Can't connect to local MySQL server through so

Question

I attempted to restart my MySQL server recently after it appeared to have been working strangely, and now it doesn't seem to start up at all.

It gives the error -

Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (111)

when I try to

'sudo service mysql restart'.

I haven't modified anything from before and it used to work fine.

I've tried changing the bind-address in my.cnf to localhost.

I've tried suggestions made in other people asking similar questions but nothing's worked yet.

Any help or advice would be appreciated - I'm fairly clueless on how to solve this. I'm running Debian Wheezy 64bit.

After messing around a bit and periodically entering

'sudo service mysql status'

It seems to be running and then say

"MySQL is stopped"

randomly each time I check.