Just about every recovering alcoholic remembers their rock bottom moment; the point where the shame and self-loathing reach critical mass and something has to give. Call it the last chance saloon.

Uncut journalist and author Nick Johnstone’s alco-epiphany went something like a scene from Joseph Roth’s Legend Of The Holy Drinker. You could call it a divine intervention. For some unknown but nonetheless providential reason, Johnstone, raised an atheist, took it upon himself to visit the Sacre-Coeur cathedral at the tail end of an ugly bender one rainy night in Paris.

“I was with a good friend of mine,” he recalls, “and we had gone to Paris really for no other reason than there was a cheap deal on Eurostar. The plan was to drink as much as we humanly could, from the night before we went ’til the day we got back – Bloody Marys for breakfast. By the evening it was that point where you’ve drunk so much that you can’t really get that sort of giddy excitement anymore, you’re flatlining.

“And it started raining as we left this restaurant, and I said, ‘I don’t know why but we’ve got to go up to the Sacre-Coeur’. And when I got inside, never having had any interest in organised religion before or since, some kind of spiritual awakening happened to me, definitely. I walked into the cathedral, it was very late at night and all the candles were going and there was a mass in full swing and I just sat down and started crying. It went on for about 35 or 40 minutes. It was just: ‘This has to stop. I feel ill. I’m destroying myself’. It was this enormous shame, just feeling like a tiny speck of dust inside this enormous cathedral, not pure enough or clean enough to be in there. It was a peculiar moment – I felt like I was under the spotlight. I was caught.”

Nick Johnstone’s story differs from other alcoholic memoirs in that it doesn’t start with the first drink nor end with the last. Instead, the writer identifies his addiction as being the result of “faulty wiring” in his psychological make up; a kind of anxious buzzing that began when he was still a boy.

“When I was eleven the humming got louder,” he writes. “It was no longer a single wasp, trapped inside my skull. There were many wasps, bees too, all humming until there was an itch inside my brain, an exhausting itch I had no hope of scratching.”

Aside from the alcoholism, Johnstone also struggled with recurring bouts of depression and self-harm (a euphemism for cutting). A Head Full Of Blue is his first book proper – previously published work includes biographies of Sean Penn and Patti Smith – and he was all too aware of the pitfalls of recounting his ten-year lost weekend a la Pete Hammill (A Drinking Life) or John O’ Brien (Leaving Las Vegas). Yet, the feeling that no-one had articulated his experience kept him going through draft after draft of the book, a painstaking process that was as gruelling as it was cathartic.

“I didn’t feel like there was any book out there that just said, ‘Look, this is how you feel’,” he explains. “ And books like Jay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind or Susanna Kaysen’s Girl Interrupted or Caroline Knapp’s Drinking, A Love Story or the two books you mentioned, all of those together had bits and pieces I could identify with, but nothing said, ‘Here’s your particular mix’. So when I started writing it I just thought, ‘Right, this is the book that’s never been there’.”

Right enough, A Head Full Of Blue differs from the majority of drinking tell-alls in that it is the chronicle of a functioning alcoholic, a working soak. It recounts the struggle of a guy trying to maintain some veneer of normalcy in the face of his affliction.

“For me I felt it’s too clichéd, the idea that somebody just ends up in a complete mess and they lose their home and the relationship breaks up and even the dog dies, all that sort of stuff,” he continues. “And I just thought, well, it’s quite possible to wake up with severe DTs and go and do a job and fool everybody. And you get a kick after a certain point with the deception of it all, it becomes quite an ingenious lifestyle, and I wanted to definitely document some of the faulty wiring that goes on where you can throw up blood and then go do a full day’s work and have everyone under the impression that you’re a functional, capable human being.”

As Nick indicates, there’s a lot of vomit in A Head Full Of Blue, and a lot of blood in that vomit, not to mention black stools in the toilet bowl, a symptom of internal bleeding. After years on the wagon, did he find it hard to revisit the gory details: the hospital sojourns, the lies, the denial, the double talk, the self-loathing?

“Yeah, I mean the bit in the book where I had this flash of wanting to jump of the bridge into the river Thames, that’s really where it all led to,” he says. “It started out (telling how) in April ’99 I got married and in this moment of complete delirious joy could’ve taken this sip of champagne. And for a couple of weeks after my wife and I were talking about this: What was that, how did it happen? And she just felt that there was something in my eyes that she had not seen before, she just described it as pure want, this was somebody who just had to have something and didn’t have any control over it for that moment.

“And I thought, ‘I’ve got to sort this out or it’s going to continue causing problems. This is it, I’m going to sort all my shit out and it’s all going to go into this book’. And a couple of months later, there I was wanting to jump off a bridge ’cos I just didn’t want to deal with it anymore. I had my doctor saying to me, ‘Give the money back for the advance, stop working on it, it’s just destroying you’. But my wife describes me as the most stubborn person she’s ever met and I just kept saying, ‘I refuse to do that, I’m going to finish this book whatever happens’.”

Does he feel any better now it’s done?

“Yeah, I do now. But I didn’t finish it ’til a year ago, so there was another year and a quarter of going over and over and over it. I had to just think, ‘Okay, this book is going to be an interior portrait of somebody who was born with depression, born with anxiety, who becomes an alcoholic to get over it and then eventually has to deal with it full on and embrace it’. I would get these moods where previously I probably would’ve had a drink, and instead I would sit down and bang out one of these little sections, and once this started to happen the whole book just got rewritten. I had to replace my keyboard when I finished it, ’cos there’d been so many tears shed on the thing that half the letters had been worn out and I had to guess where they were. By that point I knew it was done – you can only torture yourself for so much.”

One of the toughest truths Johnstone faces up to in the book is that the personal problems that made him an alcoholic in the first place were still there after he quit drinking.

“I think it was one of those: ‘Did the depression come out of drinking or did the drinking cause the depression?’ things,” he reckons. “All my life I’ve had this depression, this anxiety, and then I find something that is a ‘cure’, and like so many people I self-medicated for as long as possible until eventually the thing you’re self-medicating with becomes a problem itself. At which point your addiction is the tip of the iceberg, and everything else below sea level is the big problem. You chop the tip of the iceberg off, bring the water level down a bit, and all that stuff is still there. It’s always gonna be there, and I’m resigned to it and accepting of it.”

All of which throws light on a phenomenon that has become more and more prevalent over the last ten years – particularly in America – that of the affluent young alcoholic, dried out by 25.

“It’s on the rise, there’s an epidemic of it,” he affirms. “I remember the first AA meeting I went to, everyone was over 30, 35, and I was only 25 at the time so I felt a bit like the young snapper on the block who shouldn’t be in there yet. But I’ve found that in the last few years people seem to be getting younger, and the split of under-35 versus over-35 is getting more and more pronounced. I just think it’s in the air. A lot of people are becoming unstuck. All my friends, everybody I know in this age bracket seems to have impossible expectations, and when they don’t work out people seem to be burying their heads in things. There’s obviously a big difference between people getting smashed or doing coke at the weekend and completely submerging yourself in an addiction that you don’t have any control over, but I think there’s definitely an epidemic of people wanting to turn the sound down on their brains.”

Johnstone himself was the product of a supportive middle class background, a textbook sensitive mess half in love with Sylvia Plath, half with Anne Sexton. Despite his problems he managed to excel at his job as an advertising manager, although accounts of the lack of sensitivity his colleagues exhibited towards his addiction do little to dispel Bill Hicks’ routine about marketing folk being disciples of the devil.

“Yeah, they were all a bunch of arseholes!” he laughs. “From beginning to end. And like a lot of people, once the beer goggles came off and I went back into work after a couple of weeks of this hospital ordeal, I just sat down and (thought), ‘I don’t even know what I’m doing here, who are these people?’ It was a bit scary, like waking up in someone else’s life. And one of the main problems was that I shared office space with a wine magazine and a magazine dedicated to spirits and liquors. It was like a bad joke. They’d have wine tastings and wine awards and say, ‘Okay, help yourself,’ and you could go home with five or six cases of wine that could have one sip taken from it. That was good fun but obviously it wasn’t too clever to have people sniffing whiskies all day, talking about the body of it and all that kind of stuff. And like a lot of people, if you go around being that person who always wants to go the pub at lunch and will have the vodka and not the polite small glass of wine, I’d sort of set myself up. Everyone was like, ‘Where’s Mr Fun gone?’ I’d dug a hole for myself that I had to get out of.”

Which makes it all the more surprising that Johnstone went into journalism after drying out, one of the high risk alcoholic professions, with its endless carousel of ligs, gigs and freebies.

“Various people said to me, ‘It’s somewhat dangerous for you to want to write about music or put yourself into that world’,” he says. “Obviously it’s completely rife in that industry, but I find it quite a good test. Recently I got to interview Ronnie Wood and he invited me up to his house for a night and I knew it was going to be a test for someone who didn’t drink to be around him, y’know – the guy has a pub built into his house! When I arrived he’d just come off the plane from his home in Dublin and he was just putting it back, and there was a lot of pressure to do it like Ronnie Wood. In the end he said to me, ‘Look, are you not gonna have something stronger than Diet Coke?’ and I explained to him why not, and he was fine about it, but that situation comes up a lot, obviously.”

Is it hard to tolerate people around you when they start talking shite after a couple of hours boozing?

“With some people yes. With Ronnie Wood no, ’cos I just love the guy and I think he’s fantastic. Him talking shite for six hours I don’t mind at all. Yeah, I have been around or interviewed people who definitely started to do that and my patience does wear a bit thin after a certain point. But on the other hand there are a lot of people who have stopped drinking that I’ve encountered, be it Lou Reed or John Cale, who take very warmly to the situation if I say I’m in the same boat, and that’s been quite enlightening in itself.”

Of course, Reed and Cale burned the monkey off their respective backs with weight lifting and squash sessions. Henry Rollins and Andrew WK keep the black dog of depression doped with the endorphins released by strenuous physical exertion. And for Nick Johnstone, bouts of kickboxing and yoga help to quell the buzzing. Do the workouts really work?

“Yeah, as strange as it sounds. Obviously my idea of exercise for ten years was taking the lid of the Jack Daniels, I didn’t have any real interest in sport, I was deeply suspicious of anything to do with dressing up and kicking things around. But kick-boxing… I think it’s got a more fancy name like Tai-Bo or something, it’s a sort of mixture of kick-boxing, a boxing workout and Tai-Chi, and it does work, it’s just somewhere to go and blow a gasket. And I now go to two yoga classes a week, and that deals with the other side. Somehow that exercise sandwich keeps me in balance.”

While Johnstone believes that there’s a fatal blind spot with regard to accepting alcohol as a social killer, he admits that prescribing some kind of solution is complicated.

“There was that recent report by the charity organisation Alcohol Concern, I think it came out the same week as the book,” he points out, “and it was unbelievable, talking about something like 90% of all admissions to casualty wards on a Friday and Saturday night being alcohol related. I think it’s a tricky one – how do you moralise on the difference between someone who has two glasses of wine with a meal and someone who goes out to get absolutely smashed and ends up attacking someone? You’re not going to get a fourteen or fifteen year old who is going to pay the blindest bit of attention to someone saying it’s dangerous or bad for you.

“Everyone is going to go through that rites of passage thing, and I think everybody’s fairly aware of the damage it can do. What everybody could do some work on is coming up with a concrete way of saying, ‘This is okay, but this is where you’re starting to get into scary territory’. It’s so vague and impossible to decipher. People have all these little safeguards that are always a couple of pegs down the line from where they are: ‘An alcoholic is someone who has a large brandy at seven in the morning, or someone who drives drunk’. Until we can say, ‘It stops at this peg, thereafter you should get some help’, I think a lot of people are in the danger zone.”

Does Nick have to stay totally clean of all addictive substances?

“At one point I thought you can’t go to AA unless you chain smoke and have your coffee black,” he laughs. “I’ve noticed a lot of people continue certain patterns of the addiction whether alcohol is present or not, black coffee where before it was neat scotch. But for me, my stomach went, and I think ’cos I damaged myself physically there was no question of being able to drink coffee or smoke cigarettes – it all had to go for a while. I haven’t smoked a cigarette since I had a drink, but I don’t really buy that Hazeldon rehab clinic mythology where if you smoke you’re going to trigger some impulse to drink again, I think that’s going a bit far.”

Could he have a joint if he felt like it?

“No I would definitely not do that. My whole thing was about trying to become normal, so I found experiments with drugs just seemed to push me further away from normal.”

Does he still get queasy with the mass hysteria of something like the World Cup, social permission to get arseholed?

“I know what you mean, yeah, I’m aware of when there will be big drinking occasions. I can’t really claim to enjoy Christmas. New Year’s Eve is the worst, on principle I just like to stay in with my wife and pretend it’s not happening. All those things were murder to start with, but have become easier. Still, I wouldn’t say they were easy.”

The passages of Johnstone’s book that deal with self-harm are in many ways as important as the tales of two-fisted drinking, if not more so. At the point he started writing A Head Full Of Blue, there were only a handful of cutters out of the closet.

“To this day all I can think of is Ritchie Manic, Angelina Jolie, Christina Ricci and Princess Diana,” he points out. “Shirley Manson. And Marilyn Manson. I was very scared to get into that because alcoholism is one taboo, depression with men is another, but this was a taboo full stop. But I don’t really care at this point. There was no reference point when I was doing it for stuff like self-harm, I thought I’d just lost my mind, but now I hope it will put it out there a bit. So you’re male and you have these things – that’s no affront to your masculinity or anything else.

“I suppose in some ways it’s easier for people who are celebrities to discuss it. And I just felt, look, I’m an unknown guy trying to make a living, I’ve a very modest income, I live in a tiny flat and I’ve written this book and maybe the person on the street will find it easier to connect with it. The motive for writing the book ultimately was (i) I needed to get all this out of my head and make sense of it, and (ii) if one person on this planet picks this up and feels a bit better or less isolated, that’s why I did it. To my amazement somebody has stopped drinking because of the book, which was a very big compliment. That’s what it’s all about.”