Message in a bottle - does drink fuel creativity, or merely self-delusion?

Paul Heaton, singer and main songwriter with The Beautiful South, is on the wagon. A man who reputedly once said he was only in the music industry to support his drinking habit, Heaton reckons that although he's now sober, his creativity is still there - it's just going to take a little longer to come out. One of his first concerns about giving up drinking was how it would affect his songwriting. That remains to be seen, however, as the Beautiful South's most recent release, Painting it Red, was almost entirely written in bars around Utrecht while Heaton was still firmly off the wagon.

We can't gauge how sobriety has interfered with Heaton's creative processes - he may be just as good as a sober songwriter - but the frantic history of rock'n'roll has provided many other examples of musicians who lived, and died, under the influence. Rory Gallagher, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, John Bonham, Bill Haley, Bon Scott. All these people had two main things in common; they all made what is still considered to be world-class music, and they all drank themselves into an early grave.

Reason and chaos
Creative people are a mix of reason and chaos at the best of times, but add large doses of adulation, stir in a few million in royalties and leave stew in an uncertain ego for a few albums, and you have the perfect recipe for a "dead-before-their-time" rock star. What killed them, however, may have been the very thing that enabled them - when they were still alive - to be creative. A contentious point, for sure, but one which lingers as persistently as a rock star at a free bar. For many musicians, the lifestyle that comes with the career becomes a matter of necessity.

Not that dying is a necessary ingredient. A premature demise may be edifying if you're a paperback biographer, but not if you're a fan. Sure, most people want their heroes to live near the edge, but they want them alive. Fans fulfil their own desires vicariously through their idols. Alive and kicking up stink will always be more alluring than dead and fondly remembered; who can say they haven't been even slightly fascinated by the unpredictability and self-destructiveness of people such as Shane McGowan, Ollie Reid or Slash from Guns'n'Roses, who in publicity shots was adorned with a bottle of Jack Daniels more often than with a guitar? Only last week McGowan made front-page news again in his attempts to stop drinking.

Productive and lucrative
Of course it makes sense for Shane McGowan to give up what's killing him. But he is also giving up a persona that has been both productive and lucrative during his entire career, be it as a songwriter or as the dream of a marketer of trad-punk. McGowan was previously thrown out of a top rehab clinic for disorderly behaviour - a myth-making accolade cool enough to sell 10,000 units, as well as the sign of a character just enough at odds with the world and himself to be a musical genius.

Being slightly unhinged is possibly an advantage when it comes to creative expression - just look at any number of 20th-century artists - and if a bottle of liquor or pills enhances that creative fracture, who's to say it's improper? What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, so they say, and when it comes to musicians and creative people in general, a little substance abuse may just provide that creative spark sometimes known as inspiration. It's a question of when to stop. In the early 1970s, David Bowie's record company provided him with whatever drugs he "needed" to help him get a particularly "difficult" album finished. Eric Clapton can't even remember a full two-year period during the height of his fame and creativity. There is a clear difference between The Beatles pre- and post-acid music, the latter being clearly more "inspired". The list could go on.

Nor is this type of behaviour confined to latter-day rock musicians. W.B. Yeats is known to have fed his wife George all-manner of mind-altering substances in order to extract some pure creative juices from her mind. Sigmund Freud, the man who invented the vaulting ego, was very fond of cocaine, and underwent many a self-examination while on the stuff. Ernest Hemingway loved to get plastered and rattle off a few chapters. Dean Martin, though a modest drinker, cultivated one of the most loved and respected personas either music or film has ever seen, a character whose moral ineptitude and inner demons went hand-in-hand with his integrity and machismo. That he wasn't a genuine drunkard is irrelevant. A major reason Dean Martin had the appeal he did was because people believed he was drunk all the time. He may have needed this facade to be the star he was, just as others may have needed alcohol in a more traditionally dependant way.

Take the guitar player Stevie Ray Vaughan. In his musical prime, he was the finest blues guitarist on the planet, an unquestioned fact by most music critics and fans alike. Also a humble guy, while recording his 1984 occluded rock masterpiece Couldn't Stand The Weather, a heavily drugged-up Vaughan proposed to pay an explicit tribute to his hero Jimi Hendrix by attempting to cover exactly the Hendrix classic, Voodoo Chile (Slight Return). The result is so good, it is generally considered to be the version Hendrix was trying to play when he recorded it.

After collapsing onstage during an English tour, Vaughan sought help to deal with his cocaine and alcohol addiction, entering a treatment centre in September 1986. He succeeded spectacularly in cleaning up his act, and four years and two mediocre albums later he died in a helicopter crash. If there's a heaven, then Stevie Ray Vaughan is sitting up there wondering why, before fate shuffled him off so ignominiously, he let the puritan in him defeat his muse and turn him into a sober parody of his former self, when he should have made at least three more drug-fuelled classic albums before suffering a gloriously necessary death from overdoing it.

It's just possible that Paul Heaton may have given up more than he bargained for when he emerged from his 10-year heavy-drinking stint. Without his liquid companion, he may find himself scrabbling around to find the songs for his next album.

Check out Rock's Premature Deaths here