Sitting alone in my flat in Newcastle, inhaling cocaine and knocking back brandy, I realised that the breaking news on the TV blaring in the background was happening right on my doorstep.
It was July 2010 and while I’d once again been getting absolutely off my face, trying to kill the hours now I no longer had football to silence the terrible thoughts in my head, the whole country had been transfixed by this developing story.
A lad called Raoul Moat, newly released from prison, had shot dead his ex-girlfriend’s new partner, and seriously injured both her and a policeman he’d blasted in the face. Now, after almost a week on the run, he was embroiled in a stand-off with police, who’d caught up with him in Rothbury, Northumberland, where I sometimes went fishing.
As the TV broadcast a picture of the guy, lying on his stomach with a sawn-off shotgun pointed at his own head, while a group of coppers angled rifles right back at him, I snorted another line of cocaine and tried to work out why he looked incredibly familiar.
‘I’m sure I know him,’ I thought to myself. It’s possible I’d seen him around the city centre, where he had worked as a bouncer, but I didn’t know this at the time.
‘He’s my mate, no doubt about it,’ I said out loud and then, as I gulped down what was possibly my 15th brandy, I started to get it into my head this Raoul guy wasn’t just my friend, he was my cousin.
‘He needs my help,’ I decided. ‘He must be cold, he must be hungry, he must really need a drink.’
I snorted yet more cocaine, then went to see what I could find in the flat which might be of use to a fugitive in the middle of a stand-off with armed police. I opened the fridge door and pulled out a packet of cooked chicken, bread and a can of lager. Then I grabbed a dressing gown and ordered a taxi to Rothbury, which was about 30 miles away.
Paul Gascoigne celebrates England’s victory against Cameroon during the 1990 World Cup
Raoul Moat, who was living close to Gascoigne, spent a week on the run after a shooting spree
Armed police in Rothbury, Northumberland, during the stand-off with Moat in July 2010
Even in my drug-addled state, I knew no sane taxi driver would agree to take me to a police stand-off. So instead, I asked to be driven to Newcastle Airport, which was on the way.
‘I’m going on holiday,’ I told the cabbie who turned up.
By this point Raoul Moat wasn’t my cousin any more, he’d become my brother. Hell, he’d become my twin brother.
As we came close to the airport, I ordered the driver to take a left, towards Rothbury.
‘Where are you going, Gazza?’ he asked. ‘Don’t tell me you’re heading to the stand-off.’
‘Yes, I am,’ I replied. ‘Raoul Moat’s my brother, and he’s cold and he’s starving.’
‘Do you realise who he actually is?’ the cabbie said.
‘He’s my f****** brother, I already told you!’ I barked.
When we pulled up at the scene it was like something out of Steven Spielberg’s film E.T.
The place was crawling with police, and I was overwhelmed by the flashing lights.
My first thought was: ‘There’s a lot of people here, there must be a party going on.’
The cabbie didn’t even wait for the £80 fare, he just sped off, clearly wanting to get the hell out of there.
Before long, I was approached by a police officer.
‘Where are you off to, Gazza?’ he asked.
‘Raoul Moat’s my brother,’ I told him. ‘I have some food for him, and a jacket, he must be cold.’
‘Are you aware he has a gun in his hand?’ the copper said. ‘Yeah,’ I replied. ‘But I can talk to him. I can get him to drop the weapon.’
He looked at me coldly and said: ‘Pick up your things and get out of here, quickly and quietly.’
He didn’t have to ask twice. I’d probably snorted 14 lines of cocaine by then but, deep down, I must have realised it was a bad idea to argue so I made my way to the nearest pub and ordered a taxi home.
Waking up the next morning, feeling like death warmed up, I reached with trepidation for my mobile phone and saw that I had around 300 missed calls and 400 messages. Slowly, the drama of the night before came back to me.
A young ‘Gazza’ before his talent took him to the heights of playing for England and Newcastle
Gascoigne travelled to Rothbury in an attempt to talk to Moat during his stand off with officers
I remembered the flashing lights and seeing myself on the TV, standing there with a packet of chicken, but it was hazy, to say the least.
I switched on the television now, and learnt that Raoul Moat had shot himself dead overnight after a six-hour stand-off with police. Picking up my phone again, I knew I needed to call my dad, who’d phoned me dozens of times.
‘Dad,’ I said. ‘I am sorry. I did something wrong, didn’t I?’
‘Too right, you did,’ he snapped. ‘Son, you’re a f****** idiot.’
The whole family was both furious with me and desperately worried. My dad insisted that I go to a local mental health facility where I stayed for 11 days before my psychologist said it would be safe for me to leave.
I went straight to my dad’s house and apologised. He was glad to see me sober, but he said: ‘You’re a f***ing idiot. Raoul Moat could have killed you.’
When I look back, it’s scary to think I did that. It was down to the cocaine, I never would have done it otherwise. I’m lucky, really, just to still be alive. It’s many years since I’ve touched cocaine, but I have accepted now that I will always be an alcoholic, which means I’ll probably remain disgusted with myself for the rest of my life – a difficult thing to admit.
Why do I drink? I could give you a million reasons, but my obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) is definitely one of them.
I can be sitting in my house having a cup of coffee and not be able to rest until the handle of the mug on the table in front of me is pointing in the same direction as those on the saucepan and the kettle. Even then I’ll obsess about the ones in the cupboard that I can’t see.
It never stops, this obsession of mine with being neat and tidy, and then there are all my phobias. I’ve got so many I lose count – flying, the dark, dying, snakes, the number 13. You name it, I’m scared of it. I’ve driven myself to distraction with my numerous obsessions and the only thing which quietens my mind is booze.
As soon as I sober up, the OCD comes back with a vengeance and the voice in my head is back, telling me something terrible is about to happen.
I often wonder if the addictions I struggle with would have taken hold if it wasn’t for the tragedy which happened when I was a kid.
I grew up in the terraced streets of Gateshead, which is on the southern bank of the Tyne, just across from Newcastle.
Born there on May 27, 1967, I was one of four children and we hardly saw anything of our dad, a hod carrier who was always either grafting hard on a building site or in the pub.
My mam worked four jobs just to keep us going. Her first was valeting cars, but she also worked in a factory making jeans, cleaning offices and serving in a fish and chip shop. But still we had hardly any money – no TV, no microwave no nothing.
‘Got any washing, son?’ my mam would ask, and she’d throw my clothes into the bath, but only after us kids had washed in it, one after the other.
‘You’re a tramp, you are!’ the other kids at school would yell. I guess our lack of money must have clearly shown in the way we dressed, the things we didn’t have, but I never took it too personally.
Anyway, I’ve come a long way since then, made millions, become an icon, scored goals which are etched into the collective memory of football fans around the world – so who’s had the last laugh, eh? Not them, that’s for sure. Every night, me, my brother Carl and my sister Anna would burrow under the same duvet, pushing and shoving for extra space.
Looking back, it was Victorian, but growing up like that you form really strong bonds, and that’s how all these years later, my brother, my sisters, and my mam are still the closest people in my life, the ones I trust the most.
My dad died of cancer in 2018 and I miss him every single day. I still become emotional every time he crosses my mind.
When I was seven, he went to Germany to work and came home with the best present anyone has ever given me – a leather football.
I loved that football to death, and took it with me everywhere I went. After dribbling a tennis ball through the back lanes, the football was easy-peasy, so much better to handle and I became completely obsessed. ‘Time for bed, son,’ my mam would say, as I climbed the stairs.
‘Night, Mam,’ I’d call, as I entered my room, only to open the window, throw my football on to the grass below, then shimmy down the drainpipe and be out for hours, playing until I could barely stand.
Then, I’d climb back up the drainpipe and finally go to sleep.
I will always remember playing in the streets to the almighty roar of the crowd from Newcastle’s ground St James’ Park, just over the river, and being transported on to the pitch.
As I belted the ball into the back of an imaginary net, the fans were going wild for me, not Malcolm ‘Supermac’ Macdonald, or whoever had actually scored at the stadium.
I was just a schoolboy, but in my head, I was already the hero, the star of the match.
Gascoigne, now 58, stopped playing for England in 1998. His career eventually ended in 2004
The jacket for Gascoigne’s new autobiography, which is set to be published on October 23
One day mam came home clutching a red, white and blue box containing my first ever pair of football boots.
She must have worked like a mad woman to get the money to buy them and every day, without fail, I’d polish them until I could see my face in them.
They made me all the more determined to get into Redheugh Boys’ Club which was just up the road and a rival to the famous Wallsend Boys’ Club, which has produced the likes of Alan Shearer and Peter Beardsley, both England stars.
At nine, I was two years too young but I’d climb over the wall to watch them train, longing to be involved. ‘Mam, Dad, you have to get me into that team,’ I begged.
Eventually, my dad took me along.
‘This lad’s 11,’ he told the coach. ‘I know he looks a bit young, but he’s a late developer, small for
his age.’ To begin with, I just acted as a ball boy, doing odd jobs, like putting up the nets, but eventually I got into the club.
It was brilliant playing for an actual team, alongside other players, on a proper pitch, rather than with my mates in the park.
My mam or dad would take me every single night, handing over 2p each time.
I was a chubby little kid, but I was powerful on the pitch, and I stood out, even though some of the other players would yell ‘Corned beef legs!’ as my limbs turned purple and blue in the cold.
My best friend was Keith Spraggon who also played at Redheugh and one day, when I was ten, I agreed to take his little brother Steven, who was only six, to the local sweet shop.
‘Look after him, Paul,’ his mam Maureen said.
I promised that I would, and we both ran to the shop, which was only about 100 yards away. When we got there, we took the mickey out of the woman who worked there and tried to nick the sweets as we always did.
Needless to say, there wasn’t a lot to do in Gateshead, and it was how we entertained ourselves.
After we’d caused bother for a bit, I said to Steven: ‘Quick, let’s go.’
He was just a few steps ahead of me, but he ran out in front of a parked ice cream van, and was hit by an oncoming car. His little body was thrown about 30ft into the air, and his shoes flew off.
I rushed over to him and pulled him on to my lap. I could see his lips moving, and his body was twitching a little bit.
‘Thank God, he’s alive,’ I thought to myself, but I was wrong. Those little twitches were the last movements he ever made. There was nothing I could do, I just had to sit there, holding his body, waiting for the ambulance and his mam to arrive.
I will never forget Steven’s mother, running down the road, screaming and screaming, with no shoes on her feet. I blamed myself for little Steven’s death, even though his mam and Keith never did.
I spent a lot of time with Keith in the aftermath. I went over to his house, not realising Steven’s body was in a coffin in his bedroom. ‘Come on, let’s go and see him,’ Keith said. ‘Pick him up, give him a cuddle.’
I did as I was told, holding Steven’s cold little body in my arms for a second time.
After the funeral, I spent about a week sleeping at Keith’s house in the room where Steven’s coffin had been.
The tics and twitches I developed started soon after Steven died. I’d also head-butt the walls with such force I’d leave holes behind and my behaviour got so bad, mam took me to see a psychiatrist.
There was a sandpit in the room, and he said to me: ‘I’d like you to sit in there, and play with the sand.’ As a lad of ten, I was beyond embarrassed to be seeing a psychiatrist in the first place, especially one who made me mess about with sand.
‘Sand, what’s sand going to do?’ I thought. ‘My best friend’s little brother has just died in my arms.’ After the appointment I turned to my mam and asked her never to take me there again.
We never went back, and I didn’t get any other help for the tics, or the trauma of that accident which killed little Steven Spraggon.
I don’t blame anyone for that, it was just the way things were done back then.
If it had happened today, I would have been offered all kinds of counselling but Steven’s death changed me permanently from a happy-go-lucky lad to a fearful, anxious kid, and nothing was ever quite the same again.
The only time I was ever free from my dark thoughts and the OCD was when I played football.
For those 90 minutes, nothing else mattered.
Football scouts were regular visitors to Redheugh Boys Club and, at 13, I was spotted by Newcastle United. I started training with them every week after school, and I eventually got the chance to be a ball boy during a home game.
Throwing the ball back to my heroes, while the crowd roared in my ears, not in the distance from the streets of Gateshead, was electrifying. ‘I want a bit of this,’ I thought to myself and I never doubted that I would get it.
‘When I become the best player in the world, you two will never work again,’ I told my parents.
They were always splitting up and getting back together again. For a while dad went to live in the Crown Pub in Gateshead with another woman.
He did come back after that but eventually he left for good.
On my 16th birthday, I signed up as an apprentice with Newcastle United with my mam and dad in the room, giving each other daggers as they were on one of their breaks, much to the bemusement of Willie McFaul, a coach at the club.
It was at that moment that life changed forever. I was paid £25 a week by Newcastle, which seemed like a fortune at the time and meant my family finally stopped having to worry about money, but I worked hard for it.
When I first joined the youth team, Jack Charlton was managing Newcastle and told me that I was a ‘fat b*****d’ and had two weeks to start losing weight.
I was chubby back then, for a football player. At that time, my regular diet was a packet of Minstrels or a Mars bar, fish and chips, and a bottle of cola, and I started making myself sick to try to stay in shape and improve my chances on the pitch.
If I was enjoying a meal with family or friends, I’d join in with them, go to the toilet and spew up, then come back and carry on eating as if nothing had happened.
I got a fair bit of pleasure out of it and at the time it seemed like the perfect solution to my problems but I eventually ended up with a stomach ulcer and decided to stop.
My bulimia was a horrible habit to have got into, and it repulsed me but not as much as booze, which is definitely the main source of my disgust.
When I was younger, it brought me a lot of joy, and for a short while, cocaine did as well.
But, as I will describe in tomorrow’s Mail on Sunday, that joy came at a very steep price.
Adapted from Eight by Paul Gascoigne with Victoria Williams(Reach Sport, £22), published October 23. © Paul Gascoigne 2025. To order a copy for £19.80 (offer valid to October 25; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.
