Richard Cole says Page admitted he became addicted to heroin in the mid-Seventies, and his struggles with drugs and alcohol lasted for years: the Eighties are said to have been his ‘lost decade’. One friend who visited him said: ‘I’ve seen more movement in a Timex.’
And yet it was during those years that he met his first wife. It was in 1986 that he first encountered New Orleans waitress Patricia Ecker, fell in love at first sight and married her. Their son James was born in 1988, but the union did not last.