In 2022 Tom Grennan was assaulted and robbed outside a bar in Manhattan, where he had just performed. “I got hit from behind and that knocked me out for probably a second or two,” the Brit award-nominated singer tells me over Zoom from the beach in Mallorca, where he’s on holiday.
“I was in the doorway, and I realised what happened. I could see the guy who did it running away. I just thought I’m not letting this happen to me. I saw red, and I chased him. But he turned around and pulled a gun out, and he was like, I’ll f***ing shoot you. I thought, my God, wow, I’m not in England any more.”
Grennan, 30, chose flight rather than fight. “Luckily he didn’t shoot me.” But having been hospitalised with a ruptured ear drum and mild concussion, the singer postponed his gig scheduled for the following night, informing his fans via social media: “Wrong place, wrong time but just a crazy 24 hours, but … I don’t want to let anybody down and I don’t want it [to] cancel this US tour. I’m in the gym today. I didn’t want to be here, I wanted to mope about, feel sorry for myself but, listen, I’m not letting anybody derail me.”
He hasn’t always been this resilient. At the age of 18 Grennan was severely beaten up by a group of strangers in another unprovoked attack. This one occurred outside a chicken shop in his home town, Bedford. He’d just ordered some food and was smoking a cigarette. “It happened so fast, but then so slow,” he says of the assault that left him requiring surgery, during which his jaw was pieced back together with screws and four metal plates.
“I had a really good surgeon,” he says. “Actually, my dad saw him not too long ago for something, and he remembered me.”
I’m not surprised. The details of the assault are so visceral and gruesome. He was held down by three men, in what he describes as a “bear hug”, more in the sense of a wrestling hold than a physical embrace. Unable to move, he was pounded in the face relentlessly. It was bloody.
Grennan says that he was “broken” physically and emotionally. Crippled by anxiety, he became a recluse, housebound for months.
“I think that was the first time my world came crashing down, the first time I really knew what it was like to be depressed, to feel suicidal, like nobody loved me,” he says, before pausing. “From one little thing that somebody did. One punch caused an earthquake, a tsunami.” He takes a deep breath. “It took me years to open up.”
At the time Grennan hadn’t even wanted to file a police report. “I remember saying to my mum, ‘I don’t want to be a grass.’ But my mum was like, ‘Are you stupid?’” He listened to her. The main perpetrator was convicted.
Did Grennan breathe a sigh of relief? “Actually, I didn’t at all. I think he imprisoned me as well. He served his time for what he did, but I served it with him. I’m still serving it.”
Somehow there hasn’t really been justice. “Years later, somebody messaged me and said, ‘I’ve heard about your story. I was attacked by the same person after he was let out.’”
Grennan couldn’t eat solid food for five weeks after the attack and was on heavy-duty painkillers. He received counselling via the NHS. “But I also dropped out of school,” he says. “Luckily I had a great teacher who would come to my house and I got one A-level, which allowed me to get into uni, but it could have ruined my life.”
Grennan went to St Mary’s University in Twickenham, where he received a degree in drama and physical theatre. He taught himself how to play the guitar by watching videos on YouTube. He worked at Costa to make extra money. His weeknights were spent going from pub to pub, accepting any gig he was offered. He continued for three years before he was spotted by a record label producer.
“The attack was horrible, but it allowed me to open up another part of my mind. I’d never written a song before it,” he says. That song was Something in the Water, which would become the lead single on his debut EP.
Despite subsequently releasing two No 1 albums and receiving a number of Brit award nominations, Grennan says that he felt lost early in his career and that his addictive personality led him to get caught up with the wrong crowd. In the first episode of his new podcast, You About?, in which he talks frankly about male mental health with his friend and co-host, Roman Kemp, he says: “There was a point I was going down a road of destruction.”
He credits his mum, Clare, for stepping in to help him. “My mum saw the signs. I remember it so well, she knocked on the door [of my flat in London]. I hadn’t been seen in a few days. I turned my phone off and went on a bit of a mad one. She came in and she was like, ‘Right, it’s time to go home.’ And then Covid happened.” He ended up moving back to his family home in Bedford. “It was a blessing,” he says.
Grennan went teetotal for a year and a half, took up meditation and made exercise a priority. “I went too extreme, though. I had to go to bed at a certain time. I had to be in the gym twice a day. I had to run eight times a week. During that period it was good for me to be like that, but then I had to go, right, I can start introducing a drink at dinner.” Grennan clarifies that he’s never had an alcohol or drug problem.
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Therapy has been the most transformative thing Grennan has done. “I could really be like, OK, these are my problems. And this is why I’m like this.”
Self-analysis didn’t come naturally to someone who describes himself as growing up in “a little town with a very alpha male friendship group”, where the attitude was: get on with it.
“London is a bubble,” he says. “It’s a façade because people are more free to speak out here. But when you go further adrift, whether that’s up north or down south in these little towns, men are still in a place where they can’t really open up about how they’re feeling.”
Grennan comes from a family of builders. His father, Martin, has worked in construction his whole life. “If you want to speak about your emotions on a building site, you’re definitely going to be seen as weak,” he says.
Talking to a therapist helped him come to terms with the impact of the attack. “I think it was the reason why I drank, partied and wanted to escape. I had so many dark things going on in my mind because of it, and the only way I could really connect with other people was to be drunk and have that Dutch courage. But when I was on my own, I was a crippled mess.”
Whenever Grennan finds himself back in what he refers to as “my destructive state”, he needs to be near the sea. “My therapist told me — go to the ocean,” he says. “It’s where I recentre.”
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He sits up on his deckchair and I can see a vast, sandy beach behind him. It’s almost poetic that he chooses this moment to use a metaphor about the sea.
“There’s a wave that comes over my head, and at certain points I can feel when the wave is about to crash down. If the wave crashes down, then I don’t know, man, I feel like maybe I could go back to who I was back then, but I make sure that the wave will never crash.” I believe him.
Earlier this year he started experiencing complications with the metal plates in his jaw. “They were pushing themselves out of my gums,” he explains. He had to go back into surgery and get them removed. “It was a relief for me. I’m no longer reminded of that time in my life. It was like I closed the door and that was me being released, I suppose.”
Weekly episodes of You About? are available on BBC Sounds and other platforms every Tuesday, with bonus episodes on BBC Sounds on Fridays. His new album, Everywhere I Went Led Me to Where I Didn’t Want to Be, is out on August 15
