Life was so sweet for Alex Lloyd for a while. Amazing, even.<\/p>\n
The boy from Balmain’s hit song had catapulted him to stardom. He’d met and married his great love, started a family and moved to London.<\/p>\n
But then, to borrow from the lyrics of that song that is so deeply woven into Australia’s fabric, every wolf was at his door.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Alex is preparing to release his first collection of new music in more than a decade. (Australian Story: Dean Sewell)<\/p>\n
“I ended up in a place where no one could really help me,” Alex tells Australian Story in an exclusive interview.<\/p>\n
A legal fight over the authorship of Amazing sparked an unravelling. Resurfaced childhood trauma led to a marriage breakdown, extreme weight gain and ultimately an addiction to oxycodone that saw the four-time ARIA Award winner, including three for Best Male Artist, fade from view.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Alex is a four-time ARIA Award winner. (Australian Story: Dean Sewell)<\/p>\n
But now, at 50, with his first studio album in 12 years in the works, Alex Lloyd is learning to “be OK with me” and is ready to do some amazing things.<\/p>\n
“Now, I’m seeing the world differently. And I think I’m ready to share this part of me now and be scrutinised again,” he says.<\/p>\n
The busking boy from Balmain<\/p>\n
He was a chubby kid with a mohawk, an acoustic guitar and a voice that mesmerised the bustling crowd at the Balmain Markets in the mid-1980s.<\/p>\n
“He would play blues covers with such strength and conviction, people would just stop what they were doing,” says friend Sally Gluckstern, who met Alex when he was 10.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Alex began his music career playing blues music with friends at the local markets.\u00a0 (Supplied)<\/p>\n
“He came alive when he sang, but when he wasn’t singing, he was incredibly shy,” she recalls.<\/p>\n
“I remember feeling there was something sort of heavy about him. Heavy inside.”<\/p>\n
Music was always Alex’s escape from a chaotic childhood of dyslexia, violence, love and loss.<\/p>\n
By 13, he was gigging at pubs and his bluesy, soulful voice and poignant storytelling would become his ticket out of struggle street.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Alex cut his teeth as a teenager performing in pubs and clubs with his band The Beefs. (Supplied)<\/p>\n
When Amazing hit the airwaves in 2001, it took Alex into rarefied air.<\/p>\n
“It genuinely is one of the Aussie anthems of the last 25 years,” says friend and former triple j announcer Adam Spencer.<\/p>\n
“It’s left an indelible mark on Australian music.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Alex shot to superstardom following the release of his second album, Watching Angels Mend. (Sunday Telegraph)<\/p>\n
They were heady days \u2014 travelling the world, partying and making music.<\/p>\n
“I’ve had some extreme highs, like highs that hardly anyone gets to experience,” says Alex. “I got to sing in a castle and meet kings and queens and princesses, like, it’s crazy.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Alex’s star continued to rise throughout the 2000s as he rubbed shoulders with royalty. (Supplied)<\/p>\n
He married Amelia Mills, who he’d spotted in the crowd on a tour for his debut album Black the Sun, became a dad and moved to London to work on his first independent album. He was the “happiest guy on the planet”.<\/p>\n
Then, the legal letter arrived.<\/p>\n
Dredging up the past<\/p>\n
Out of the blue, truck driver and one-time musician Mark O’Keefe alleged Alex had stolen Amazing.<\/p>\n
O’Keefe claimed he’d co-written the hit with Alex on the back of coasters when they played at the same pub when Alex was a teenager.<\/p>\n
The “ridiculous” claim challenged Alex’s artistic integrity.<\/p>\n
“I couldn’t think of anything worse than stealing somebody’s song,” he says.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The accusations of plagiarism rocked Alex to his core. (Australian Story: Tom Hancock)<\/p>\n
But more destructively, in order to rebut the claim, Alex had to cast his mind back to those tough years he thought he’d left behind. Childhood trauma “just comes and bites you in the arse”, Alex says.<\/p>\n
Alex’s parents split when he was about six, and he and his brother, Oliver, lived with their mother, Bridget Lloyd. He loved his “crazy in a beautiful way” mum, a struggling artist who’d start painting at midnight, waking Alex up with the smell of oil paint and Ry Cooder on the stereo.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The death of Alex’s mother Bridget when he was a teenager left a profound impact on his life. (Supplied)<\/p>\n
Her relationship with a violent binge drinker led to terrifying times, when the man would beat Bridget, “banging her head against the hard wood floor”. Alex would try to intervene but was too young and powerless \u2014 and had his own battles with his volatile brother.<\/p>\n
“I had to go back in time and discover all this shit that I hadn’t dealt with,” Alex says.<\/p>\n
“The beatings on my mother, the beatings from my brother, being called a fat shit all the time.”<\/p>\n
When Bridget died suddenly, when Alex was 16, he “cried for six months”.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The dark side of\u00a0Alex’s childhood has\u00a0remained a source of pain for him. (Supplied)<\/p>\n
The legal action took him back there, with O’Keefe initially claiming Amazing was written in 1989 soon after Bridget’s death. But Bridget died in 1991.<\/p>\n
O’Keefe withdrew his claim soon after the case reached court, but the damage was done.<\/p>\n
Depression set in, his weight ballooned and the songs wouldn’t flow.<\/p>\n
“I fell apart,” Alex says.<\/p>\n
“I was scared to write songs on my own because I thought, ‘If I write this song on my own, anyone can say they wrote it.””<\/p>\n
Champagne and Twisties<\/p>\n
By 2012, Alex and the family returned to Australia but the marriage didn’t survive. Losing Amelia and not living with his four children sent Alex into a spiral.<\/p>\n
On the weekends, when he had the kids, he’d cook up a storm and “pull out all stops”.<\/p>\n
But when they left, he’d walk up the street to the bottle shop.<\/p>\n
“I’d buy really expensive champagne \u2026 and a pack of Twisties,” Alex says.<\/p>\n
“Then the next three days, I’d eat KFC and Pizza Hut and Domino’s. And I’d lie in bed.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Alex with his former partner, Amelia. (Getty Images)<\/p>\n
He was frittering money away, “trying to doubly be destructive to my bank balance”, which had already taken a $300,000 hit in legal fees from the court case.<\/p>\n
Performing had always been a joy but this period was different.<\/p>\n
“I was 168kg and I was going out and doing shows in front of 10,000 people with my face on a massive screen,” Alex says.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Binge eating and alcoholism took their toll on Alex over the course of the decade. (Supplied)<\/p>\n
Photographs of him online attracted a flood of fat-shaming comments.<\/p>\n
“I didn’t feel very good about myself,” he says.<\/p>\n
“[I was] in a lot of pain all the time, emotionally and physically.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Alex attracted public ridicule for his weight gain during the period. (Supplied)<\/p>\n
He was suffering crippling nerve pain caused by the complete wearing away of the cartilage between vertebrae in his neck.<\/p>\n
Nothing he was prescribed worked. One day, someone offered him the painkilling opioid oxycodone. It is, Alex says, “an evil drug”.<\/p>\n
The lonely reality of opioid addiction<\/p>\n
None of Alex’s rock star partying prepared him for the insidious assault of oxycodone.<\/p>\n
At first, he thought: “This is the answer to everything.”<\/p>\n
His pain was managed, his depression eased and he was motivated, pulling back his drinking and running long distances.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Chronic neck pain eventually led Alex to undergo surgery. (Supplied)<\/p>\n
But, he says: “I had no idea what I was getting into with that drug \u2026 I didn’t know how addictive it was.”<\/p>\n
He took more and more \u2014 but it wasn’t enough. He tried to get off it but couldn’t.<\/p>\n
“Eventually, it’s a very empty, lonely sense of impending doom,” Alex says.<\/p>\n
It was in this state that Alex headed to Brisbane to do some gigs with multi-instrumentalist Salliana Seven.<\/p>\n
She describes Alex as an open soul and says he never tried to hide his addiction from her. His failed attempts to break free of oxycodone were heartbreaking.<\/p>\n
If you need help:\u00a0<\/p>\n
“I saw him at his lowest of the lowest of low,” she says. “You know, suicidal.”<\/p>\n
“As cooked as he was when I met him \u2026 he opens his mouth and I’m just blown away.”<\/p>\n
Relief came with Suboxone, a medication to treat opioid dependence.<\/p>\n
It was a gruelling transition as his body adjusted, but his children, and his renewed joy for music, gave him the impetus to push through.<\/p>\n
“I think he’s finally let go of the broken fairytale of his marriage,” Salliana says.<\/p>\n
“I really feel that losing that just destroyed him on top of all the other trauma that he’s had \u2026 He’s moving through that, which is massive.”<\/p>\n
Facing his fears and the future<\/p>\n
As he works through his own long-buried trauma, Alex is hoping to help today’s kids navigate tough times by working with the KIDS Foundation.<\/p>\n
“I really believe in and want to be an advocate for childhood trauma and giving kids skills at an early age to deal with it later because it hit me and I didn’t even know what it was,” he says.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Alex volunteers\u00a0his time working with the next generation of musicians.\u00a0 (Australian Story: Winsome Denyer)<\/p>\n
At a recent musical workshop, as Alex sits in a field with a guitar on his lap, a couple of teens share their fear of being judged, or trolled, for their music.<\/p>\n
Alex tells them that every artist must face those fears, and every artist falls on their face at some time. Getting back up is where the success lies.<\/p>\n
“You can’t beat yourself up over everything,” Alex says, as much to himself as the kids.<\/p>\n
“Otherwise, you’d just be stuck there forever. There is no such thing as mistakes, only lessons.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Life was so sweet for Alex Lloyd for a while. Amazing, even. The boy from Balmain’s hit song…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":73582,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[6116,57218,57219,64,63,6013,134,136,15436],"class_list":{"0":"post-73581","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-addiction","9":"tag-alex-lloyd","10":"tag-amazing","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-drug","14":"tag-entertainment","15":"tag-music","16":"tag-opioids"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73581"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73581\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/73582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}