01 September 2019
Newsdesk
The Keane singer has spent 10 years undergoing "pretty heavy" psychoanalysis and thinks it has made him a better person, while he and his bandmates are more "supportive" towards one another since their recent reunion.
He said: "We are kinder to each other, more aware and more supportive now. In so many ways I'm grateful for my addiction because it's made me understand myself, good and bad."
Tom's "wake-up call" came when he relapsed after the group split in 2014, leaving his wife Natalie - the mother of his five-year-old daughter - terrified he'd die.
He told Event magazine: "That was my wake-up call. I left the band, decided to do a solo album and had a baby all at the same time as taking as many drugs as possible. And then you have to work out why you behaved like that. I needed hardcore analysis and it's helped me change.
"As a kid I had issues with confidence, and my way of dealing with it was drugs. I went to university to study art history when I was 18 and discovered that if I took a load of drugs I didn't feel so insecure. I basically spent a year just taking drugs and then dropped out, came back home and Tim asked me to be in his band. People had no clue I was like that."
The group's comeback album, 'Cause And Effect', is inspired by keyboardist Tim Rice-Oxley's marriage breakdown and Tom praised his friend for his honesty.
He said: "Tim wrote this album out of a really painful time in his life. But that again is honest. We are putting ourselves out there. It's all we can do."
The 'Somewhere Only We Know' writer hit rock bottom when he was arrested in 2015 after being found in a ditch when he'd crashed his car while drunk.
Tim recalled: "There I was, hung over in a police cell and I felt I'd just lost everything. I was pretty proud of the boxes I'd ticked over the past ten years - four No 1 albums, lovely wife, house in the country, kids. But I'd made a classic mistake of thinking the marriage, the children, the house would all just be there for me. I put all the effort into the success of the band and not into my family. And then the band split [in 2014], my marriage ended and I realised that everything that made sense had gone."
