Addiction, Music and Recovery: Fashion's Favourite DJ Fat Tony on Creating an Alter Ego

DJ Fat Tony sits down with SHOWstudio in a brutally honest interview about his best-selling memoir humorously titled I Don’t Take Requests, showcasing Tony’s extraordinary life in music, addiction and the road to recovery. Growing up on an estate in Battersea as the middle child, chaos would become a constant in Tony’s life. Falling into trouble from a young age, Tony’s gift of the gab and ear for dance music would take him from working stalls in a market and acting as the receptionist for a prostitute, to hosting nights for the biggest clubs in London, Ibiza and New York, partying with friends including Boy George and Kate Moss. Underneath the glitz and glam however, Tony began spiralling into drug and alcohol addiction and risked losing it all. His memoir, written with Michael Hennegan, leaves no stone unturned. In many ways, this is a book about trauma, revealing the events which led to 28 years of addiction including the DJ’s harrowing account of being the victim of child abuse from the age of 9, but it’s also a story of redemption and the magic of music, which looks beneath the facade of ‘DJ Fat Tony’. Part of our recurring series Book Club, explore the project on SHOWstudio.com/projects/book_club Established in November 2000, SHOWstudio is an award-winning fashion website, founded and directed by Nick Knight, that has defined the manner in which fashion is presented via the Internet. A pioneer of fashion film and live fashion broadcasting, SHOWstudio is now recogni