Cole/The Last Miles, 5. Into the shadows

The years 1976 to 1980 are often described as Miles’s “lost years,” “silent years” or “missing years;” but whatever you call them they were certainly the most chaotic years of his life. And for anyone who cared about Miles, they were also the most worrying. Miles had had major physical and emotional problems before in his life – during the 1950s, for example, he acquired a heroin habit which became so bad that he had to drop out of the music scene for a time. And bouts of sickness seemed to be a common theme throughout Miles’s life. But none of those dark periods could match the journey of selfdestruction that Miles seemingly embarked upon in the mid-1970s.