Being Davina - Nigel Goodall

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overpowering for those who encountered him, and more so because of his confrontational style.

      In the late 1980s, when Davina would have known him, Bowery collaborated as a dancer with the post-punk ballet dancer Michael Clark, having been the costume-designer for a number of years. He also participated in multi-media events like I Am Curious, Orange and the play Hey, Luciani, with Mark E. Smith and The Fall. In 1993, he formed Raw Sewage with Sheila Tequila and Stella Stein, and performed in 18-inch platforms at the Love Ball in Amsterdam, but the collaboration ended in dramas. Bowery went on to appear as Madame Garbo in The Homosexual or The Difficulty of Sexpressing Oneself by Copi at Bagleys Warehouse in London’s King’s Cross. In May 1994, he married his long-term female companion, Nicola Batemanin, just seven months before his death from an AIDS-related illness at University College Hospital in London on New Year’s Eve.

      Despite the fact that it has been reported elsewhere that it wasn’t until 1997 that Davina was able to rid herself of the destructive legacy of addiction to vodka and any class A drug she could get her hands on through counselling, it was actually six years before. In 1991, her half-sister Millie came home and caught her under a duvet in the middle of the afternoon. At the time, Millie was 11 years old, and, according to Davina, could see right through her. ‘She just looked at me and said, “Davina, you look awful!” And I thought, “God, you’re right. What am I doing to myself?” I realised then I wasn’t just harming myself, but I was letting other people down a lot.’ Part of that ‘letting other people down’, Davina explained, was when ‘I would tell Millie I would pick her up from school and just wouldn’t turn up. She would have to make her own way home. I’m deeply ashamed of the way I treated my family.’

      Not that she has any regrets today, or is about to apologise or be ashamed about what some may consider irresponsible behaviour. In fact, she is glad of the experience because of what it taught her. ‘Without wanting to say, “Hey everybody, go and get a drug problem!” – which is definitely not what I am trying to say – I’d say to anyone thinking of taking drugs, “It’s not cool, and it can ruin lives.” I am grateful that I have been where I have been because it has definitely made me a more grounded person. It has given me gratitude. When you get clean, you get so grateful for the smallest bit of good news, and people’s attitudes towards you change: you get asked to people’s houses again, and you are asked out to dinner because you are no longer a pain in the arse.’

      But now, as patron of Focus, a treatment centre for addicts in Suffolk run by Chip Somers, the person who gave Davina the most help when she needed it, she has – she says – been able to give something back: ‘They treat people irrespective of income, which is really important because by the time someone is ready to ask for help they are not going to have the money – they will have spent it all on drugs.’

      Although Millie was the initial trigger in Davina cleaning up her act, another turning point came when her best friend Sarah threatened never to talk to her again unless she turned over a new leaf. ‘She gave me a real rollicking and told me I was a loser. I burst into tears and that’s when my life started, when I stopped taking the drugs.’

      Today, she still attends Narcotics Anonymous meetings: ‘I have to be vigilant because I’ll never stop being an addict even though I have been clean for [15] years. Different people do different things and that’s what I do, and I love it. I feel very safe there because, if I get wellied, my willpower goes out the window. If I was drunk and someone went, “Do you want a line?” I can’t guarantee that I would have the wherewithal to say no. In the summer I’m like, “Please, please, I’m desperate for a chilled rosé” or in the winter a mulled wine.’

      She says the reason she couldn’t allow herself to have even one glass of wine – although her husband, Matthew Robertson, is a ‘wine nut, who spends a lot of time doing that lovely ritual of decanting and sniffing, and swooshing, and sometimes, you think, “You know, it looks fun”’ – is that she knows she’s not the sort of person who can do ‘one’ of anything. Not that she was ever a double-whisky-first-thing-in-the-morning type of person: ‘But it was doing my head in. Every day I felt like I’d been run over by a 10-ton truck. I’m an addictive person; I’m very driven but I can also be focused in a negative way, which was how I was to drinking. It took me a day to give up. It was affecting my life, so I just stopped.’

      But, she continues, ‘I would trust my life to an addict, an ex-addict who’s working some kind of programme in their life, like a 12-step programme. I would trust them with my biggest secret, my life, because there’s an unwritten code that makes them the most trustworthy person in the world. However, if an addict has used for one day, if I’d used for one day, I’d be the most manipulative untrustworthy person you could ever meet. Give me one drug and I’ll just be your worst nightmare, and that’s why I know I can’t do it. In my mad heady days when I was younger – clubbing and all that – I was having a really good time and then it all got out of control. And the older I get, the more accepting I am that I’m going to change all the time but my core – my morals and my manners – will stay the same. Even when I was using drugs I was quite a moral person; I had good manners, like “Please could I have the class A drugs?” and I was quite a loving person.’ But, of course, it could have turned out very differently indeed, if it was not also for the cautious counsel of one of her father’s closest friends.

      Andrew, who by now, in Davina’s words, was ‘a gorgeous graphic designer’, was mates with Eric Clapton, who was also an old friend of Davina’s aunt, and who better to help than someone who had actually had the same problem. No stranger to alcohol and drug addiction, it was Clapton who convinced Davina to check into a rehab centre in East Anglia. She did that as well.

      Clapton’s close friendship with Andrew was perhaps not the only reason why he wanted to help. Some years before her drug problem came out into the open, he and Davina had been romantically involved with each other for nine months. She was 18 and he was 41. Had she been as famous then as she is now, one can only imagine what the tabloids would have made of it. No doubt it would have been a relationship made in tabloid heaven. And had Clapton gone public about his mixed-up feelings about sex back then, announcing how he had in the past often used sex to bolster his low self-esteem, it would have been headline news. Although today he has changed his attitude towards women, there was a time, he says, when ‘girlfriends became a way of avoiding being with myself. I’d see a woman in a room and I’d be magnetised, and usually that would be dangerous because I don’t think you can be any good to anybody unless you’re OK on your own.’

      Similarly to Davina, Clapton was also raised by grandparents in Surrey. If, like her, the secret formula for success is an unconventional childhood, then again it is no surprise that Clapton – born out of wedlock and abandoned by his parents – would go on to become one of the most respected and influential artists from the 1960s rock era, and one of the very few to be a three-time inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Still widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential guitarists in pop music history, his musical style has gone through multiple changes during a career that now spans more than 40 years. Although always faithful to his love of the blues, Clapton is perhaps also now seen as an innovator of the different musical genres that have taken his career from the blues to psychedelic rock, pop and reggae with such bands as John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, the Yardbirds, Cream, and of course as a solo artist.

      He first ran into trouble with drugs in the early seventies at a time when he was emotionally and professionally distraught with an unsuccessful solo album and an infatuation with Patti Harrison, the wife of his friend Beatle George Harrison. Although he would at one point even pawn his guitars to feed his heroin habit, Clapton eventually bounced back in the early eighties with a couple of hit albums and singles after a two-year hiatus. He finally won the heart of Patti Harrison – and not so happily ended up with a new addiction, this time to alcohol.

      Bearing in mind that he probably came closer to a more fatal end than just another drink or another bout of drugs he was very well placed indeed to help counsel Davina about the same addictions with which he himself had battled. And with his music-biz background, he seemed the perfect mentor to help Davina in her bid to launch herself as a singer, and cut

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