18 December 2017
Newsdesk
Iron Maiden star Bruce Dickinson's voice is better than ever - thanks to his tongue cancer battle.
The rocker admits even he's a little surprised with how strong his voice is after his health battle.
"It's a little bit different," he told Swedish TV show Malou Efter Tio. "Two things are slightly different. One is my saliva, which obviously lubricates your throat, a little bit less than it used to be, although, back 10 years ago, if I had the same cancer, I wouldn't be making any saliva. But now, I'm probably 70 per cent, which is great.
"And the other thing is that I think that the shape of possibly the back of my tongue, which forms vowel sounds and things like that, might have changed shape slightly, because, obviously, it had a big lump in it, and the lump's gone. So maybe the surface has changed shape. So I notice a few differences.
"Funnily enough, the top end of my voice is maybe even a little bit better than it was before."
Dickinson underwent a seven-week course of chemotherapy and radiology almost three years ago after he was diagnosed with cancer, and he was given "the all-clear" by his specialists a few months later.
"I was amazed," the Run to the Hills singer added. "My cancer was a 3.5-centimetre tumor in my throat and a 2.5-centimetre one in my lymph node, and that was the one that I could feel, but I did 33 sessions of radiation and nine weeks of chemo at the same time, which is fairly standard therapy for it. And it was gone.
"I said to my oncologist, 'What do you mean it's gone? Where has it gone?' And he said, 'Well, your body just gets rid of it'. A body is an amazing thing."
Bruce has opened up about his cancer battle in his autobiography What Does This Button Do?, which recently landed in the New York Times bestsellers top 10 list.
