When Josh Connolly was 18, he found himself in a football pub in Swindon. “It was a brilliant night. Drinking, taking drugs, dancing to Madness. I’ve lost my dad, but I’m drinking with a bloke who is 40-odd, telling me I’m a good lad.
“On Monday, a lad at the factory says, I saw you at the EDL night on Saturday?’ I didn’t know what the English Defence League was, even though we would chant ‘E-E-EDL’ at football games, and ‘England ’til I die’. I didn’t really have any identity except being a Swindon fan, and English – I thought, ‘you’re f–ing English mate, English and proud’. When I’d see England fans fighting abroad, it gave me something to hang my hat on. We were like a band of brothers. You’d set off in the morning excited. You’d drink together, share drugs, listen to music. It’s a buzz supporting something.”
In a cafe, on London’s South Bank, Josh pushes aside his coffee. His hair has grown long since the shaved head of his hooligan days, but his beard, tattoos and physical size still draw attention. “It was the camaraderie,” he says, quietly. “When I talk about it, I still feel a part of me light up. But none of it is really true.”
Now 39, the author, podcaster, coach and father-of-six has been on a journey of twists and turns. The son of a violent, alcoholic father who died suddenly when he was nine, Josh was drawn to county lines gangs, looking for belonging. Then, via nights in the pub supporting his beloved Swindon Town, he was drawn into the dark world of football hooliganism.
The EDL had just been formed, in the summer of 2009, as a Far Right Islamophobic organisation coalescing around football hooligan firms – by a young Stephen Yaxley Lennon, now known as Tommy Robinson.
“I was always wanting to stand for something,” Josh says now. “I did actually try to adopt a right-wing ideology but it never sat right with me. But the thing with the Far Right is – it’s not like the Left – you don’t have to have an ideology. You can go on a march and you don’t really have to believe anything. You don’t have to be racist, you just have to be English singing football songs, and you can belong.”
A turning point came after he’d been to an away match in Blackpool with the Swindon hooligans. “We were having a food fight in the pub,” Josh says. “One of the Swindon lads offered me outside. I thought we were still joking, so I put my chin out and said, ‘give it your best shot. The punch snapped my jaw in two places. Even in the taxi to hospital I was trying to pour vodka into my broken mouth. I was seriously depressed. They took me to Preston by ambulance, and on the way there I tried to end my life.”
Waking up after emergency surgery, Josh tried to phone his band of brothers. “They had me on loudspeaker, laughing,” he says. “They were nearly back to Swindon on the minibus. I thought: ‘They are not your mates’. I spent the child maintenance on eight cans of Strongbow and a pack of straws, and I drank them on the way home on the train. Then on the 14th May 2012, at the end of the football season, I stopped drinking.”
Today, via a combined social media following of 690,000 people, a best-selling book, and workshops all over the country, Josh uses his experiences to connect with others trapped by childhood trauma. Last week, he launched a new podcast, Talking Common, where a host of well-known faces join him in deep conversation. He is brutally honest about his past, in the hope it helps reach people like him who once believed there was no way out.
“It’s got to be more than big, burly men doing emotions,” he says. “After I stopped drinking, I was still very depressed, and decided to end my life. But after I went to say goodbye to my kids, I changed my mind. Instead, I became obsessed with finding out why I am like I am. I started a 12-step programme, and began to understand that how I was acting wasn’t right, but it was proportionate to the experiences I’d had.”
When Josh’s dad died, the coroner recorded a verdict of “misadventure”, but his son – who was nine years old when he found him – believes he took his own life. Today he is an ambassador for The National Association for Children of Alcoholics (NACOA).
“As a child, I was very dissociated, from trauma,” Josh says. “I was growing up in an environment where it was fighting and chaos all the time. Dad went to prison. My mum was terrified about bills. If my mum is upset, I can’t give her sadness – so, I learn to tune out from my body from a young age. And then you are looking for things to make you feel alive. When I first held drugs on me as a kid, I felt something. Even if it’s anxiety or fear, I feel alive.”
When Josh was kidnapped by a county lines gang as part of a terrifying initiation ceremony, his only thought was that he couldn’t wait to tell his friends. “When people say ‘falling into the wrong crowd’ it sounds accidental,” he says. “But we went there because we were looking for something. The problem with drugs and alcohol is they both work. My brain developed through a war zone and then you put me in school eight hours a day and told me to keep still. I remember my teacher going to see my mum and dad to say I could go to RADA, I was the best actor she’d ever seen. I never even heard it.”
Instead Josh was getting deeper into gangs, hooliganism and alcohol. “It’s easy to see how we get groomed into right-wing ideology,” he says. “When you’ve had a hard life it’s nice to have a common enemy – somewhere to direct your anger. I want to be angry with the politicians but I’ll never change that, so I’m angry with immigrants. A lot of people now don’t believe in politics at all. They don’t have the privilege of an informed opinion. They just see people like Nigel Farage and Donald Trump putting two fingers up to the establishment and they admire that.”
Josh is supporting the Mirror’s Britain Talks project, as a way of reconnecting people from different backgrounds. “I don’t see a lot of people in the political world that relate to me,” he says. “But I do think things are changing. People are yearning for person to person interaction. I don’t think we have a mental health crisis, I think we have a social health crisis.”
An influencer with an ambivalent view of social media, he adds: “In the end, I think phones will end up like smoking. They’ll say, ‘did you give that to kids?’ For now, I’m an influencer with a padlock – I’ve learned that doomscrolling’s impact on my nervous system is too dangerous.”
He shows me the physical app-locker he carries in his pocket, and smiles. “I do think the algorithm will eventually die,” he says, “because I believe in humans.”
Talking Common with Josh Connolly is available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts @TalkingCommon.