GLEN Power wasn't usually nervous before gigs. Admittedly, this was a big one: The Script were about to go before 16,000 screaming fans at Birminghman's LG Arena. But that wasn't the reason he was shaking and sweating.
The drink had done that. It was March 17, 2011, and Glen - the hit band's drummer - had started the St Patrick's Day Party early. The night before, in fact. His booze marathon had careered on through the night until 6am. Now, as he took to the stage alongside bandmates Danny O'Donoghue and Mark Sheehan, he was in no phyisical state to perform at all.
Hungover, sleep-deprived, shaking and sweating, Glen didn't know if he'd make it through the first song - never mind an entire concert.
'I had been up in my hotel room drinking red wine on my own until six in the morning,' Glen, 31, remembers. 'I was hungover to bits. I couldn't eat anything all day. We went down to the venue and I felt so unwell that Danny called me aside. I was so sick looking; I was as yellow as one of the Simpsons.
'Suddenly, I got really nervous and I started feeling something I had never felt before: real pressure. I hadn't eaten or slept and I was going out there to play in front of 16,000 people. I'll always remember the lights going down in Birmingham. I walked up the steps to the drum kit and I could barely sit down. When I got to the third song, I literally started seeing stars and felt I was about to pass out - my body was shutting down. I was seconds away from fainting and I was breathing deeply and barely hitting the drums.'
Glen shudders as he thinks of the scene he came so close to causing on stage that night. 'My drum technician was asking me what was going on. I called him over at the end of the song and said: "I am going to pass out."
He came back with a bucket of ice and some towels, and at the end of each song I would put my head into the bucket and hold the towel around my neck. I thought I would collapse and people would take pictures, and the front pages of the newspapers would have pictures of me passing out on stage. My family would think I was on drugs and I would be ruined. I managed to struggle to the end by praying to everyone I knew that had passed on.'
When Glen came off stage, he collapsed on a couch and swore to the band, his managers and, more importantly, himself that it would never happen again. His drinking had escalated in the previous months while The Script were on tour in America, when Glen had started staying up all night, engaging in drinking competitions with barmen.
Too many mornings he woke up with no memory of the night before - an $80 taxi receipt and half-eaten fast food his only clues to what had transpired. 'I used to suffer terribly from the booze blues,' he says. 'That led to crippling anxiety and I would take a Xanax for that. Then I would throw in some beta blockers to slow the heart down because of the anxiety that came after the blues. Then throw in a little dash of depression just for good measure and mix it all up and you have a car crash just waiting to happen.'
After that near disaster Birmingham, however, he swore that was the end of his heavy drinking. His promise of sobriety lasted all of 72 hours.
'Three nights later I was in Bournemouth and I was visiting my cousin. We went back to the hotel and I was in the bar until 6am again. We were drinking top-shelf bourbon, brandy - the whole shebang - and I was in the same condition again the following night for the gig. I was sitting there on stage wondering: "How the hell did this happen again? I swore this wouldn't happen." I managed to struggle through that gig and a few others. By the time we got to London and the O2 there, my appetite had gone and I wasn't sleeping.
I knew I was coming near the end.' To get himself through the sell-out London gig, Glen fortified himself with a double vodka before taking to the stage to face the 20,000-strong audience. It was TheScript's biggest career high to date - and yet Glen says he felt empty inside.
'I was on stage at the O2 in London and I was looking out at 20,000 clapping fans and thinking: "Why am I so miserable?" I was trying to understand why I felt so bad and so low when this was everything I had worked so hard to achieve. I was at the top of the mountain and I hated the view. Something was seriously wrong. If I had kept going I would have been dead within the year. My close friends and crew, who love a jar, said to me that I was on a different planet altogether. Thank God I didn't do drugs. If I had done drugs it would have killed me faster.'
It was the night after the O2 gig that Glen had his epiphany. 'I was standing at the bar of the K West hotel in London about to order another drink and go on another session and the weirdest thing happened. I literally had a moment. Something clicked and a voice in my head went: "It's over dude, you can't do this any more."
'Do you know the movie 127 Hours?' he says of the James Franco film where a trapped rock climber is forced to hack off his own arm in order to survive. 'There's a moment when he is down in the crevasse and he knows that if he is going to live he has to cut off his arm. It is going to hurt but in order to survive he has to cut off his arm. I had a moment like that with alcohol.'
Today, the Dubliner has been sober for more than two years and says he has reclaimed his life and is a new man. However, he says that making the landmark decision to quit drinking was the easy part; what followed afterwards were the toughest six months of his life.
As The Script continued to tour, he started going through severe withdrawal symptoms which made him physically ill and left him incapacitated by migraine headaches. 'I got sicker for about six months; I got violently ill. I didn't realise I was so far into the woods until I was frighteningly ill. I think I went mad for those six months. I would come off stage and get into the tour bus, close the curtains in my bunk and put the iPod on and just isolate myself.
'I still get the migraines. When we arrived in Australia earlier this year I had such a bad headache that I had to get a bucket of ice delivered to the room, take painkillers and close the curtains for 40 minutes, with the ice tied around my head in a towel.
'Sometimes the migraines are a three day affair. I'm training in the gym, I'm changing my diet and eliminating MSG. I have done another MRI scan. It's not my brain but the doctors think that it is as a result of quitting drink. It is the body healing itself.'
' Looking at Glen, it's easy to believe his declaration that sobriety has also saved his life. He shows me a picture taken of him in 2010 next to one of him today and he looks leaner, healthier and more alert.
He is single but spends most of his free time in Ireland with his teenage son. Family, he says, are so important and all of them including his son are supportive of his new lifestyle choice.
'It's a funny thing to call it alcoholism or ask whether I am an alcoholic,' he muses. 'I'm allergic to alcohol and if I drink, it makes me sick. I don't use the word alcoholic. Some people say that an alcoholic is someone sitting on the street drinking out of a brown paper bag. That's not right, either. If you have an allergy to something and you take it and you get sick, you won't take it again. That's how I feel about alcohol.
It is really that simple to me. The lads in the band asked me if I wanted them to stop drinking around them, but I said no. I am not trying to be a poster boy for not drinking, I really don't want to be that. I just want to help people and be useful. I had to learn a new way of living.
'I have done it, I feel so good about my life and I feel blessed. I have a 14-year-old son and he asks me why I am not drinking. I am upfront with him about it and I tell him that I am allergic to it and I don't drink any more. And he is great. My brother and my dad have a few jars and it is all great. I have nothing against it.'
We're interrupted by a fan who lost her husband last year to cancer: he was a big Script fan. Glen chats to her for ten minutes and recommends a book which may offer some comfort. He promises to post her a copy.
He leaves the café to meet with the band. They have eight tracks recorded and mixed and they are preparing to finish the new album. Glen is thankful that, after he came so close to ending his career - and maybe his life - that night in Birmingham, he is still around to be part of it.
Source: The Dublin Weekender / Edited: DannyODonoghue.Net
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