class he is, how it affects him, how it affects us all.
'I came to prominence as a sort of rabble rouser,' he says, 'or someone who'd get in your face whenever I expressed passion. Then as the years went on, I was in recovery for a while, that all kind of toned down a bit and I started to experience almost feeling shunned by my original community as a result. I'm also aware that in some sections of the Left, in Scotland certainly, I've kind of fallen out of favour as a result of being successful or working with the BBC and all these things that really put a mark against you. I started to feel like I was someone who didn't belong anywhere.'
Because it comes up a lot in his work, I ask him if he feels like he still belongs in the working class. 'Well, I live in East Kilbride round the corner from a Greggs and three off-sales and four chippies and we've stayed where we were before all of this happened. My wife is an academic, we have an espresso machine, so if these are the trappings of a more middle-class lifestyle, then absolutely, I've changed classes in terms of the economics. But I can still feel that my intuitions, in terms of the political temperature, or my understanding of how our economy is structured, it's still very much of the Left and I would say working class.'
He also believes society is still self-evidently hard for the working class and the poor and is getting harder. 'The UK is a basket case, politically, economically, it just is,' he says. 'This country is for rich people to get rich. Every single day a company based in the UK posts £5bn profit while we've turned the department of work and pensions into a low-rent FBI to snoop on people's bank accounts. That is not happening anywhere else in Europe because we're trying to claw back money form the weakest people in society, because we have empowered rich people so much that we can't do anything but hold a begging bowl out to them. 'Please create some low-paid jobs, please don't leave'. And the UK is distinct in that because there's much more balance between neoliberal economics and a social contract all over Europe. In this country, people are getting shafted.'
McGarvey has been performing at the Fringe (Image: Newsquest)
Darren says he can also see, and feel, the effects of class inequality in his own field: the arts. You may have seen his post on X the other day questioning why he wasn't included in the programme of the Edinburgh Book Festival and he stands by it. Working-class performers and writers such as him, he says, are effectively excluded from the festival because they aren't part of the middle-class network that feeds it. It's a stitch-up against the working class, he says.
The other thing that bugs him is what look like nice middle-class solutions to largely working-class issues: trauma and social inequality, he says, are deeply intertwined so the solutions aren't easy. Take public policy on drugs for example and specifically The Thistle, Glasgow's controversial safe consumption facility; I don't know why but I expect him to be supportive of it but he isn't.
'I suspect a lot of good work will be done at The Thistle and it will be saving a lot of lives,' he says, 'But for a lot of folk it will be prolonging misery when if we had rehab more available, people could go in and try to get into a rehab and get sober. I think we suffer from the bigotry of low expectations in the drug sector because resources are so stretched, we say that recovery, complete sobriety, is beyond certain people because they're too chaotic. But part of the reason they're too chaotic is because the services are in shambles. They're doing the best they can but the key ingredients to make a real dent in the drug crisis, they're just not available because economically the UK is f****d.'
He's equally sceptical about legalising drugs. Again, I tell him I'm quite surprised by his opinion and he laughs. 'We're curious creatures, addicts. It's because I know the appetite for drugs is out there. So you'd have safer drugs, and you'd maybe get an economic dividend from the sale of drugs going back into the economy, but we can't even divert money from minimum pricing back into services. So could we do it with vending machines for valium?'
But at least legalisation would steer people away from dealers and crime, I say. 'The dealers will undercut everything that's available,' he says. 'Think how persistent they've already been – the police don't even go after them. So yes, you'll steer some people away, but you'll also open a new population to the idea that 'well, drugs must be safe because it's legal'. That's not a blanket against legalisation, but in Scotland, this time, right now, it wouldn't work.'
The book may surprise many readers (Image: Contributed)
As Darren admits himself, some of these views might seem curious for a guy with his history, but that's the way it is: it's complicated. His political views are still of the Left but one of the things that seems to have driven a wedge between him and some former political comrades is that he talks about the role of personal responsibility in navigating poverty and addiction and he stands by it: 'If there was a service to meet every need, you couldn't get an alcoholic to stop unless they decide,' he says. He was also one of the most prominent supporters of Scottish independence but has a dim view of the current version of the SNP: 'a bunch of caretakers'.
What's also complicated, in the end – and this is what his show and book is really about – is who exactly Darren McGarvey is now. There's all the stuff about class and his upbringing, but he lists some of his other identities: male, white, heterosexual, Catholic, addict, introvert, artist, househusband, father (to a boy and a girl), gym-bro and prolific daytime napper – these are also facets of him, he says, but are never telegraphed with the same intensity as his class. He also says there's a lot in his childhood that was positive: his father's resilience as a single parent, his awesome aunties and uncles, the long hot summers. But again: none of that is part of the public story in the way his trauma is, and it's not just the media that's done that, it's Darren too.
The problem, as Darren says in his book, is that people want the tidy story arc: how bad it got, what we learned, where we are now, a neat beginning, middle and end that ruffles few feathers, but Darren's story isn't that and never was. He says he's nowhere near as 'recovered' as he'd like people to believe. He rails against the burdens of being a public face of poverty, addiction and trauma and yet doesn't know who or where he'd be without it. Even the anger isn't what it was; he's much more cautious, he says, about wading into the wars online; much better to stay at home and enjoy some of his other identities that don't get as much publicity.
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But here's some anger from Darren to end with, for old time's sake. It emerges when I ask him for his take on the UK, our politics, our relationship with alcohol, the state of the place. 'We're leading the field in all the wrong areas,' he says. 'You're in the Netherlands or France, Germany, Italy, the wine's out, but people aren't falling about the streets, there's not someone in psychosis every hundred yards along the road. There's something corroded about the UK. Transport, politics, media. You land at Edinburgh Airport, or Heathrow, and you feel your butt clenching as soon as the plane hits the tarmac. The emotional signature of this country is so much more unpleasant. You feel it on the roads, you feel it on the buses, you feel it everywhere, and it's because our public services were sold to the highest bidder 30 years ago.'
He stops and gives me one example: 'In Amsterdam they're building little staircases to help cats climb out of canals. Here, we're fishing human faeces out of the rivers.' Which isn't the neat ending some of us might want, and it certainly isn't tied up with a nice TED Talky ribbon. But it is the authentic Darren McGarvey, or one of them.
Trauma Industrial Complex by Darren McGarvey is published by Ebury Press and is out now.