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Given that his early songs, his voice and his persona were drenched in drink, how hard was it for him to give up?

“Oh, you know, it was tough. I went to AA. I’m in the programme. I’m clean and sober. Hooray. But it was a struggle.”

Does he miss the odd night-cap?

“Miss drinking?” he says, sounding genuinely surprised. “Nah. Not the way I was drinking. No, I’m happy to be sober. Happy to be alive. I found myself in some places I can’t believe I made it out of alive.”

That bad, huh?

“Oh yeah. People with guns. People with gunshot wounds. People with heavy drug problems. People who carried guns everywhere they went, always had a gun. You live like that,” he says, without a trace of irony, “you attract lower company.”

Did he write a different kind of song when he was drinking?

He thinks about this for an instant, then says, “No. I don’t think so. I mean, one is never completely certain when you drink and do drugs whether the spirits that are moving through you are the spirits from the bottle or your own. And, at a certain point, you become afraid of the answer. That’s one of the biggest things that keeps people from getting sober: they’re afraid to find out that it was the liquor talking all along.”