Even if the police knew that the out-of-control ‘madman’ with the hammer in his hand and anger in his eyes was actually a famous pop star who had once sweetly encouraged us all to reach for the stars, they didn’t comment.
‘They probably didn’t make the connection,’ smiles Jon Lee, who became a household name as the youngest member of S Club 7 – surely one of our most wholesome, and least threatening, pop outfits.
‘I didn’t even recognise myself at that time. Sometimes, in the midst of one of the psychotic episodes where I’d be smashing my flat up with a hammer, I’d catch sight of myself in the mirror and say: “What the f***?”. ‘I’d have a moment of lucidity, thinking: “I was a successful young man, I had a brilliant career, incredible life. What am I doing?”
‘I’d be standing there, holes in the walls around me, cuts all over my knuckles, my eye swollen from where I’d been punching myself in the head. I’d shaved my hair too. I didn’t look anything like Jon-from-S Club – or what people would expect Jon-from-S Club to look like.’
During one of these incidents, circa 2019, Jon’s neighbours dialled 999.
‘It was 3am and I’d been smashing the place up, screaming and shouting. The police came, saw what a frenzied state I was in, and by the time they led me downstairs there was an ambulance there.
‘I don’t know where they took me to. It wasn’t a hospital, but some sort of clinic. I guess I was sectioned there, because they held me overnight. I remember I had to keep the door open, and someone sat outside. I suppose I was a danger to myself. It was after that I walked out on my own life.’
This is the first time Jon – a child star who was on the West End stage aged 12, before being plucked from thousands of fresh-faced hopefuls to be part of the hugely successful S Club 7 – has discussed the drug abuse that nearly killed him and erased a good chunk of his adult life.
There are many reasons why a life disintegrates, but as Jon, who is now 43 and living back home in Cornwall near his mum, tells his story, you can’t help but ask what role fame played in his descent, writes Johnston
Although he had dabbled in softer drugs during his pop star years, and readily admits that he used alcohol to ‘help me be the person I thought I had to be’, it was only in his thirties – when his pop career seemed like a distant dream, and he was pursuing a career in musical theatre – that he was introduced to crystal meth.
His addiction cost him dearly. ‘I’m not sure how I’m still here,’ he says, a little tearfully as he recalls the hallucinations, paranoid delusions and manic episodes.
‘My mum didn’t think I would be. For a long time, she was expecting the knock at the door saying: “We found Jon. He’s dead”.
‘My biggest regret is that I put my family through that.’
There were also points at which Jon – who really did seem to be living the showbiz dream – wished he was dead himself; indeed he pretty much did try to take his own life.
‘As well as the crystal meth, I was taking GHB, which just knocks you out if you take a certain amount. I’d take four times the dose, hoping not to wake up. When I did, often a whole 24 hours later, I just remember crying my eyes out because I simply didn’t want to be here.’
There are many reasons why a life disintegrates, but as Jon, who is now 43, and living back home in Cornwall, near his mum, tells his story, you can’t help but ask what role fame played in his descent.
This is a man, after all, who comes from a very ordinary non-showbiz family, but was cast in Oliver! in the West End when he was 12 and had won a scholarship to the Sylvia Young drama school by the time he was 13 (‘Amy Winehouse was the year below me,’ he observes).
British pop group S Club 7, circa 2001. When S Club split – after four Top 10 singles, worldwide success and their own TV show – he was still only 23
He was only 16 when he joined S Club and found himself catapulted to global fame, his sweet face smiling down from bedroom walls the world over. When S Club split – after four Top 10 singles, worldwide success and their own TV show – he was still only 23.
‘It’s not a normal world. You’re in a goldfish bowl, facing pressures that nobody else can understand.
‘Some people do come out unscathed, but others…’
He remembers his old school mate Amy Winehouse. ‘Her battle [with drugs] was very public. I’m glad mine wasn’t. If I’d gone through what I did – AND had to contend with headlines about it – I don’t think I’d be here today.’
Jon first started drinking when he was about 17.
‘It gave me a confidence that I didn’t have. Everyone assumes you do, but I didn’t.’
There were complicated factors at play, even then. Jon has always known he was gay, and was always open about this to his family, friends and band members in his teens. He only came out publicly though, in 2010 after S Club split. The disconnect between who he was, and who fans thought he was, proved to be a significant trauma, he now believes.
‘I spent a lot of that time terrified that someone would find out. I was living a lie. I couldn’t be myself. I did press interview after interview thinking: “This will be the day. Someone will ask, and what will I say?”.’
He says he numbed his anxiety with alcohol, drinking more in the months after the band broke up and he moved into musical theatre.
‘Gin, vodka and wine most days. I’d party, get up and go to work. But if I didn’t have work, I could drink three quarters of a bottle of gin in the afternoon.’
Then there were the drugs – cannabis, cocaine and ecstasy, all recreational, ‘but happening on a daily basis’, he adds.
The more complicated his life became, the more he relied on his stimulant ‘crutches’. In his thirties he had a love affair, which ended badly. Then in 2014 came a blow that knocked him sideways. His father – the mainstay of his life, the one who had driven the length and breadth of the country to take him to auditions as a child – was diagnosed with motor neurone disease. ‘My dad was my hero,’ he says. ‘He was the one I’d talk to – about money, career, everything. One of the cruellest things is that he lost the ability to speak. It hit me hard. I didn’t cope very well.’
He was in his mid-thirties, when he says he ‘lost the plot’.
‘I think I was just trying to get away from my life, from the reality of what was happening to my dad. I am ashamed now because my family needed me, but I just couldn’t deal with it.’
A friend offered him some crystal meth, to smoke at first, ‘and I bloody loved it. It just made me forget everything’. He took it once, then again after some weeks, not believing there was a problem. Then someone told him he could inject the drug, to get a stronger hit. He holds out his arm, showing where he offered up the vein.
‘I still can’t believe I did it. I let a complete stranger inject me. It’s the most disgusting, dangerous drug… and I went down that road.’ His career halted. ‘I couldn’t be in a theatre. I couldn’t even audition.’ He went to ground. Living alone, he’d draw the curtains in his flat, just outside London, and ‘try to get out of my own head’. At the beginning of his addiction, he was spending around £250 a week on crystal meth (‘more than my mortgage,’ he admits). Then the psychotic hallucinations started.
‘I’d be convinced that there were people in the flat. Sometimes I’d just hear them; other times I’d see them. I’d have conversations with them, just as I’m talking to you now.
‘Sometimes they were – this sounds odd to say – a comfort, because I never felt alone. Other times, I was terrified. I’d sleep with a hammer under the bed. I’d barricade myself in the bedroom, convinced they were coming to get me.
‘I had paranoid thoughts that they were hacking into my laptop, listening to my phone conversations. I’d hit out, at them, things in my flat. I put my head through the bathroom door one day.’
Several times his mum and sister took him to A&E after he had hurt himself.
But he refused all help, instead becoming increasingly reclusive. He’d venture out only to buy drugs or to simply walk.
‘The thing about the drugs is that you can’t sleep so I’d go out and walk, at night, to get away from the voices really. I’d walk for hours and hours and hours, and it would be the middle of the night by the time I got back, but then I could sleep.’ Jon’s father died in 2019, and the memory reduces him to tears. ‘My dad was so proud of me,’ he says. ‘I was so so ashamed of what I’d become, who I’d become.’ Rock bottom was reached soon afterwards, when, in one of the now-frequent episodes where he destroyed his own flat, he was taken away by police. Although he was let go the next day, he realised even then, that it was a watershed moment.
Some might have checked into rehab at this point, or called family. He took off, getting on the Eurostar to Paris.
‘I just walked out of my life,’ he says. ‘I posted my flat keys to my mum, wrote to her and my sister saying: “I have to do this”. I threw away my phone. I got rid of everything, all of my social media. A voice in my head told me I had to do it – “just go “and I did.’
It was a full year and-a-half before his mother heard from him again, and then it was to ask them to sell his flat.
‘I went to Paris, then Venice, Florence, Berlin, all over.’ Doing what? ‘Just walking. Like I’d done in London, but without the drugs. I was away for three and a half years, in total.’
What of his career, his fans? The astonishing thing is that no-one had any inkling of any of this. ‘My family were calling the other S Club members saying: “Do you know where he is”. No one did.’
How did he fund the ‘missing years’, when he wasn’t earning? He says that (‘thank goodness’) his ‘very sensible’ dad had advised him to invest in property during the S Club 7 years, and he still owned three flats which were rented out, ‘so there was always an income’.
Five years ago, he had made it to India, but was still feeling ‘wobbly about life’ when he had an encounter that would change everything.
‘I found a puppy,’ he says, eyes shining. ‘I called her Lolly, and it’s no exaggeration to say she gave me reason to live again. I had to get out of bed in the morning to feed her.’
He returned to the UK in 2022, with not just one but three rescue dogs, to pick up the pieces of his life, only to be greeted with news that another S Club reunion – marking the band’s 25th anniversary – was in the pipeline.
Would he be part of it? ‘At first I said no. I did open up to them about what I’d been through. I was a bit afraid that being back in the limelight would derail me,’ he says.
‘Simon Fuller [the brains behind S Club 7] was shocked, but understanding. He said I could go at my own pace’.
Any questions there might have been about where Jon had been were brushed aside when the band was hit with tragedy – the loss of fellow band member Paul Cattermole, aged just 49, in April 2023, who died from a heart condition.
‘Losing Paul was devastating,’ admits Jon. ‘I’d sat down with him at the pub and told him everything I’d been through. It was just before he died – and his death just floored me. But we all had grief counselling then. I think I used the time to unpick my own life, go back through everything – and try to put it all back together. I think it made me even more determined that I had to… live.’
Which brings us up to the present. Jon is back at work, doing gigs with fellow S Club star Jo O’Meara, and dipping a toe back into the celebrity world.
In August he will appear on the show Celebs Go Dating, proudly and openly seeking a partner.
And his mum? As part of his recovery, he moved back to Cornwall, and bought two houses on the same plot. He lives in one; his mum and sister, and his nieces, live in the other. ‘They never gave up on me, and I owe them the world.’
