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July 15, 2025 – He was a teen singer with his dream career. But then his life fell apart. Anthony Kavanagh talks about sex work, addiction and the years he spent being forced to hide his sexuality. His memoir, Pop Scars, is sprinkled with darkly comic takes on what his life had become…
Known as Kavana, he had a Top 10 hit in 1997 with his cover of Shalamar’s I Can Make You Feel Good. “I’ve always somehow been able to find the humour, even at some of the darker times,” he says.
And there were dark times. Making a joke about a Neil Sedaka song (“Oh, Carol. Oh f**k, more like”) to describe the reality of waking up in a stranger’s apartment; fragments of a memory of driving down Sunset Strip with Sedaka on the car stereo; the realisation he had been paid for the sex he couldn’t remember. Smoking crack in a skip in Hackney with a homeless woman he had just met, and whom he trusts with his bank card to go and score more drugs (“Note to self,” he writes, “never give a stranger your pin code when high”). There are funnier, less serious incidents – he earned a lifetime ban, he says, from the daytime TV show Loose Women after slurring his way through it and being “unhinged” backstage – but in general, it’s a fairly bleak account of addiction, pain and what happens when the pop machine spits you out.
