One for the Road: The Quit Drinking Podcast

Stacey Heale was hiding glasses of prosecco behind cookery books in her own kitchen. Her husband Greg, lead singer of the band Delays, had stage four bowel cancer. The country was in lockdown. Friends kept dropping off wine with the groceries. She'd put her two small daughters to bed with a flute on the bedside table. By the time she got to the stories, the words on the page were blurring. It wasn...

Marisa Peer has worked with thousands of people including royalty, rock stars, actors, and Olympic athletes. She's the founder of Rapid Transformational Therapy and one of the most respected therapists in the world. In this conversation with Sober Dave, she says something that stops you in your tracks: in 30 years of work, she has never met an addict who believed they were enough. That's the whole...

Seye Adelekan is the bassist for Gorillaz. He's toured with Lana Del Rey, Emeli Sandé, KT Tunstall and Paloma Faith. By his early thirties, he'd also spent three months locked in his bedroom, drinking three bottles of cheap wine a day, scraping cocaine bags off the floor, with bottles piled to the height of his bed. On April 1st 2019 he walked through the doors of Teen Challenge, a residential Chr...

Steve Flynn was 20, deep in Irish rugby-lad culture, and proud to tell his granny he was going out to get drunk. He hadn't kissed a girl sober. He didn't really know who he was outside the pub. Then his twin brother Dave found a book on detox in the library. They quit drinking for a month to train for a marathon. They never really went back. Twenty years later, Steve is one half of The Happy Pear:...

Kelly Burkhart looked like she had it all. Healthy food business, two teenage kids, marriage, the lot. From the outside, perfectly on point. Inside, she was climbing into bed at 11.30pm with a triple gin and tonic after a 16-hour day, alarm set for 5.30am to motivate her team. It wasn't bottles. It wasn't every day at the start. It was an Aperol Spritz that turned into another Aperol Spritz. It wa...

At his peak Ryan Phillips was pulling in half a million dollars a week in cash, buying 80% of the marijuana in British Columbia. National Geographic called him the King of Weed. It started at 19 with an ounce of BC Bud in a deodorant cap. By 23, he was face down at a US border crossing with the DEA's guns drawn and 103 pounds of marijuana in the truck. Two years in a maximum federal penitentiary f...

Bryony Gordon is a Telegraph columnist, the author of  The Wrong Knickers ,  Mad Girl  and  Glorious Rock Bottom , the founder of Mental Health Mates, and nearly five years sober. She takes Dave through it. Growing up scared, with what she now knows was OCD running untreated through the eighties and nineties. The first drink at 14 in a park with a friend, a litre of cider and a...

James Veck-Gilodi is the lead singer-songwriter of Deaf Havana, with three top-ten albums, a top-five record, headline shows at Brixton Academy and tours with Kings of Leon behind him. He played almost every one of those shows drunk. He joins Sober Dave on One for the Road to talk about quitting drinking after 15 years of touring through it. James started getting hammered at 14 in a small Norfolk...

Philip Barantini moved to London at 17. He was on Dream Team, then Band of Brothers as the youngest cast member, then Ned Kelly. He had free Soho House membership, a driver, and a 5am bedtime. Then the work fizzled out and the anger came in. He spent the next decade in restaurant kitchens drinking red wine out of coffee cups during service. In this conversation with Sober Dave, Philip walks back t...

Cat Sims got blackout drunk at 13 and her parents thought it was funny. She'd been drinking that way ever since, mostly with people who drank that way too. By her thirties she'd figured out she could mix vodka with coke and Xanax and stay personable instead of sloppy. She thought she'd solved the riddle of life. There was no movie-grade rock bottom. There were car wrecks and missed bedtimes and 4a...

Thanks for joining me for this bonus sober spring special of One For The Road. Today’s episode is with Richard Piper, CEO of Alcohol Change UK. We discuss Stigma, Sober shaming and the start of Sober Spring, and of course my 24 hour Liveathon on the 26th of March. Alcohol Change UK work to end the harm caused by alcohol. Helping tens of thousands of people take control of their drinking and provid...

Content note: this conversation discusses childhood abuse and domestic violence. Johnny Lawrence called alcohol his best friend of 20 years. He met it at 16, alone in a council flat after leaving home to keep his mother safe. Born in Islington to a Nigerian father and a white British mother, Johnny grew up in 80s Hertfordshire as a survivor of physical child abuse. He worked four jobs as a teenage...

Jamie Klingler was drinking two bottles of wine a day, sometimes more, working the London bar circuit six or seven nights a week. By the end she was buying five-litre wine boxes. Two at a time. The party girl who cried in the corner. She quit on Easter weekend, April 2020. Then she lost 100 pounds. Then a woman named Sarah Everard was murdered by a serving Met officer, and Jamie co-founded Reclaim...

Claire Pooley drank a bottle of wine a night for years and nobody knew. Three kids, a husband, a working life. The wine witch in her head from the moment she woke up. A whole life functioning, just about, around it. Then one morning after her own birthday party, she poured the last two inches of wine from a bottle into a mug so the kids wouldn't see. The mug said World's Best Mum. That was her las...

Michelle Heaton was a Liberty X singer with a husband, two kids, and a two-litre vodka bottle on repeat order from Amazon. By the end she was drinking neat vodka at seven in the morning, being sick, then drinking again. Her liver readings were so high doctors couldn't understand how she was still alive. Her friend Katie Price showed up and asked one question: do you want what I've got? Forty eight...

In April 2013, Matt Pink's four and a half month old son Rocco died in his sleep. Someone told Matt that time is a healer. So Matt decided he'd drink his way through two years and come out the other side fine. He didn't. Five years went by. The drinking got heavier. The grief stayed where it was. His marriage ended. The house went. He was sofa surfing through the West End with a bag of his life wh...

Kortney Olsen is a Brazilian jiu-jitsu champion, an Australian arm wrestling champion, a bestselling author, a TV personality, and the woman who crushes watermelons between her thighs. She's also 12 years clean and sober from meth, oxy, pills, and alcohol. In this conversation with Sober Dave, Kortney walks back through the whole story. The mum who was an alcoholic in active addiction. The Kate Mo...

Jack Fowldry was a functioning alcoholic at eighteen. He was drinking a crate of beer and a bottle of Bailey's a night and convincing himself it was just what musicians did. By the time he stopped at twenty-six, he had been drunk every day for forty-eight days straight. This is the recovery story of the lead singer of UK alt-rock band Tova. Jack tells Sober Dave about being a functioning alcoholic...

Ollie Ollerton was 10 years old when a 50-pound chimpanzee pinned him to the floor of a circus enclosure and tried to kill him. He fought it off. Nearly lost his arm to gangrene. Then spent the next thirty-something years chasing danger to feel something close to that adrenaline again. Royal Marines. Special Forces. Iraq, where he drove drunk through Baghdad on his own with an AK-47 in the back of...

The Christmas season is the hardest stretch of the year if you're sober, sober-curious, or just trying to drink less. Office parties. Family pressure. Christmas Eve in the pub. Boxing Day boredom. New Year's Eve hype. And the trap of telling yourself you'll fix it all in Dry January. In this Christmas special, Dave sits down with Andy Ramage, co-founder of OYNB and author of Let's Do This, to walk...

Leanne could drink a bottle of wine in six seconds. By the time her daughter was born with a 4% chance of survival, she was hiding everything. The pregnancy. The bottles. The nights spent crying in intensive care. This is how a self-described "Winehouse" became a sober mum. Leanne Baylis tells Sober Dave about being adopted, finding wine at nine, dancing on cocaine at half five in the morning, and...

Dean McCullough was drinking a litre of vodka in a weekend during lockdown. He was hosting a breakfast show, presenting Manchester Pride on TV, and falling apart on the inside. A year later, he was sober and behind the desk at BBC Radio 1. This is the recovery story of a Belfast boy who got the Radio 1 job he had wanted his entire life, but had to quit drinking first. Dean tells Sober Dave about l...

Millie Gooch is the founder of Sober Girl Society, author of The Sober Girl Society Handbook, and one of the loudest voices in the UK sober community for women in their twenties. But four years ago she was a blackout drinker. She didn't drink at all until 18, then went to uni, took three bar jobs, got paid in alcohol, and came out the other side a four-or-five-night-a-week binge drinker. PR and jo...

Jenny Valentish is a British-Australian journalist and author. Her book Women of Substances is an addiction memoir that uses her own story as a case study to explore the gendered way women experience trauma, mental health, eating disorders, and addiction. She's also a board director of SMART Recovery in Australia and has written four books in total, the most recent on people who push their bodies...

Charlie Owen was twenty-three when his seven-year relationship ended, his Asia trip got cut short by COVID, and he found himself stranded in Brisbane with no idea who he was sober. He started drinking five beers before every date just to feel good enough. This is the recovery story of a Welsh farmer's son who quit drinking at twenty-five. Charlie tells Sober Dave about growing up in a 2,000-person...