Dickinson’s ‘a voice bit better’ since cancer battle

Bruce Dickinson’s vocals are “a little bit better” since he battled cancer. The Iron Maiden frontman underwent a seven-week course of chemotherapy and radiology after a cancerous tumor was discovered at the back of his tongue, and now the “top end” of his voice is “a little bit better” than before his treatment. He said: “Two things are slightly different. One is my saliva, which obviously lubricates your throat a little bit, is a bit less than it used to be. Although, back ten years ago, if I had the same cancer, I wouldn’t be making any saliva. “But now, I’m probably 70 percent, which is great. Thanks very much, everybody upstairs. And the other things 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.” The 59-year-old singer couldn’t believe it when he was told the tumor had disappeared. Speaking on Swedish TV show ‘Malou Efter Tio’, he said: “I was amazed. My cancer was a 3.5cm tumor in my throat and a 2.5cm one in my lymph node, and that was the one that I could feel - that was the secondary one. “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. “And 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.”