Love, rock 'n' roll, and 'the S word'

Love, rock 'n' roll, and 'the S word'

What drives someone to seek a life without chaos when fame, booze and mental illness are all swirling together? This episode of *All In The Mind* follows Jeremy Oxley, front man of the 80s Australian band Sunnyboys, as he talks candidly about rock stardom, schizophrenia and the love that helped him pull back from the edge.

You’ll hear Jeremy describe the “utterly mad” music scene where you “write your head off and you play your head off and I think you drink your head off”, and how a diagnosis of schizophrenia at 22 sent his life into a long, messy spiral through hospitals, heavy drinking and self-destruction. He’s blunt about his distrust of psychiatry and honest about how lost he felt carrying “the weight of the world” on his shoulders.

Then Mary Oxley Griffiths enters the picture – a nurse, widow and mother of twin boys whose childhood love of Sunnyboys never faded. After her sons picked Jeremy out from old film clips “because he had beautiful eyes”, Mary tracked him down via a support group. Her account of that first meeting shows Jeremy not as a rock casualty, but as someone vulnerable, frightened and yet deeply kind with her boys.

Mary shares how she initially let Jeremy “medicate with alcohol” to keep their bond, gradually helping him cut down from a carton in a sitting to just a couple of beers a week, while working with local mental health services to introduce antipsychotic medication and address his diabetes and overall health. Jeremy, in turn, describes feeling like he’s “whipped schizophrenia’s arse” through creativity, treatment and their relationship.

For anyone interested in recovery, relationships and serious mental illness, this conversation offers a rare mix of black humour, brutal honesty and genuine hope. If love, family and good music can help someone start again, what might they do for you?