Justin Hawkins saw his nose 'fall out' at peak of cocaine addiction

Justin Hawkins has admitted "bits of [his] nose fell out" at the height of his cocaine addiction.

The Darkness frontman spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on the drug before getting sober 20 years ago, and he's reflected on the "cataclysmically awful" times that saw him hit rock bottom and vow to change his life.

Speaking on Andrew Gold's Heretics podcast, he said: "I sometimes think about what it would be like if I had a sip of alcohol now and I think it would probably burn.

"I think now it's been so long that I can't even imagine drinking. So to ask me what it tasted like or felt like is a difficult question to answer honestly.

"I can still remember the smell of cocaine and the numbing sensation.

"I remember bits of my nose falling out and stuff and like whole tubes of like the mucus kind of structure coming out. Yeah, I did a lot of it."

The 51-year-old singer knew he needed to get sober when "something really bad happened", but declined to go into detail.

He said: "There was some stuff that happened that was so cataclysmically awful that I changed my life.

"There was something bad happened. Something really bad happened actually.

"But those are what you might call the wake-up calls, aren't they?

"There were a lot of moments that I'm going to only euphemistically refer to because there's some stuff that happened that was so cataclysmically awful that I changed my life and I'm not going to sit here and talk to you about it."

Justin noted how addicts ultimately realise they need to stop after "something dreadful" causes them to take stock of their choices.

He said: "Yeah, there's [moments] where you feel shame and you know you've hurt other people and that's what makes you stop.

"Like this is what I love about alcohol and drugs and stuff. It's like in the first instance you're looking for a correlation between the positive things that happen in your life and the amount that you're consuming.

"And then you see that because you want to see that and then it [the drugs] doesn't stop because of anything positive.

"Like if somebody said to me in say 2006 or whatever, if I gave you £5million will you stop doing drugs? I go like, yeah.

"And then I would take drugs and I'd f*** it up because something positive isn't what stops it. It's something negative. That's why they always talk about rock bottom.

"So somebody dies or something dreadful happens and then you have to take stock and go hang on that's my bad. I've got to stop doing that."

The I Believe in a Thing Called Love hitmaker still takes sobriety "one day at a time" and admitted the question he hates most is being asked if he is happier now.

He added: "What the f*** does that mean? I’m a human being, which means every day is a myriad of different feelings that you sit with."