Will Young has opened up about “being terrible” at taking drugs during a “wild phase” he embarked on when he rose to fame in the Noughties.
The “Evergreen” singer, who won the inaugural Pop Idol aged 22 in 2002, was speaking on Jamie Laing’s Great Company podcast when he recalled the first time he started taking drugs at the beginning of his career.
The singer, now 45, said: “I had my sort of like, wild phase. I remember thinking, Oh, I should take some drugs now, because I’d never taken drugs. You know?”
“I remember the drug dealer getting me in his car, and then he brought his girlfriend around to meet me,” he recalled.
But it was comments made by a friend that made Young realise that drug-taking wasn’t the path for him.
He explained: “I tried that for a bit, and then I remember my friend saying to me, ‘You’re not a very good drug taker. I don’t think you’re a drug taker.’ I said, I think you’re right!”
Young’s comments come just weeks after the singer claimed he was “pressured” to continue competing in Strictly Come Dancing by his team, after he asked to pull out of the competition because he was dealing with extreme agoraphobia.
When he dropped out after three weeks on the BBC show in 2016, Young cited personal reasons.
But speaking with Rylan Clark on his BBC podcast How To Be In The Spotlight about his time on Strictly, Young said: “I tried to pull out of it, but I was sort of pressured to do it.
“It was sort of like ‘Well, if you pull out, the BBC will never work with you again’.
“That was one of the things that was said to me, so I did it, but I knew I wasn’t well enough.”
Young, who was partnered with Strictly-pro Karen Hauer when he was on the show, continued: “You know, when you’re getting flashbacks and all those kind of things, for me, it was agoraphobia.”
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“So agoraphobia was really bad for me. So literally throughout that stage, I didn’t even know where I was.
“I’m on that show. If you ever watch it back, I was not even in the room.”
Strictly is currently embroiled in controversy following multiple allegations of abusive and inappropriate behaviour behind the scenes.
Two of the show’s professional dancers, Graziano Di Prima and Giovanni Pernice, have been dropped from its lineup ahead of the new season’s launch this autumn.
In a recent interview with The Independent, Young spoke about how the breakdown he suffered after Strictly – which he traced back to his experiences at boarding school – led to years of therapy as well as visits to a shaman.