Anyone who’s interviewed a newly sober rock star will know they have a tendency to vomit self-help platitudes. Not Danny Bryant. “People like that used to get on my nerves,” the 45-year-old British bluesman says, grinning. “You know, the ones that walk around saying: ‘Oh, I get up at half six in the morning, I go for a long walk, I’ve got my coffee, I love my life…’ I used to think that was absolute bollocks, to be honest with you. But that’s because, secretly, I was desperate to be sober too.”
In his first interview of the campaign for Nothing Left Behind, we start by apologising in advance to Bryant. The trouble is, we squirm, there’s no way to broach this new album without landing on subjects including death, divorce, hospitalisation and drastic weight loss. He interrupts us and says not to worry, ask away, and nothing is off the table.
That trust in us to tell his story right goes back some 15 years, when Bryant was a regular in Classic Rock’s (now gone) sister publication The Blues. Born in Royston, Hertfordshire in 1980 – it’s still his stamping ground – the guitarist came up as a protégé of Walter Trout, and there was a little of his US mentor in the kid’s bruised songwriting, big-man blues holler and eyes-closed emotive solos. But perhaps a darker parallel existed too: while Trout had long since kicked his demons, Bryant was just getting acquainted with his.
Back then, at interview, there were hints that Bryant was struggling (“I remember talking to you once about my terrible anxiety”). Today, he opens the book. “I was always nervous about going on stage, nervous about doing interviews. So I’d have a drink. It was self-medication. I could still play. Otherwise I wouldn’t have kept the job. But touring was about how messed-up I could get, and it wasn’t about the music any more. And things got very, very dark.”
Over the past decade, Bryant recalls his drinking “creeping up” as life rained blows on him. First came the death of his beloved father (and bass player in his first band), Ken, then the head-messing years of covid and his 2022 divorce. When a subsequent girlfriend took her own life while he was on tour, he crashed.
“The drinking got way, way worse,” he remembers. “I was a textbook ‘drink-vodka-and-hide-it’ alcoholic. I was waking up in my hotel room and the withdrawal was already so bad that I’d just start drinking. I was so low at that point, I didn’t care. I’d sort of lost everything. You know, my career wasn’t going great. My marriage had finished.”
He hit rock bottom in January 2024.
“I’d done a long tour, and when I came home I was yellow. What saved my life was almost dying, basically. I was at my mum’s house when she called an ambulance. They took me into hospital and told me: ‘If you drink again, you’ll die. And we’re not sure if you’re going to die anyway.’ They said I’d ruined my liver, I had cirrhosis, I’d need a transplant. Fortunately they jumped the gun on that.”
Remarkably, not only did Bryant survive, but he also repaired his liver by overhauling his lifestyle (today, sharp-cheekboned, scruffily handsome and seven stone lighter, he’s unrecognisable from the heavy-jowled grizzly of his drinking years). In those fragile early days, he finally turned to Trout.
“That was a shameful part of it for me,” he says of hiding his addiction from the older musician. “But once I got out of hospital, Walter found out what was going on and he was great. He rang me and said: ‘You don’t need to apologise. It’s an illness, you fell into that trap. I’m here to make sure you’re better.’ We talk all the time now, and him saying how proud he is, that’s another big help.”
When Bryant got back to work – at the head of a five-piece band including guitarist/producer Marc Raner – the first song he tracked was the haunted Enemy Inside – “I actually wrote the lyric in hospital”. But in truth it’s an outlier on a largely positive album that suggests a man pledging to live better.
“A song like Tougher Now has that theme of redemption,” he says of the head-banging opener. “And it’s got the lyric: ‘I drained the poison from my veins.’” He smiles. “My bloods [tests] actually came back the other day and they were completely normal.”
He credits Black Country Communion for sparking the rock edge of tracks like Not Like The Others, while Swagger’s boogie is touched by the hand of ZZ Top.
“Blues will always be the reason I get up in the morning and the reason I can’t sleep at night, but on that song I was thinking about Billy Gibbons,” Bryant says. “When I was ill, we were supposed to open for them in Germany. I was trying to get the doctor to let me out of the hospital. Apparently I kept saying to him: ‘Look, I’ll pay you if you come over with me so I can play this show.’ One day he finally said ‘Let’s make a deal. I promise I’ll get you home, but you’ve got to give up this idea that you’re going on tour with ZZ Top!’”
Perhaps there’s still time. Two years sober, Bryant says his relationship with the guitar is reborn and the songs won’t stop coming (“I work on my playing like I haven’t since I was sixteen, simply because I’ve fallen back in love with it”). He suddenly has the time to steer his career (“Everything is easier, because you’re not pissed, you’re not hungover and you’re not a nervous wreck”). Most importantly, for the first time in years, he can see a future.
“I never take being sober for granted, because that’s when you can slip up. So it’s one step at a time. But all the clichés you read about getting sober, they’re all actually true. And this is the best life I’ve ever lived.”
Nothing Left Behind is out now via Jazzhaus.
