Insecure Men The Crescent, York Monday 30th November, 7.30pm Tickets are £16.50 (+ b/f) in advance and available from See Tickets. *This is a standing show* Saul Adamczewski spent the summer of 2024 living in a cupboard in the South London suburb of Tulse Hill. No band, no girlfriend. Certainly no money. When you’ve lost your job as the tea boy for a Rastafarian meth dealer, where exactly is there left to go? Life, for the songwriter in his mid-thirties, had darkened. “I thought that the chewing gum on the floor in Brixton was artworks with my face on it,” remembers Adamczewski of his frayed psychological state. “Quite severe psychosis. Mental health services were called.” Adamczewski has lived with mental health challenges all of his life, but the hallucinations brought on by psychosis were worse than anything he had previously experienced. Going weeks without a proper meal, Adamczewski became very, very unwell. He was socialising only with the local methadone services, or those who could procure him a cheap bag of fentanyl (the street opioid of choice in English cities in the 2020s), and it was a period he remembers as arguably the lowest of his life. “I looked like I was going to die,” says Adamczewski, “and I suppose I was.” But something changed. “I called my Mum,” he remembers today, sipping Super Bock in a summertime Paris recording studio looking healthy and even handsome. “I said: I’m done, I’m fucked. Can I come home?”. Adamczewski began the painful process of opioid withdrawal in his mother’s house. “Since then, everything has been much better,” he says, and has spent the last year cheerfully cohabiting with his mum in South East London suburbia. “Everything started to come back to me. I really thought I was a goner.”