Five rock stars that kept touring despite their bodies telling them to stop
Kate Nash spoke extremely fondly of touring, saying that when a musician is on the road, life makes more sense than usual.
“When you’re on tour, you know exactly what you’re doing and what’s required of you,” she said in an interview with The Guardian. “There’s a routine. It’s tangible what you stand for because it’s right in front of you. You come off tour, and you’re like, ‘Fucking hell, what is the point? What am I doing with my life?’”
Artists don’t just love going on tour because they get to play to big crowds and party all the time; they love doing it because it’s a very real reflection of the art form they’ve committed their lives to. As such, when they fall ill or find themselves in a dark place, it’s not easy for them to just completely cancel a run of shows. Instead, they push through and attempt to keep going even though their bodies are begging them not to.
Sometimes, this can have fatal consequences. No matter what genre you’re dealing with, throughout it, there are plenty of artists who should have stopped touring but refused to do so.
Five artists who refused to stop touring:
Lemmy
Lemmy was always incredibly committed to both his music and his fans, which is commendable, but also acted to his detriment. On his final tour, it was clear that he wasn’t well enough to be on the road, and yet he made adjustments and dug deep to ensure he could keep going. Lemmy ended up passing away just 17 days after his tour ended.
“Instead of arguing with Lemmy, trying to get him off the road, let’s just help him instead,” said drummer Mikkey Dee when discussing what it was like on the road with Lemmy in his final days. “I remember shows where we had to adjust a lot of stuff, but I think we, and he, did fantastic. Our last show was December 7th in Berlin, and then a couple of weeks later, the man is gone. Trust me, me and Phil put in 150%, Lemmy must have put in 300% to get through the sets.”
Shaun Ryder
Shaun Ryder and Bez are no strangers to a party, and while the fun-loving duo from the Happy Mondays often look like they’re having a great time, such a lifestyle always ends up taking its toll. Shaun Ryder realised this, as while he was on tour, despite his body begging him to slow down, he continued to press on.
While he might not be on drugs anymore, his commitment to touring despite how he is feeling remains. When he was on tour in recent years, he got pneumonia because of his commitment to continuing to play despite feeling awful. Everything went wrong at once, but despite Ryder’s body trying to get him to slow down, he plugged himself up with whatever painkillers he could find and kept going.
“It just fucking hit me,” he said, “I had to stick all sorts of shit down my neck, codeine, morphine, tablets that been left over from somebody in our family that had cancer, you name it, anything, just to get through. I’m old school, you don’t just go off tour because you’re fucking dying. Then I collapsed.”
Tiny Tim
If you don’t think you’ve heard of Tiny Tim, you’re wrong. Albeit a true outsider, he travelled around the world performing to audiences using his bizarre (and often unsettling) high-pitched vocals. His most famous song, ‘Tiptoe Through The Tulips’, is a cult classic and has been used on the big screen in multiple films.
He never stopped touring and performing; it was in his blood; however, this became a serious problem towards the end of his life. On September 28th, 1996, he suffered a heart attack onstage in Montague when he was playing at a ukulele festival. After eventually being discharged from hospital, he was told not to perform again; however, he wound up back on stage on November 30th, 1996. Before treading the boards, he told his wife that he wasn’t feeling well, but didn’t want to disappoint the fans, and so he went on to give a good show regardless. It was during this set that he had another heart attack, fell unconscious and shortly after passed away.
Iggy Pop
Iggy Pop was punk before punk even had a name, as his wild performances and confrontational manner on stage captivated audiences around the world. While drugs took their toll on Iggy Pop’s health and nearly forced him to give up touring multiple times, it was the damage he did to himself on stage which well and truly almost got the singer killed.
At a show in New York, one audience member, Bebe Buell, remembers the anticipation of waiting for Pop to do something wild. “There was that element of danger,” she said, “Because everybody had heard about his antics on stage.” Pop certainly delivered, as while strutting around the room, he fell into a stack of glasses and cut himself all over.
The show should have ended, but Pop carried on playing despite his body being battered and bloody. Pop, seemingly amused by the hold thing, instead held his arm in a certain way where blood would jet out and squirt the audience. “It was horrible,” recalled DJ Wayne County, “Like a Roman arena.”
Trent Reznor
Trent Reznor has faced a great deal of internal battles. One of Nine Inch Nails’ most popular songs, ‘Hurt’ stems from a dark place of self-resentment. “I’m not proud to say I hate myself and don’t like what I am,” he said, “But maybe there is real human communication that ends up positive even though everything being said is negative.”
A particularly hard period in his life, both mentally and physically, came when Reznor and the rest of Nine Inch Nails went on tour with their album The Fragile. Reznor himself admitted that the run of shows led him down a dark path, and despite his body telling him to stop, he didn’t listen. The tour wasn’t abandoned voluntarily, but forcefully, as when Reznor mistook smack for cocaine, he overdosed and almost died.
“That whole tour I was in a constant state of withdrawal and sickness,” he said, “The success of that record was the first week. Then the label had had enough, and the public seemed to have had enough, and I’d had enough… It led me down a very dark and terrible path. At the end of it, which was close to four years ago, it was very clear to me that I was trying to kill myself.”
