The Conversation Live with Amanda de Cadenet

I met Tony when I was 14. He remembers it as a herd of teenage girls stampeding down Kings Road with an attitude he calls “a little mini suffragette movement.” Thirty odd years later, we sat down for a Live conversation, both of us sober, both of us in recovery, both of us somehow still standing, and it felt like picking up a sentence we’d left unfinished decades ago.

Tony is a legendary DJ, the author of the memoir I Don’t Take Requests, and just released his second book, Recover Me: A User’s Guide to Overcoming Insanity, structured around the 12 steps, with input from his therapist, Tara, at the end of every chapter. We talked for close to 45 minutes, and it went everywhere. Here’s what stayed with me.

Getting sober isn’t the same as getting well. Tony was 15 years sober, doing five or six meetings a week, sponsoring half of London, opening rehabs in Thailand, and still stuck. He calls it “the Tony show”: a new behavior wearing the costume of recovery. His therapist finally asked him a simple question: when did you last drink? Fifteen years. Then why are you still raging about it every session? That was the moment he realized he was living in the solution to a problem he no longer had, while the real ones sat untouched.

The work underneath the work. For Tony, that meant trauma therapy, literal coloring in, drawing timelines with felt tip pens, mapping the people who’d hurt him. He didn’t consciously notice a pattern until much later: every person he drew who’d caused him harm had yellow hair. He’d been drawn to blondes his entire life, tracing straight back to the person who abused him as a child. We talked about how intellectual insight, being able to explain your own history, is a completely different thing from actually feeling different. That gap is something I’m circling in the book I’m writing now.

Desirability as the first taste of power. We both landed on the same memory: the moment we realized we were sexually desirable was the first time we felt like we mattered, counted, existed. For Tony, sex became “a new love behavior” he thought he controlled. We talked about how much of a life can get built on that foundation before you notice it’s not actually love.

Being fully known. Tony described meeting his now husband with nothing hidden for the first time, no skeletons, no performance. He’d already published the most honest book he could write; there was nothing left to protect. The hardest part, he said, wasn’t other people accepting him. It was that he was the last one to accept himself.

Sponsors, friendship, and finding your people. We talked about how relationships in recovery shift shape over time, sponsors who become family, sponsees who become chosen children, the slow work of finding people who’ll hold your hand rather than hang off your shirt. Tony dedicated Recover Me to his friend Eddie Queens, who built an online meeting during lockdown that grew from six people to hundreds before she passed away last year, a reminder of how much of recovery is communal, not solitary.

Higher power, redefined. Not a lightning bolt kind of faith. For Tony, it’s the energy of a room full of strangers moving to music, or a genuinely honest conversation. For both of us, connection itself does a lot of the work that used to be assigned to God.

The throughline for both of us, in different words, was the same: honesty is the hardest and simplest tool either of us has. Not the varnished version, the real one. Tony put it better than I could: “What works for me today is based on the most simplest of things, but the hardest of things, honesty.”

The full conversation is above if you want to watch it.

Love,

Amanda X