I Just Died In Your Arms Tonight

On Going On, Not Going On & Going Out With A Bang

I write from my sickbed. Today marks the first time I ever cancelled a show due to sickness and I’ve been feeling horrible about it, but when I awoke this morning still coughing and hacking like a seal but without any discernible voice, eyes glued together and a banging headache, I was grateful I’d made the call early and not waited to see if I might miraculously heal. I’m sceptical about miracles and nobody wants to see or hear me like this.

Actual photograph of me in my sickbed (or ‘The Nightmare’ by the painter Henry Fuseli)

I thought about how many shows I’ve dragged myself through chugging on a bottle of cough syrup to get through. It is truly amazing how adrenalin and a built in sense of showmanship kicks in and can push you through a performance. Or a recording session. When the day of my first recording session in Nashville (at the wonderful Welcome to 1979 Studios) rolled round, I was coughing and hoarse but so excited and determined to believe that I would be healed by the holy Nashville studio air that I drank lemon and ginger tea and sipped from my little bottle of cough syrup throughout the demo session and got though it huskily but not too badly. I have vague memories of the recording engineer Chris Mara looking at me with concern later in the evening and asking me if I was alright as we mixed followed by terrifyingly vague memories of driving home in some kind of giant Lincoln Continental on endless unfamiliar confusing highways with blinding flashing lights through falling tears and constant coughing and seemingly no way to ever exit. I just hadn’t thought about the fact that some cough medicines get you higher than hillbilly hell and I’d consumed an entire bottle in one day. Apparently, the ‘kids’ call it robotripping (it causes hallucinations, difficulty breathing, fast heartbeats and death!). I’m not only grateful to be alive after that, I’m so grateful I didn’t hurt and kill anybody. I can’t even listen to those demos.

Keeping on keeping on is the norm. ‘The show must go on’ is the traditional performers’ battlecry - putting aside all personal trauma, pain and misfortune for the sake of the show. Forgive me while I quote myself here, in a short passage from my book Lovers Dreamers Fighters about endurance and expectations.

The pop singer Halsey caused shockwaves in 2020 when she revealed she’d performed a huge show just a couple of hours after suffering a devastating miscarriage, with the help of adult diapers and Percocet. The gig was really important and her team didn't know what to do, feeling it would be a huge thing to cancel, so she just steeled herself and did it, even though she didn’t want to. She walked straight offstage and threw up. up. The Rolling Stones called Merry Clayton in the middle of the night and begged her to come down to their studio and record the backing vocals for the apocalyptic barn burner ‘Gimme Shelter’. She got out of bed, heavily pregnant, still in her curlers, and gave it her all in three mind-blowing takes, howling about surviving a world filled with rape and murder. Tragically she miscarried soon after, which she partly attributes to the intensity of that recording. As Tammy Wynette stood in the wings to go onstage in Perth, she passed out from the excruciating pain of a blocked bowel, which had already caused show cancellations. She ended up hospitalised for days. She collapsed again a few months further down the road, during her second show of the day in Akron, Ohio, and had to be taken by ambulance to hospital. When the Australian country singer Catherine Britt was diagnosed with breast cancer, she did ten gigs without telling anybody what had happened, explaining that making good music was the only thing that felt good in her life at the time. The soul singer Candi Staton was at the first day of rehearsals for her upcoming Unstoppable tour when she received the news she had cancer. She decided to keep it to herself and deal with all her swirling fears and emotions privately, later saying that being on the road and performing, doing what she loved and felt she was born to do, really helped her. When Chrissy Amphlett got her breast cancer diagnosis, on top of her MS diagnosis, she told the Sydney Morning Herald, ‘I’ve got songs to sing, I’ve got stages to perform on. I’m a keep-on-going sort of girl.’ I think most female performers would relate.

The personal tragedies, indignities, suffering and hardships endured by some of our most beloved artists have become part of their legacy and inform how we listen to their body of work.

Billie had got used to turning up at gigs so badly beaten by her husband, manager and sometimes pimp, Louis McKay, they had to tape up her ribs before pushing her onstage.

from The Hunting of Billie Holiday by Johann Hari/ Politico

She told her friend, singer Hazel Scott “No matter what the motherf***ers do to you, never let ‘em see you cry.” McKay and his heirs inherited her estate and all her royalties.

Edith Piaf sung despite experiencing extreme pain most of her too short life (from severe illnesses, three serious car crashes, multiple addictions and the death of her true love), often collapsing onstage then returning. Her final tour was referred to as her ‘suicide tour’.

Her lover and fellow singer, Georges Moustaki, said of her when she was on stage, "She could breathe there, she was at home, she constructed her own world. If she felt ill in the wings, she felt better once she went on" (via "No Regrets"). In 1959, she rushed off stage on two occasions, coughing up blood. A doctor said that she had a hemorrhaging ulcer from all the medicine she had been taking. (from The Tragic Real Life Story of Piaf/Grunge Magazine)

You know how teenagers talk excitedly about the spectacular deaths they might have in the very far future? I used to say I wanted to die onstage somewhere, doing what I loved. If I still believed that, I’d probably be embarking on a career as a comedian about now. Boom boom.

Comedian Dick Shawn, who played Adolf Hitler in cult comedy The Producers, died in 1987 from a heart attack mid-set while making a joke about the apocalypse, onstage at the University of California. The audience thought it was part of the joke and heckled him with comments like ‘Take his wallet!’ and ‘How long is this going to go on?’. The stage manager checked on him several times before realising he had actually died.

Morphine lead singer songwriter and innovative bassist Mark Sandman also collapsed and died from a heart attack mid set at age 46, during a show in Italy in 1987. Due to the drug reference in the band’s name and the lack of official detail that ever emerged, many assumed it was a drug related death. A Medium blog by rock journalist Michael Azzerad attempts to set the story straight with information from Sandman’s girlfriend and some close to the band, stating Sandman was not a drug user but was under incredible amounts of stress, as both the co-manager and pivotal performer in Morphine, who had just signed a big record deal and he was determined to make it pay off. Morphine saxophonist Dana Colley told Huffington Post "I think Mark was under a lot of pressure to really kind of live up to the expectations of the people who gave him a lot of support. We were in the big leagues, and he was under a lot of pressure to hit one over the fence."

The incredible Grammy winning ‘Mama Africa’ Miriam Makeba also collapsed onstage in Italy, in 2008, moments after singing her joyful 1967 signature hit song ‘Pata Pata’, dying shortly after at the age of 76. In this case, it really does sound like a wonderful way to go, dying in the embrace of your loving audience, having achieved all you set out to do.

Revered Nashville singer-songwriter David Onley died onstage in 2020, from a heart attack moments after closing his eyes and apologising to his audience in the middle of his third song. His opening act Amy Rigby said “He was very still, sitting upright with his guitar on, wearing the coolest hat and a beautiful rust suede jacket we laughed about because it was raining like hell outside the boathouse where we were playing – I just want the picture to be as graceful and dignified as it was, because it at first looked like he was just taking a moment.” There’s a video on YouTube of Onley performing the song he was singing as he died at a Songwriter’s Festival show that same day. A comment says “I was at this show when he passed it was the most peaceful thing to witness. He was playing Bluebonnet girl (by his friend Jack Murray - the first song he plays in this clip) and near the end he said he was sorry, shut his eyes, and gently laid back. It was a beautiful simple song - probably a lot like David. At the show, right before he played his last song, he said he is covering other people's songs because he would like others to cover his songs (haha). He looked so cool and was in his element in a beautiful space surrounded by music lovers. It was something to witness.”

Researching entertainers dying onstage has sent me down some strange and fascinating paths this morning, and I could probably write another whole book on the phenomenon. In fact, don’t tempt me, I just might….

In the meantime, take care of your hearts, minds and lungs and stay home if you need to.

Lo x

PS: Thank you for keeping me company while I’m dying from consumption over here and please do join us at the glittering new date of Sunday 6th August for our postponed Lazybones show - tix here. It’s an early one.

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