Barry Manilow says that he’s unsure that his voice will ever return to what it was after undergoing surgery for lung cancer.
The 82-year-old MOR star has been battling cancer for some time and last December had to have a tumour removed from his lung, forcing him to cancel a number of shows as well as his Las Vegas residency.
Now in a new interview with Good Morning America, the singer admitted: “My voice, I don’t know whether it’s coming back.”
“I did my first sound check about a month ago, and I didn’t sound like me at all. I just couldn’t believe that it’s over.” He added that the discovery is “really upsetting because I don’t want to stop.”
“I looked at my band, and they were all looking at the floor,” he continued. “So that was the first hint that something was not right. I’ve always taken my voice for granted. I don’t take it seriously. Now I do, because it doesn’t seem to be there the way it always was.”
Hmmm. He had better locate it soon, for the sake of his UK fans, at the very least – Manilow starts a short British tour next week in Glasgow, what are being billed as ‘The Last Last Concerts’.
Except that they really aren’t. At the end of this month, he starts a two-month US tour, followed by the rest of that Las Vegas residency.
Other than the little matter of not being able to sing, the singer/songwriter behind such standards as Could It Be Magic and Mandy told the TV show that: “I’m doing good. It took longer than I thought it was going to take to get past this lung cancer.”
He admitted that when he was first diagnosed, he “paid no attention to it. It was just too heavy for me.” Doctors suggested that he have the surgery rather than go through chemotherapy, but then he had a setback when he contracted pneumonia. “I was in the ICU for seven days, because they couldn’t grasp this pneumonia that was just about killing me.”
But he insists he’s right as rain now, aside from the little matter of his pipes: “I’m in great shape, I’m ready to go. I just hope my voice is there. If I sound good, that would be just great!”
