Sum 41's Deryck Whibley Is Glad He 'Didn't Go Out Like Jim Morrison'

Canadian musician and Sum 41 frontman Deryck Whibley has given his first interview since being hospitalised over his excessive alcohol consumption, telling the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) that he had no idea his body was failing so dramatically inside.

"I never felt anything weird, everything just felt normal," Whibley told CBC News. "I just thought: it's just alcohol, it can't really harm you that much. But, sure enough, it can."

Despite whatever justifications for continuing his hard-drinking lifestyle he offered to himself, it all got a bit too real when Whibley collapsed at home one evening in May and was consequently rushed to hospital.

"They were just telling me my liver had failed and my kidneys had collapsed and there was just all this other stuff going on inside of me that I had no idea about; I had pretty much just damaged everything inside of me," Whibley said. "It was a long stint in hospital ... needless to say, I guess it scared me pretty straight."

Whibley says that he was totally taken aback to be told by doctors that his innards were in such a dire state, not least of all because his drinking had never encroached on his ability to function.

"I was very functional when I was drinking -- I'm one of those kind of drinkers that can drink a half-bottle of Jack and you'd never know I'd had a single drink yet ... but that was part of the problem; it never seemed like a problem," he said. "I wasn't being dragged up, wiping up my own vomit or anything. I was always just functional."

However, considering that in the half-year or so leading up to his hospitalisation, Whibley was a daily recipient of a morning vodka drop -- "Every single day, it would show up at my door ... You didn't have to show ID or anything," -- in some ways, it was arguably necessary, or at least inevitable, for him to fall so far to be able to bounce back up, and he has no misconceptions about just how close he came to losing his life.

"You know, I'm glad I didn't go out like Jim Morrison: a little too young, which I almost did," he told the station.

Looking at him now, a visibly emaciated Whibley seems to be a shadow of his former self, but his renewed focus on music and staying sober -- and alive -- has him philosophical about his ordeal.

"When everything that happened to me after years and years of drinking so much, I never realised that I was taking it that far; I never realised that I would end up in the hospital like that," he added.

"I just wanted our fans to know that it can happen to you, too, if you're not careful."