Bruce Dickinson says his singing voice sounded like a “wounded buffalo” after undergoing throat cancer treatment.
The Iron Maiden frontman had radiotherapy and chemotherapy after he was found to have a golf ball-sized tumour in the base of his tongue in 2014.
Speaking on The Charismatic Voice YouTube channel, he recalled: “The technical diagnosis for me was T3 N1 M0. That means that the tumour [in the throat] was judged to be a stage three tumour. And that’s just actually more or less how big it was. And the ‘N’ bit was whether or not there were any lymph nodes associated with it. N1 means there was one; I had cancer in a lymph node as well. And the M bit is, has it metastasised? In other words, spread to anywhere else in your body. And luckily, the answer to that was zero.
“People go, ‘Oh, you were lucky you caught it early. I went, ‘Well, I didn’t kind of catch it that early.’ It was three and a half centimeters.
“It was a golf ball living in the base of my tongue, and then there was a strawberry, a two-and-a-half-centimeter in the lymph node on the other side.”
The Fear of the Dark singer, 67, went on to describe being left “shocked” by just “how awful” he sounded when he tried to sing before his recovery time was up.
He later shared: “I’m the world’s most impatient man, and I tried to sing after about six months, and I was shocked how awful it sounded.
“It sounded like a wounded buffalo. It just made this — what is it, Young Frankenstein? When the monster comes out and they’re doing Puttin’ On The Ritz, and he goes, “Ritz”. And that was me. And I was just, like, ‘Oh my God.’ And I was in the bathroom doing it. I was just, Just stop. It’s been five months. They said 10 months. Wait. And then gradually my body started to recover, and I got energy back and I started putting on a little bit of weight. So one day I was just walking around the house, and I was feeling all right. So I went, [starts singing a few notes. It didn’t hurt. And then it was there. And then I just thought, ‘I wonder if I could do a little bit of [Maiden’s] Run To The Hills’. And I did. And I went, ‘Oh my God, it’s there. Oh my God.’ And that was, like, I’m thinking, probably the end of September, October. And I thought, ‘It’s there.’ And then I went, ‘Right. You know it’s there. So leave it alone. Put it back in its box ’cause you know it’s going to be all right. And the longer you leave it, the more all right it will be when you want to go balls out and start pushing it.'”