Sonny Hall on rehab, writing and reinventing himself

The millennial poet and model speaks to Martha Hayes about overcoming his teen struggles
Martha Hayes14 March 2019

Sonny Hall can pinpoint the exact moment he decided to get clean.

It was 11am on Gloucester Road, he’d just scored some pills and he was about to have his first drink of the day ‘to function’ when his friend’s mum phoned him out of the blue.

‘She didn’t call it rehab, but she told me about this place, [notorious celebrity addiction clinic] The Cabin in Thailand that’s a bit Zen and you can get away from it all,’ he recalls. ‘I’d been to therapy before but I always went straight to my dealer afterwards. On this one morning, something just clicked in my head.’

Within a fortnight, the London-born model for Burberry and Vivienne Westwood was on a flight to the treatment centre for alcohol and drug addiction. It was 2017 and he was 18 years old. ‘That’s the thing with life,’ he ponders. ‘As much as something bad can come and hit you in the face, something good can as well.’

“Scumbag is the old me, scallywag is the new”

Sonny Hall

Hall is not the first model to enter rehab (and he won’t be the last) but his career in the fashion industry, which started when he was scouted at a gig in Camden aged 16, actually has little bearing on him becoming an addict. In rehab, he explains, ‘things came up that I hadn’t thought about for years. I was facing trauma I didn’t even realise I had because I had normalised my life to everyone I met as a way to cope with it.’ Most poignantly, those things include ‘living in a home of drugs and alcohol and violence’ until he was adopted (alongside his twin brother, Harvey) aged four and losing his biological mother to a heroin overdose in 2015.

Wooyoungmi jumper (selfridges.com)

Three months into his treatment, Hall started writing poems as a way of ordering ‘all the madness’ in his head. Two years on he’s written 300-400 poems and plans to self-publish his first book, The Blues Comes With Good News, in April. ‘It was a surprise to me because I never studied writing or anything,’ he points out. ‘Now, whenever anything happens, I write about it. Before that, I was destructive to myself. It’s like I’ve rewired my brain. I couldn’t imagine not having it.’

There is something endearingly childlike about Hall, which is inherently at odds with the volume of life experience he has crammed into his 20 years. ‘How many questions will there be?’ he enquires with wide eyes, nibbling on a brownie, when we first meet. ‘Is it going well?’ he’ll ask later on. ‘I don’t live like a normal 20-year-old,’ he offers, by way of explanation. ‘I actually can’t remember about three years [from the ages of 17 to 19]. It honestly feels like this is the start of my life.’

As well as rehab and writing, Hall credits a ‘support group’ of stable influences, including fellow models Adwoa Aboah and Iris Law, and DJ Fat Tony, to whom he has spoken at length about addiction. ‘I’ve been lucky to have people around me since I decided to sort myself out,’ he continues. ‘I’m almost happy that I was very destructive, very fast, because it made me realise how bad it was, sooner.’

I bring up his appearance last year in Rita Ora’s video for ‘Let You Love Me’, in which he plays her love interest. He blushes. I ask him why. His rep jumps in to explain that he was ‘requested’ to be in that video. ‘I think if I wasn’t connected with Rita it would have been a shambles, but me and her got on so well, it made it easy. I was nervous before I got there, then I got into this mode. I’m actually doing acting lessons at the moment,’ he smiles. ‘I can’t model forever.’

But he’s still only 20, I remind him. We talk about his 20 tattoos, half of which were done since he got clean and half before. There is a deeper significance to ‘scallywag’ than the word recently inked into his arm might suggest. ‘I had scumbag on my leg when I was very young, so I thought I’d get scallywag as an upgrade,’ he says. ‘Scumbag is the old me, scallywag is the new.’

Inspired by Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bukowski and others ‘who tell it like it is’, Hall and his potent, painfully raw, hand-scrawled poems have amassed more than 100,000 followers on Instagram. From articulating addiction (‘The Thing That Killed My Mother’) to reacting to a recent break-up (‘The Worst Investment I’ve Ever Made’), he is hugely prolific, writing ‘Crafty Gag Reflex’ (hand-printed) exclusively for ES Magazine’s men’s edition, which he is happy to dissect. You can watch Hall's reading of the poem in the video above.

‘I see the flip-side, where people are talking about their feelings now, but I’m also aware of the stiff upper lip,’ he nods. ‘[Men] not actually knowing how they’re feeling. I’ve been like that 80 per cent of my life.’ The line ‘Some no man old man’ is a direct reference to ‘having an absent father and not being taught much’, he explains. ‘Don’t get me wrong, my parents who adopted me have given me the world, but the other things have skewed certain things.’

Most revealing is when Hall describes his personal style as ‘scally, like the Artful Dodger; kind of like the underdog who has the shine, you know? He was abandoned and he’s mischievous but he’s also a bit charming. He found his way in life and I kind of relate to that.’

To pre-order a copy of Sonny’s book go to thebluescomeswithgoodnews.co.uk

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