‘I hadn’t thought about a drink. Then I saw the pub. Game over’: singer-songwriter Michael Head on beating addiction - again

Michael Head is re-enacting the moment he thought he was about to die. In 2019, the beloved Liverpool songwriter "fell off the wagon on a grand scale". The 62-year-old, who had beaten heroin addiction twice, had been sober from alcohol since 2016. But by 2020 his drinking was so severe that he was getting regular seizures. One looked as if it would kill him.

Sitting on the couch in the cramped back room of Yawn studios in West Kirby on the Wirral, he sits bolt upright to indicate the panic; he flashes his hands across his face in a blur, making a whirling, thudding noise. "Like in the movies," he says. "I said to myself: 'Mick lad, this is it.'"

A remarkable chain of events has led not just to Head's survival and sobriety, but one of the most prolific periods of his 40-year career. Brilliant new album Loophole rapidly follows 2022's Dear Scott - Mojo's album of the year and Head's first UK Top 10 hit - and was written alongside his forthcoming autobiography, Ciao Ciao Bambino. "It's about mindset," he says. "I've had time to decide to be focused."

Now 62, the teenage Head decided music was his future in 1979 after watching the Teardrop Explodes on TV. The very next day, he met the band's keyboardist Paul Simpson at Probe Records in Liverpool, who introduced him to a local scenester named Yorkie, who in turn altered Head's mind by playing him Love's psych-folk classic Forever Changes. Thereon in, Head only ever wanted to write songs. "The young Mick had big, massive plans," he says.

He has since amassed a remarkable songbook with the Pale Fountains, Shack, the Strands and, since 2013, the Red Elastic Band: 11 albums of softly psychedelic, Love-inspired, Byrdsian bittersweet beauty. Head has admirers everywhere from Manic Street Preachers to the Coral and his current producer and Yawn owner Bill Ryder-Jones; Noel Gallagher is such a fan he released Shack's last album, 2006's The Corner of Miles and Gil, on his Sour Mash label. His following may well have been bigger were it not for a litany of far-fetched myth-making misfortune, including label mismanagement, death of band members, studio fires and missing master tapes. The phrase "lost songwriter" has ended up attached to him. "If I was lost, where would I have to go to be found? I've never been far away," he says.

The results were catastrophic. He was unable to stop drinking, he and his partner split. Worse still, his distraught daughter Allie Beaudouin, scarred from dealing with Head's on-off addictions, packed her bags and left for Canada. "It hit me so hard because I never thought he'd drink again," Beaudouin says. "He's two different people; all the worst traits come out. I've always put my dad first, but I had to be selfish."

"Everyone was at the end of the tether," Head says. "I don't blame them. I was putting them through hell."