‘I was earning £5k a month but spent most of it on cocaine – now I get daily TikTok messages from people who need help’

A successful music promoter whose high-paying jobs earned him up to £5,000 a month and helped fuel his secret cocaine addiction has shared his recovery journey on TikTok to encourage fellow addicts to “ask for help”.

Ryan Phillips, 38, who has worked at some of London’s top music venues and curated festivals around the world, hid his cocaine addiction from friends and family for over a decade.

At the height of his career, Ryan, who worked as a stock trader before going into the music industry, was earning more than £5,000 a month but found himself counting the pennies after spending most of his money on drugs.

Ryan would purchase around 15 grammes of cocaine a week, worth £750, lock himself in his room for several days without sleeping, and snort the Class A drug until it felt like he was on the verge of having a “heart attack”.

Earlier this year, Ryan went on a cocaine-fuelled binge the day before his sister, Chelsea, and eight-year-old niece were due to visit him, blacking out before they arrived and found him standing in the middle of his apartment surrounded by broken glass.

This was the last straw for Ryan who decided to open up about his addiction to friends and family and after attending a rehab centre in South Africa, he is now more than 100 days clean.

Ryan has shared his recovery journey on his TikTok channel @ryaninrecovery, which has gained more than 9,000 followers and 70,000 likes, and said he receives daily messages from people asking for advice.

“It’s not like just my family knows, every single person I have ever met in my life now knows and I haven’t had a single bad reaction,” Ryan told PA Real Life.

“People think that being an addict is like being a ‘junky’ or a ‘loser’, but that’s not the case.

“My biggest regret is that I didn’t speak to someone sooner and kept it a secret.”

The first time Ryan saw cocaine, he was 17 and had just started a summer job, working as an assistant at a stockbroker’s in the city.

He said: “We were all at a Friday pub lunch and one of the older guys, who was a bit of a nutter, got the coke out, poured it on the other guy’s shoulder, and just sniffed it straight off of his shoulder.”

When Ryan qualified as a trader, a year later, he became accustomed to having “boozy lunches” and taking cocaine with his co-workers.

“It was very much a Wolf of Wall Street kind of company,” he said.

“I had a dealer in Canary Wharf who would deliver it to this pub and we would often have ‘roll throughs’ where we would stay up on a Thursday and go to work on Friday without any sleep.”

In 2006, Ryan left the company and joined Northern Trust, an investment bank based in Canary Wharf, but was made redundant during the financial crisis in 2008.

Unable to find another job in finance, Ryan, who plays guitar as a hobby, started putting on gigs with his band Tiny Islands across London.

One day, after playing at Proud Galleries in Camden, he was offered a full-time role as the venue’s booking agent.

But stepping into London’s music scene was a slippery slope for Ryan, who continued to take cocaine on a weekly basis.

“It was an intense environment,” he said.

A year later he joined The Colombo Group, which owns and manages music venues in London, and was put in charge of the music diary for The Queen’s Head in Islington.

“I was at Colombo group for eight years and became their Head of Music, overseeing nine venues and three festivals, with 25 members of staff reporting to me,” he said.

“During that whole time, the cocaine was always (in my life), but I would go through cycles of thinking Ok, I’m taking too much now and I would stop for a bit – never that long.

“Because I was doing well on paper, making good money and getting promoted, I never stopped to think about it.”

Ryan said he was making around £5,000 a month but managing to spend it all, mainly on drugs.

“I would always be slightly behind on bills and friends would say ‘You’re really bad with money’, but I would always scrape by,” he said.

Music venues were then closed overnight when the global pandemic struck in 2020 and Ryan would once again be made redundant a few months later.

He spent lockdown at his ex-partner’s family home in Wandsworth and thought this would help curb his consumption.

“That’s when my using took a noticeably darker turn,” he said.

“I would say I’m going for a run and I would, but then I would also meet a dealer and pick up cocaine.”

Ryan would also fake feeling ill so he could isolate, away from his ex-partner’s family, and “get on it”.

“I just lied and hid it, and that’s when I realised, I’m properly addicted here,” he said.

After the second lockdown, they moved to Margate in Kent, where Ryan hoped a change of scene would help him escape the addiction.

But he soon made friends and started using again, except this time he was unemployed and had to borrow money from his ex-partner and parents.

They were not aware of his problem, thinking he was just struggling financially after losing his job.

Ryan’s antics eventually took a toll on his relationship and they soon split up.

He managed to clean up his act for a while and secure another high-flying job as Head of Music for Boiler Room’s international events department.

This meant Ryan was in charge of programming their events outside of Europe and regularly travelled abroad to Thailand, Australia, Bali and Mexico.

“Again it was another ‘false dawn’ where I was like, this is the thing that’s going to get me out of my hole,” he said.

Very quickly, Ryan slipped back into the “partying lifestyle”, taking drugs and staying up for days at a time.

The job, which was also very well paid, allowed him to work from home most days, during which time he started taking more and more cocaine.

“I was using so much that the money I was earning was gone in like two weeks,” he said.

Ryan would consume around eight grammes in a day, sometime twice a week, and then go into the office having not slept in days.

“As time went on my addiction kept growing and I started using for longer – stopping on Thursday would become stopping on a Friday,” he said.

“I would pretty much just be on my sofa, my arms would go numb and I would feel like I was having a heart attack.”

Around the same time he started dating his partner Amy, from whom he concealed his addiction, although she soon began to notice.

People at work were also aware that Ryan was “coasting” and “doing just enough to get by”.

The situation came to a head at the end of January this year, when Ryan invited his sister, Chelsea, and niece over for the weekend.

The day before, he locked himself in his room and took seven grammes of cocaine along with sleeping tablets and drank a bottle of alcohol.

He does not remember what happened next, but was told that his sister had climbed through his window after he stopped answering messages and found Ryan standing in his apartment surrounded by broken glass.

She put him to bed and when Ryan woke up later that evening, Amy and Chelsea had cleaned up the mess.

Later that evening, after his niece had gone to bed, his sister confronted Ryan who decided to come clean about his addiction.

Ryan, who lost his job a few weeks after the incident, said sharing his battle with friends and family has been a tremendous help.

While Ryan relapsed a few weeks later, he then booked himself onto a six week recovery programme at the Recovery Centre at White River in South Africa.

He has now been clean for 115 days and has shared his recovery journey on TikTok to help inspire others to speak up about their addiction.

“I get around 10 or 20 messages a day from people who are in a similar situation,” he said.

“I say to every single one of them, please, just ask for help.”