Star treatment

The psychotherapist Beechy Colclough probably knows more celebrity secrets than anyone in Britain. He has treated an extraordinary number of stars, including Jerry Hall, Robbie Williams, Elton John, Michael Jackson, Paul Gascoigne, Michael Barrymore, Darren Day, Sophie Anderton, Danniella Westbrook and Caroline Aherne.

Elton John was so grateful for the Irishman's help in curing his bingeing and self-hatred that he agreed to write the foreword to his book, The Effective Way To Stop Drinking. 'I am now convinced that those of us too proud, too arrogant or too frightened to ask for help need people like Beechy to help us claw our way back into existence,' he observed. 'Riddled with addictions, I was obese, miserable, suicidal and beaten.'

Colclough also reportedly inspired Jerry Hall to leave Mick Jagger after decades of womanising, weaned Michael Jackson off his addiction to painkillers after spending an entire month with him, and helped Robbie Williams... well, he probably didn't know where to start with Robbie Williams.

'People come to me because they're in the shit,' he explains in his strong, no-nonsense Irish accent. 'Generally they've been everywhere else. I'm viewed as the maverick, because I go into people's homes - I'll be with them 24 hours a day.' Like Michael Jackson? A nod. 'Yeah.' What was he like? 'I loved him. He's the most talented person I've ever met.' Musically? 'In every way.'

We are in the dark and formal Tsar's Bar at the Langham Hilton where Colclough, looking funky-Parisian in a beret and black jersey, has come to talk about another self-help book he has written - Get Up and Do It! Essential Steps To Achieve Your Goals. He could be a sailor or a builder: his forearms swell from his black sleeves like hams. He sits attentively cradling a latte and his vivid blue eyes stare at you deeply, never dropping your gaze, while a simmering energy roils off him.

'Not to me,' he says at once, when I ask if it's different treating celebrities to normal people. How did he get to treat Elton John? 'How did I get him?' Colclough ponders. 'He was referred by Dr David Altman of Parkland Hospital in Chicago. He came to me for follow-up treatment.' What was he like? He sips his latte. 'He was cool. Look at him! He's got a knighthood. He deserves about ten knighthoods for the work he's done for people with HIV alone.' And he analysed Jerry Hall? 'Yeah, I helped her. She's wonderful.' Is it true she left Mick Jagger after seeing him? 'I can't talk about that.' What about Robbie Williams? 'He's well. Look at him!

He's great. Very talented. I haven't seen him for ages, but he looks great.'

Colclough, 56, charges £130 an hour. He works from an office in Harley Street and treats addictions to alcohol, drugs and food, as well as depression and terminal illness. I ask what he does in his sessions. 'I invite them to talk,' he replies. 'I'm good at getting people to talk. I listen to what they don't say. Then I give it back to them: "You say this, do you really mean this?" "Er, yes." "Well, so tell me then! If you can't tell me, don't sit here." I'm very confrontive [sic].' I ask what he would say if I was his client and told him I was about to get together with a drug addict. He shrugs. 'I'd say that's great. Come back and see me in a couple of weeks. At some point you'll call me because he'll have died or done something. It always ends up badly.'

He should know. Colclough is himself an ex-addict and alcoholic, and spent the first 16 years of his adult life on a prolonged bender. He would take 'dope, LSD, sulphate, painkillers, anything I could get my hands on', and in his worst years slept rough as a tramp, in London and Guernsey, knocking back Brasso and Old Spice aftershave. He would maraud into supermarkets, snatch whisky bottles from the shelf and empty them into his mouth as shoppers reared away in disgust.

'When I was drinking I was horrible,' he says, looking me in the eye. 'You wouldn't have given me the time of day. I was self-destructive, horrible verbally, remorseful, depressed, miserable.'

Soaking on park benches, he would watch people going to work. 'You cannot imagine the loneliness, when the days are getting shorter and you're walking down the street and the lights in the windows are on.' Awful, I murmur. 'It was a million miles past awful,' he says.

It was his now (second) wife, then a barmaid called Josephine, who rescued him. She has become a therapist, too - they co-wrote Get Up And Do It! - and they share a converted farmhouse in Lincolnshire. She gave a rather chilling picture of his behaviour on alcohol six years ago. 'He used to say things like, "You bitch. You've ruined my life," ' she recalled. 'Once I had my fringe cut and I thought it looked nice. I came home and he was in the middle of a drinking session. He turned round and said, "What have you done? You're a f***ing mess." ' They began going out in the last four years of his drinking. Why did she stay? 'Because her father was an alcoholic, and he left and she never got a chance to help him.' They have been together 25 years. 'If it hadn't been for her I'd be dead.'

Colclough detoxed in a clinic in Plymouth in 1982. He compares the years of adjusting to sobriety to 'pecking out of an egg - I had to relearn everything'. As the screen of alcohol dissolved he discovered that he had alienated his entire acquaintance. He admits sombrely he could feel 'shame forever' if he dwelt on how he behaved during those years. But in Plymouth his therapist had told him things would look up if he 'just told the truth', so when he went for a job as a kitchen porter at a hotel on Guernsey, he did. 'And that was the first time, outside a therapy group, I had said to a complete stranger: "Do you know what? I've been destroying myself." '

He washed dishes in that hotel brasserie for six months, the oldest in the kitchen. 'They all saw me as a loser.' Then he heard of a chef's competition called the Salon Culinaire taking place at the Royal Hotel down the road. He decided to ask the hotel chef if he could take part. ' "F*** off," he said. And threw me out. An enormity of feelings came up for me that afternoon. "I'm just fit for washing dishes" - it came home to me. Then, at 9pm, the phone rang and it was him, laughing. He'd had a few glasses of wine and was up with the sous chef. He said, "You can do a plate of hors d'oeuvres." They were taking the piss out of me.'

He won second prize. 'That started it. It was the most significant moment in my recovery. I thought: "If you're really up for it, and willing to push yourself, Beechy, God knows what can happen." Fear is the single biggest emotion that holds you back. I ended up in charge of the brasserie I had washed dishes for, and was 16 months into recovery when my old treatment director from Plymouth said, "Get back here and I'll train you." ' He went on to become an agony uncle for the Sunday Mirror and GMTV and last year hosted a daytime ITV show called The Intervention, where he interviewed addicts with their families - brought in by them on a pretext - before dispatching them off to rehab.

It is this transformation that provides the backbone for Get Up And Do It! 'If you apply yourself, make the right decisions, continually work on yourself and be realistic, then you can achieve your goals,' he writes in it. The book offers motivational techniques, such as encouraging you not to regard anxiety as a bad sign, identifying self-sabotaging strategies, talking positively to yourself and jettisoning limiting self-beliefs. It has a nice line about fear being 'False Evidence Appearing Real', but is similar to a lot of self-help tomes already in the bookshops.

Colclough says he was an alcoholic because of his genes, not his childhood, though that was bad enough. He grew up on Belfast's rough Ormeau Road where he was bullied because of his sissy Christian name (he was christened Beauchamp after one of Cromwell's generals). Though Catholic (he is one of eight children), his parents sent him to a Protestant school, and to add to his difficulties his father was a resounding drunk.

'I grew up never knowing what I was,' he says. 'I had an alcoholic father and a mother who loved him to death. I was the youngest child by ten years, so it was just him, my mother and me, and he never paid me any attention. Every night when he came home I used to hide. He would shout and scream and break things, and be out fighting in the street. It was just terrifying. I was brought up in fear. I know a lot about fear. I've been in the most bizarre, frightening situations therapeutically and I'm not frightened. What more can happen to me?'

I ask if that could be the reason for his addictions. 'No,' he says. 'I was born an alcoholic. Alcoholics drink because they can't not drink. If you go back in my family tree, it's there.' How did he feel about that? 'I feel there was nothing else I could do. That was the way it was going to be. I'm not responsible for what happened.' Are his siblings alcoholics? 'I don't know, because I don't have any relationship with them. To my knowledge they're all OK. I'm the one who took after my father.' At times, his reasoning can seem a bit woolly.

'The family was torn apart by my father. That's really the long and short of it. I don't want to get into it, because they'll read about it, and it'll get even worse. But I have everything I need in my life and I've accepted the way it is.'

This fatalistic notion of acceptance, or refusal to attempt change, is very apparent in Colclough. In an alcoholic haze, at 22, he married a woman called Josephine Carroll. They had a son, Julian, and he left her when she was pregnant with their next child, Abigail. 'I haven't seen her in 30 years,' he remarks of his first wife, folding his muscular arms. 'I was drunk when I married her.' His relationship with his children is also almost non-existent. Abigail, who is now 29, and lives in Bradford, was quoted last October as saying that it was 'frustrating when he's portrayed as such a wonderful man when he's not'.

'I don't want to talk about them,' Colclough says, frowning, 'because in the last article about me, again they were commenting. I never had any contact with them. I've seen my daughter twice and my son twice and I haven't heard from them. They do what they do. I don't know what they do. That's the way it is. As a therapist I have to accept that.'

But as a therapist couldn't he change that? 'How can I change the fact that I wasn't there?' Did he think it might be upsetting if they felt their biological father didn't want to see them? 'Probably, but that's not the case. I have never said that I didn't.' But did he? A pause. 'To be really honest with you, at the moment, I don't know, after what happened with them talking to newspapers.'

He is very hurt that they criticised him in print. 'I have feelings, too!' he points out. But still, I say, he is their father. 'But I'm the vulnerable one!' he exclaims. This stumps me. He tells me, upset, putting on his coat, that if the interview is to be about his children he doesn't want it to run. 'It was just so unjust,' he says, referring to the article quoting Abigail. And shakes my hand and heads off. He is a busy man. He has another patient to see, more hearts to heal.