Belinda Carlisle quit drugs when she realised it was "only a matter of time" before they killed her.
Belinda Carlisle
The 62-year-old singer stopped taking cocaine when her band the Go-Gos split up in 1985, but she turned back to the habit in the early 1990s and things eventually came to a head in 2005.
She said: “I was in a really bad place from age 40 to 47...
“It was a horrible cycle. I was just sick of the lies and the drama, and I hated myself."
Recalling how she skipped rehearsals for recording her French covers LP 'Voila' in London in 2005 in favour of going on a cocaine binge, she said: “I just knew that it was only a matter of time before I died."
The 'Heaven is a Place on Earth' hitmaker - who has son Joe with husband Morgan Mason - returned home to France and, after one final drink, quit all her bad habits.
She told The Guardian newspaper: “I went out, got a big bottle of wine to celebrate my sobriety, and then the next morning, I woke up and that was it. I was over cigarettes, over pills, over everything. I just stopped and got myself some help.
“That album got me through the early days of sobriety. I was able to be creative, and I didn’t really care if anybody ever heard it.”
Belinda developed an eating disorder when she went solo because of the pressure to look good and admitted her weight was one of the reasons why she'd turned to drugs.
She said: “It was horrible. I look back now, and I was normal – I would fluctuate in weight and that was never an issue. I think one of the things that people loved about the Go-Go’s was we were normal girls. But when you’re that young, and weight was always mentioned when I was in the paper, that really messes with your head.
"That was one of the reasons I got into drugs, because I could keep my weight down.”
Belinda knew drugs would cause her problems "from the very beginning" but couldn't resist.
She said: "I always had that little voice: ‘What are you doing?’
"[In the early days, I was] an acid head. But when I was introduced to coke, I thought, ‘Oh my God, when I get money, I’m going to buy lots of this.’ And I did.”
But the 'Leave a Light On' singer admitted she also had a "complete blast" in her wildest years with the band.
She said: “Oh my God, I had a great time. I had a complete blast, but it does become a problem normally at some point. It was fun until it stopped being fun, and then it just became a real f****** nightmare.”
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