"If the pandemic gave the general public an insight into touring life minus the hour onstage – ie, drinking earlier and earlier in the day to alleviate the tedium of being stuck in cramped, largely identical rooms with the same three or four people for months on end – for many musicians it had the opposite effect. By removing the social gigging element of their lives and careers, lockdown starkly exposed dependencies they’d previously been able to disguise as a typical rock’n’roll lifestyle" - music journalist Mark Beaumont wrote in the Independent introducing his piece about musicians who stopped drinking in the pandemic: members of Royal Blood, Deadletter, You Me At Six, Wu LYF and others.

Sober 21 is a free PDF zine with essays by, and interviews with, sober musicians like Brad Truax (Interpol), Cait O’Riordan (The Pogues), Darryl “D.M.C” McDaniels (Run-DMC), John Grant, Mix Master Mike (Beastie Boys), Nile Rodgers (Chic), Peter Hook, Moby and others. Zine's goal is to "help other alcoholic/drug-addicted musicians see the amazing freedom, and benefit to our art, that we found in sobriety by sharing our own experiences".

Snoop Dogg is set to launch a gin line 26 years after the debut of his signature track 'Gin & Juice', Complex reports. The rapper and entrepreneur unveiled Indoggo Gin after working to create a beverage that evokes a "laid-back California style", embodying the spirit of the party anthem.

"Musicians don't drink like normal people," Canadian singer-songwriter Damhnait Doyle wrote in a Toronto Star op-ed earlier this year. "You drink before gigs, during gigs, after gigs, on your day off, on a travel day, at the airport bar, the hotel bar, in the bus, the back of the van, when the show sucks, when the show is off the hook, when your song is on the radio, when no one's playing your single. Alcohol is both the journey and the destination". The article inspired Exclaim to talk to several artists - Hollerado drummer Jake Boyd, singer-songwriter and Single Mothers frontman Drew Thomson, PONY bandleader Sam Bielanski and singer-songwriter Ansley Simpson - about how they got sober and what has changed since they stopped drinking.

"I thought it was the drugs and the alcohol that made it all work" - Ozzy Osbourne told about his recording career, as Rolling Stone reports. "But it's not true. All I was doing for years is self-medicating 'cause I didn't like the way I felt. But then this ['Ordinary Man'] is the first album I've co-wrote and recorded fucking completely sober". He says he likes having a clear head - - "Cause at least I can remember the fucking thing I did yesterday". In an earlier NME interview, he said he "now rates his greatest achievement as simply 'staying alive'".