American singer David Crosby regards the time he almost died from his addiction to cocaine as a valuable learning experience.

The WIND ON THE WATER star, who is now clean, found the allure of the illegal drug became "more important" to him than creating music, before he was jailed for walking out of a rehabilitation centre he'd entered in place of a prison sentence in the mid-1980s.

He explains, "Coke got in the way most dramatically, and almost killed me. It took my life over. It got more important than the music was, and that was something that I'd sworn would never happen. It taught me a good lesson."

And now Crosby prefers performing sober: "I like to play straight, because I do a better job, but I think all the other stuff, they can't go hard enough against it, it's just awful."

28/09/2004 17:32