Cerys Matthews has said that Bob Dylan and the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens, Yusuf Islam, helped her off drugs with a couple of timely phone calls. The former Catatonia singer says that her addiction to heroin was close to killing her when the phone calls gave her the spur to turn things around.
Matthews says: "I couldn't walk, couldn't breathe. I was allergic to heroin. My body would react against it. It fills your lungs up. You suffocate yourself. So what do you do? You make a conscious decision to live. It would have been the end if I hadn't made that decision.
"I had a telephone call from Bob Dylan and from Yusuf Islam in a two-week period and it gave me the confidence to follow what my heart was telling me, which was just to get out. I don't know why they rang, it happened out of the blue. I'd like to keep the conversations private but it was a strange time because I'd almost given up hope on everything and started to lose the plot a bit, and that's a pretty sorry place to be. Then these spiritual guides called and it helped me gather strength to change things and start again."
Matthews is shortly to release her second solo album.