DJ Fat Tony reflects on fame, recovery and self-destruction in extract from new memoir Recover Me (EXCLUSIVE)
"Over the years, I’ve inhabited so many versions of myself that it’s not surprising I completely lost sight of who I was," Tony writes
By DJ Fat Tony
In this exclusive extract from Recover Me: A User’s Guide to Overcoming Addiction and Insanity, legendary DJ and LGBTQ+ icon DJ Fat Tony reflects on the masks he wore throughout his life – from clubland king and celebrity confidant to recovery evangelist. With trademark honesty and humour, he explores how ego, performance and addiction became intertwined, and why getting sober was only the beginning of discovering who he really was.
Look at Me with My Big Dick Energy
Back in the 1980s, when I first started DJing at clubs like Playground at the Lyceum and the Wag Club, it was never enough for me just to turn up and DJ. I was sixteen years old: this chavvy, chubby thing with a second- hand Del Boy sheepskin coat and a big mouth. I was loud, precocious, the most annoying fucking queen on the planet. Every week, I’d blag my way in, work the door at a club then complain about the music to whoever was running it. Before you knew it, Tony had a weekly residency, even though, in the beginning, I had only four records to my name. I was like Disco Jesus – every weekend turning four records into a twelve- hour set. A year later, I was being flown out to New York and by the age of nineteen I’d become musical director at the Limelight club on Charing Cross Road.
My life always followed a familiar pattern. I didn’t just need to be working the door at a club: I needed to run nights, run venues, run everything. And when it came to my recovery – as soon as I got a taste for it – I needed to run meetings too. This wasn’t just any old fellowship meeting, this was Tony’s fellowship meeting. I may as well have had flyers with the words Tony’s Recovery printed on them.
I still do it now, only these days I manage to stop myself – or someone else stops me first! I can turn up anywhere and gatecrash an entire room, be the most obnoxious person in there. The other week I was DJing at a festival in Croatia. Stavy was with me and we hooked up with old friends. Even Stavy ended up rolling his eyes, saying: ‘For fuck’s sake, Tony, give it a rest!’ because I was mouthing off over this, that and the other. The way I see it now, it’s just another mask I put on – old habits die hard! It’s another coping mechanism so that no one clocks that I’m excited, or anxious, or nervous, or just shit scared. So I pretend: I become the biggest, loudest person. And when you’re an addict, you have such a fucked- up, distorted view of yourself that the ego speaks first and the ego speaks loud.
Over the years, I’ve inhabited so many versions of myself that it’s not surprising I completely lost sight of who I was. I was the ultimate Wizard of Oz – a massive presence, but pull back that curtain and all you’d find was a little man struggling. And, for so many years, I didn’t allow anyone to pull back that curtain, not even Dorothy (though Toto may have got a lookin!). In Chapter 1, I described my mask at school as being the class clown – the entertainer – the kid at the back of the room desperate for people to laugh at my jokes because, behind that facade, I was failing at everything. It was the only way I thought people would like me or that I’d be accepted – the only way I thought I could survive in a system not built for me. God forbid that anyone would love me or get to know me – everything I did was to push that away.
By the time I left school, I had what I call big dick energy. I walked around giving it the big ‘I am’ to everyone I met. I was such a little cunt. How else could I have got expelled for forcing my drama teacher to suck me off? I mean, what fifteen- yearold does that? Yet I thought the world owed me. Worse still, I thought I could get whatever I wanted out of anyone. I thought I could control it all. It was all about the chase and Tony had to get his ego fed – on stage, in the backs of toilets, in park bushes. I was needy, seedy and greedy.
All the world’s a stage
When I hit the big time – when I started flying around the world to New York, Ibiza, you name it – I became even more of the court jester. Boy George took me on my first Concorde flight when I was eighteen; George Michael was a mate; I was playing after- parties for the likes of Madonna, Michael Jackson, Wham! and Elton John. Of course, I was tripping off my tits. But the point is that when that stuff is being offered to you, when your friends are the biggest pop stars on the planet, you enter an even bigger circus, but it was never a circus of my own making. In that environment, I guess I never thought I belonged – behind it all I had the worst imposter syndrome. I always felt like I was playing someone else’s game because, underneath, I never thought of myself as successful. I loved music, always had a thing for it, and it became everything to me, but I’d never had a game plan of becoming a DJ. I didn’t wake up one day and think, I’m gonna be a DJ. I’m gonna practise. And I’d never set out to achieve the fame I did. And because I never paid for anything – drugs, flights and so on – I was living a high life, a life beyond my wildest dreams, but none of the foundations felt secure. So being the clown made me visible: it gave me the attention I wanted and needed, and boosted me up whenever my ego felt smashed.
After I entered recovery, I wouldn’t return to work as a DJ for around a year, and so the rooms became just another stage where I needed to perform, impress people, be liked, get attention. I needed that gratification, and people finding mefunny became my new drug. So, if one of the steps of recovery is to actively surrender – to admit you have no control over your addiction, to put your faith in a higher power, then I did submit to that. I was powerless. Yet to compensate, all I did was try to claw back control by exerting power over everything and everyone around me. Of course, all I was doing was building more facades to distract from what was really going on inside. Essentially, I was lost, and I was using that as just another way to kill myself. I was keeping myself in a state of sickness.
Tony’s Guide to Masking
When we live in addiction, we wear masks to hide who we are. These different personas disguise how we are really feeling, and often deflect from emotions we’re not dealing with – feelings like fear, shame, sadness and anger. In other words, we wear masks to protect us.
It’s a bit like when someone asks, ‘How are you?’ and you reply, ‘Fine,’ when actually you feel like shit. That’s a mask – you’re hiding the real you. But turbocharge that with addiction – any addiction – and there are so many masks that a person can wear. You might be struggling to hold down a home, a job, a family – yet you keep trying to show the world that you’re okay, that you’re functioning.
I wore more masks than a fucking Greek tragedy! And, after twenty- eight years of drug and alcohol addiction, those masks became my identity. After I stopped using, they didn’t magically disappear: they continued to be my identity – it’s who I’d learned to be. They’d become so ingrained as coping mechanisms that I didn’t know who the real Tony was.
Here are just some of the masks people wear, and I know exactly which ones I’ve made my own in the past: The Joker; The Perfectionist; The Overachiever; The Bully; The Sex God; The Control Freak; The People Pleaser; The Drama Queen; The Victim.
Is that me, or my big fat ego?
I remember when I turned up as the newbie at Allington House in Bournemouth. Immediately, I hated all of those team leaders who’d achieved six months recovery time and who were now facilitating group work. Instead of thinking: Wow that’s amazing, I can really learn from this person, I thought: He’s a cunt. I’ ll annihilate him. I even made friends with the tallest girl in there – a woman called Collette – to form a kind of gang. If anyone picked a hole in my behaviour, I’d come at them all guns blazing and they’d have Collette to deal with too. Why? Because I was out of my comfort zone. I was a nobody. Yet in my head I was DJ Fat Tony, for fuck’s sake! I thought, How dare they? Even though I had a busted career, a busted face, a busted everything, I was still clinging on to my former glory.
I was also out of my depth because, for the first time ever, I couldn’t pretend to be anything more than who I was. I couldn’t lie about having six months clean time when I only had six days or six weeks. It would be like boasting to everyone I could speak fluent Spanish when the only words I knew were hola and graçias. Sooner or later someone was going to ask me to speak a whole sentence and I’d be found out! Like everyone else, I’d have to earn my clean time, and as I’d never earned anything in my entire life, the ego took over.
Back in London, I went from using drink and drugs to using meetings. For years. And I can only say this with hindsight, because when you’re in active addiction you don’t see anything of what you’re doing. All you’re doing is using those survival skills – those skills that may have served you in the past, but in reality started failing you a long time ago. Nevertheless, I gave it my best shot. The only way I knew how to be accepted, to be liked, was to bring out The Tony Show. And The Tony Show seemed to work – for a while, anyhow. Not only did it make me likeable and feel in control, it also kept everyone exactly where I wanted them: at arm’s length, not getting to know the real me – always in the audience and never on the stage.
I spoke in the last chapter about how I drew people in withmy war stories. If someone had done one drug, I’d done ten more. If someone had lost something, I’d lost everything. Then as soon as I’d exhausted that and I’d worked through enough of the twelve- step programme to start taking meetings myself, I couldn’t just take one meeting every so often. Oh no! Just like when I began DJing, Tony had to take over and lead three meetings a week. I became like a cuckoo, parasitically laying my eggs in someone else’s nest, shoving them out of their wellearned place. And I couldn’t just be a leader, I had to be a leader who drew in a crowd. I turned every meeting into a comedy. Whenever I asked someone to share their story, I’d let them speak, but as they did I’d sit there like the bitchiest fucking queen ever with my legs crossed, one eyebrow raised or my lip curled. Or I’d throw in some cutting quip. It got me the laughs. One Thursday lunchtime meeting went from twenty people in a dimly lit church hall in central London to a hundred and fifty members. Every. Fucking. Week. It was the largest arena I’d played to in a very long time and it felt fucking great.
So not turning up was never a problem for me. In fact, I committed religiously to meetings. I took every chance I could to stay clean – I wanted to recover – but I’d be lying if I said that some of that commitment didn’t serve me in very unhealthy ways. Let’s say I put my name down to make the tea for a meeting – that became an opportunity to become the funniest tea maker in London – the Basil Fawlty of tea makers! When I returned to DJing and earning again, I spent money on the best biscuits for the meeting. My wafers were far superior to anyone else’s broken Bourbon creams. People used to say, ‘Oh my God, you bring such good cakes, Tony!’ And there you have it again – kerching! The money shot – that ego was being fed.
I controlled the rooms in other ways, too. If I didn’t like someone, I rarely let them share. I’d see them with their hand up in the air and think, Nah. And it was a surefire bet that this person would be someone I saw as a threat, someone I thought might upstage me, or someone I clashed with. If they ever challenged me about it afterwards, told me that I’d purposely not chosen them or that I’d monopolised the room, I went ballistic. ‘Who the fuck do you think you are?’ I’d rage. I cut them right down, all because I needed to feel bigger and better than them. At the time, I found that powerplay funny. Now I look back at it and cringe, but also with relief that I don’t do that any more.
All hail Saint Tony
And I controlled with kindness. If ever I was leading a meeting and I invited a quieter member of the group to speak, that gave me a lot of pleasure. And truly, there is nothing better than seeing people come into recovery who’ve sat in silence for weeks, then come out of their shell. Or seeing someone who’s dead behind the eyes find that glint again. Often they would approach me afterwards and say: ‘Thanks. I was really nervous say that help was 100 per cent genuine and I had the best of intentions – and I thought that I did – but at that point in my recovery it also became another way to feed the beast. And Tony needed more . . . and more. So over time, I became amazing at everyone else’s recovery. It wasn’t long before I was an expert! I was king of the coop, getting high off saving the world.
And that’s another side to my character: there’s nothing I love more than scooping up a pigeon with a broken wing and kidding myself that I can fix them or change them. Saint Fucking Tony. At the time, I could barely even change myself. But to distract from that, I was doing everyone else’s recovery for them. People began ringing me: ‘Oh, so- and- so said you’d be able to tell meabout this, this and this.’ Let’s speak to Tony; Let’s ask Tony became just another facet of The Tony Show. I even started bringing my famous friends to meetings, like I’d turned into the Pied Piper of Recovery. Early on, I remember making it my mission to get Boy George into recovery (he did need it!), then George Michael – he’d been a lifelong friend and I saw he was struggling, so I thought: Right, I’m going to get that bitch clean. I rang him every day.
And I still do some of that shit now, because – if you didn’t already know – I’m a really good doctor, and I’m a really good vet. If there’s something wrong with my dog, Reenie, I’ll know exactly what it is. I’ll have diagnosed her myself, and think: I can treat that! I’ll go to the chemist and buy children’s eyedrops and children’s cough medicine and give it to my dog. I’ll think, Oh, if it’s all right for kids, it’ ll be fine for Reenie. That’ ll do it. I’ ll just monitor that, and if she doesn’t get better in two days, then I’ lltake her to the vet. Or, if Stavy’s not feeling well, I will tell him exactly what’s wrong with him. All the time. Because I know best. Of course I fucking do. I’m the best doctor in the whole of London. And I’m a really good plumber, and a really good electrician. Oh, I can fix that! I haven’t got the first fucking clue.
I couldn’t tell you anything about anything. But I can do it: Oh, yeah. I can do that. I know all about that. These days I have to stop myself and ask: What the fuck are you doing, Tony? Youdon’t know anything! It’s harmless, but it is just another mask.
Did I mention my sex addiction?
So, back in recovery, I was playing the clown, the ringleader and the elephant tamer all at the same time. Every day, I lived and breathed a different role in that circus. I thought I was Barnum – the greatest showman! And yet, all of it deflected from the real shit that I was doing outside of those rooms – feeding my ego in the way that I loved the most – through sex. And, you know what? I knew it, too. It’s why I ended up having the word ARROGANT tattooed on one hand, and HYPOCRITE on the other. It’s exactly who I was – it was probably the most truthful label I’d ever slapped on myself, because I’d become this preachy, self- righteous cunt – the kind of quality you hate if you see it in someone else. I was worse than a fucking snakeoil salesman – telling everyone about what they needed. Yet everything I was telling people to do in recovery, I wasn’t doing.
When I first became a sponsor (more on becoming a sponsor later), which I did around two years into recovery, I’d be on the phone to a sponsee. They’d be telling me how they were in a relationship yet sleeping with other people, so I’d give them all of this advice about how that wasn’t good for them and about how lying about anything wasn’t going to help them recover, blah, blah, blah – if only they knew I was doing the talk but not walking the walk. The whole thing was smoke and mirrors. In the whole six years I kept my first sponsor I don’t think I ever mentioned my sex addiction to him – I might have touched on it, but it was never, ever discussed as a problem.
During that time I’d also been in a messy relationship with someone (neither of us were faithful to one another). When he and I finally split, I hit another crisis point. I’d been living at his place, but now I was back sofa surfing, just like I had been at the height of my drug and alcohol addiction. So years into recovery, any progress I had made had well and truly plateaued. I had to face facts: yeah, I’d put down the drink and drugs but my life wasn’t getting any better than that. When Boy George offered that I stay at his place in Hampstead, I moved there for a few months (I ended up staying for four years). And I changed my sponsor to Gary, who is still my sponsor to this day. I thought that by doing so I could make another step- change. All great intentions. But again, was I truly ready to embrace recovery? Was I ready to actually do the work of recovery? Sadly, the answer was no.
This is an extract from RECOVER ME: A user’s guide to overcoming addiction and insanity by DJ Fat Tony. Published in hardback on 25 June 2026 (Piatkus, £25).