February 2022

The Joy of Addiction: The Confessions of a Teenage Wastrel launched to a full house at West End Lane Books in West Hampstead in February 2022. In it’s first week it hit No.1 on Amazon’s on hot new releases list, and came third in the treatment and addiction bestseller chart — tucked happily behind Alan Carr’s Easy Way To Stop Smoking and Russell Brand’s Freedom. Its author, Sebastian Wocker, or as I know him Basti, says the joy comes when you get free of addiction. And this time round, he’s been free for 13 years, previously for seven and a half years, before a relapse in 1995. He was just 22 years old when, in 1987, he first came into a 12-step recovery programme, where he learned to embrace his pain and to heal and grow. 

The book’s often hilarious anecdotes reflect on his teenage adventures busking around Europe and touring in a production of the musical Hair and, as he puts it, hurtling into the abyss. Wocker's lively, comedic, and soul-searching style brings light to the dark, desperate and sometimes tragic consequences of addiction. 

Like many of his generation, the experience of growing up in London during the late 1970’s and early 1980’s felt bleak, like living in black and white. But, after jumping on a Freddie Laker flight to New York with his earnings from Hair, he discovered girls who said things like ‘Oh my God you’re so cute, I could eat you’ and would ‘pounce’ on him. As he points out in the book: “Once you’ve had a taste of that sort of hospitality, frankly, British realism can go fuck itself.” 

The first and most obvious thing about Basti is that he is tall. Standing at 6ft 7, this rare attribute failed to endear him to classmates at Hampstead School, who bullied him for being “Tall, skinny and posh.”  Rejection, rebelling against education, detention, and running away from skinheads, helped him spiral into the pain of being an addict, enslaved to alcohol, cocaine, cannabis, sulphate, solvent and LSD binges.  

In hindsight, Basti concedes a perk of going to Hampstead Comprehensive School was that he got a good book out of it and has, unwittingly, fulfilled the school’s motto: Is est emendo; tendo quod macula iocus notitia — to correct faults, give direction and impart knowledge. 

As an only child whose mother and father were German, school playgrounds weren’t an easy gig in what he refers to as “Dad’s Army Britain.” Taunted over his Teutonic ancestry, the great irony was that his grandfather and great grandmother, being Jewish, had fled Nazi Germany. His parents, both journalists, met in postwar Bonn and settled in London where Basti was born in 1965.  

The death of his father, the broadcaster Karl Heinz Wocker, forced Basi to confront his own mortality, and was his catalyst into revovery. He recalls how his dad was impressed when, desperately driving the wrong way up a one way street with Basti’s mother on the verge of giving birth to him, a policeman stopped them and, jumping immediately into the passenger seat, directed them to the nearest hospital. According to his dad, it was the kind of improvisation and common sense a German policeman would have been unlikely to display at the time.  

Basti was a Beatles fan from the age of 4, after scratching up his mother’s records — especially The Magical Mystery Tour.  “After all the bullying and abuse I got at school and in the streets, the Beatles were a real saving grace and, as my dad was mainly absent, they become my male role models: John Lennon felt like an older brother or father figure.” 

By the time he was 17 Basti was already in the grip of addiction and, after blagging some “absent-father-guilt money” off his Dad, he set off, a guitar slung over his back, on his own musical odyssey via Interrail around Holland, Germany, Italy and France, playing in the streets and on trains. Short on funds, he perfected his technique of going backstage at gigs saying he was ‘with the band’ and feasting on generous German band-riders, quaffing from fridges full of beers and sausages. In return for his audacious blag he’d perform A New England by Billy Bragg and test out his own material. 

With some clean time under his belt, Basti formed Yeah and the indie band won The John Lennon Talent Award in 1993. He had already signed with SMV, the Hamburg based music publisher who’d famously signed, then let go of, the Beatles, but fortunately went on to sign and keep ABBA. SMV provided him a demo studio and the substantial prize money from the talent award paid for a tour.

Basti later teamed up with ex-Culture Club drummer Jon Moss who he met in Hampstead in the 1990’s, after Yeah’s fifth drummer had been sacked for “being too annoying and smelly because he never changed his socks.” Moss and his much cleaner socks subsequently joined Yeah and the band played London’s club circuit and recorded indie World Cup song Engerland, the video for which was shot at Hendon Football Club’s old Clarement Road ground. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTCcywXKmVw  

Fast forward to 2018 and a new band Ridiculous ridiculouswebsite.com has coalesced around his carefully crafted songs. Basti was in Deñia, Spain writing his book when he received a call from Jon and bassist Peter Noone (not of Herman’s Hermits) who suggested forming a new band.

Back in London, after only the second rehearsal, Jon and Basti were larking about outside Mani’s cafe in Hampstead and noticed a fellow, trying to read a book at the next table, had started giving them funny looks. As Basti recalls it: ‘Then he came over and we thought, oops, we’re in for a ticking off. But he said ‘are you in a band? And we said ‘yes’ and he said, ‘Good, I’d rather like to be in a band,’ and we said, ‘what do you play?’ he replied, ‘Trumpet and keyboards,’ and he gave us his card. And, so it was that film-score composer Erran Baron-Cohen, brother of Sacha, joined Ridiculous.

Their ridiculously upbeat songs about love with the occasional social commentary thrown in are bound to make you shuffle your feet and put a smile on your face.

Despite the limitations of seemingly never-ending lockdowns Ridiculous has recently recorded at Abbey Road Studios, and showcased live gigs at The Dublin Castle in Camden Town, Pentameters Theatre in Hampstead and The Water Rats in Kings Cross. Their first single Everybody Loves That Girl is on the cards. 

Another string to Basti’s bow is his day job as the editor of The Hampstead Village Voice, a quarterly magazine he set up DIY style in 2007. Over the years it’s evolved from a local rag into an informative tome on all things Hampstead, and has found itself a nice little niche, The New York Times quoting it as, “essential breakfast reading.” Well-known Hampsteadites who write for the Hampstead Village Voice include Martin Bell, Tony Parsons, Nicky Horne, Charles Harris, and Claus von Kunst, the erstwhile owner of the Catto Gallery. Notable interviews over the years have included Emma Thompson, Russell Brand, George Graham, David Baddiel and Giles Coren.  

With the help of his friends who love the magazine, Basti delivers to over forty newsagents hot off the press, often on Uber bikes. 

It took four years to write The Joy of Addiction, and like any piece of art or song, it was ready when it was ready. “I’ve learned I need to work a recovery programme, otherwise my default setting will let my addiction back in”. Basti reckons that John Lennon’s favourite Paul McCartney song was Yesterday, and remarked on the way John looked at Paul every time he sang it, laying bare his pain with utter reverence. I hope Basti knows he inspires a similar reverence by sharing his stories of strength, hope and recovery from addiction. 

Further Info:

The Joy of Addiction by Sebastian Wocker (HAVIVO) is available now world wide on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones and all online bookstores or can be ordered from any bookshop. amazon.co.uk link: https://www.amazon.co.uk/JOY-ADDICTION-Confessions-teenage-wastrel/dp/1739991303/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Ridiculous will play The Water Rats, King’s Cross, London on Saturday 14 May 2022, £12 door / £11 advance | Advance Tickets: https://www.wegottickets.com/event/538410

The Hampstead Village Voice at newsagents in and around Hampstead, next edition 01/04/2022