I knew it was coming. I always know that it’s coming. It’s just a worry about when it will actually come. Will it come on the day, before the day or after the day? Thankfully this year I think its come at just the right time…the first cold of the winter!
I know we all go through it but for most jobs it’s just an unpleasant inconvenience. Whilst feeling uncomfortable you can probably paint a house or service a car with a touch of flu. When your voice is the only thing that people will pay you for, well, losing it can be a disaster.
Maybe you can get away with it by telling your audience, I’m sorry but tonight, due to a particularly heavy cold that has gone down to my chest, I will be performing in the style of Barry White, but you can’t do that consistently. If you try it night after night before too long you will probably start to perform a lot more like Marcel Marceau! (the mime artist).
When you plan a big concert there are so many different things to take into consideration. Will the band be available, what about the guests, let alone the venue and technical staff? Sometimes things change last minute due to unforeseen circumstances but on the whole once it’s in the diary everyone is pretty much committed. The one thing you can’t control is will I get a cold.
It’s still one of the hazards of being a human being. Thanks to the advances in medical science there are vaccines for diseases like measles or small pox, and thank God for those, but it seems a vaccine for the common cold is still beyond us. Yes, its just a cold. Usually 3 days to come, three days to feel rough and three days to go but come on scientists pull your fingers out!!!.
The trouble is if you’ve got the biggest concert of your year next week the last thing you want is to be reaching for the tissues half way through the opening song.
Which means that for a lot of this week I’ve been tucked up in bed most afternoons surrounded by hot toddy’s, potions and pills, feeling pretty awful but strangely on the whole very happy with myself. It started with a sore throat over the weekend and by Thursday I had been through 2 boxes of Kleenex before tea time…but by my calculations I should be out the other side of coughs and sneezes by Sunday.
I’ve still been working on the radio all week from 10-1pm, so I have been using my voice, but I’ve been careful to get a little closer to the microphone and increase the volume so as not to strain it. I’ve also been able to rehearse the music for my songs playing the guitar and piano, but I haven’t really stretched my vocal cords. There has been no loud singing just in case. This I put down to experience.
Traditionally the autumn is the time when we go on tour or produce TV shows. The worry and fear I’ve gone through over the past few weeks is an annual strain I’ve been under for well over 30 years. In the past I thought myself invincible singing ‘full pelt’, even when the sniffles had started. I think I began to learn my lesson one year, when after pushing things too hard whilst struggling with a cold, I looked down to see blood on the keyboard….
It’s not just singers who have to go through this, in fact I think one profession suffers just about more than any other at this time of year, whilst also being responsible for passing on the disease. I mean teachers.
Come September every year my mum who was a primary school teacher would be dosing herself up with every vitamin tablet and cold remedy she could find. Of course it would always get her in the end. It was then she would resort to all sorts of tried and tested cures. One I remember, and have often used myself, was a bowl of boiling water with a few drops of eucalyptus in it. You then got a towel and covered both your head and the bowl whilst breathing as deeply as possible. It was good and gave some temporary relief but in truth the only real cure was time.
Then there was the cough medicines. Quite often for me once a cold develops it then seems to travel down to my chest leaving me with that annoying tickly cough. Back in the day we had a local chemist that my mum had known since she was a little girl. I think the cough medicines she was sold probably don’t exist anymore. All I remember about them was that they came in dark brown bottles, and those bottles contained thick dark medicine that tasted sweet and clung to your throat as you tried to swallow it.
A lot of this being exposed to cold germs does change over your life span. As a young dad with 4 kids all in full time school my chances of avoiding infection were pretty small. After a number of years school free now I probably blame the grandchildren. They have been back in school, or as some describe it as the ‘germ factory’, for a few weeks now and low and behold here I am with a sore head, sore throat and a paracetamol habit.
Anyway, I knew it was going to come and I’m pleased, no, I’m delighted that I’ve got it out of the way this week rather than suffering next week. When I walk out onto the Swansea Building Society Arena on Wednesday evening my nose might still be a little red from over tissue use but hopefully the voice will be back to normal and for that I will be extremely grateful.