I said to my wife ‘what’s that loud ringing?’ and she said she couldn’t hear anything...
SMITHS DRUMMER MIKE JOYCE ON LIVING WITH THE DEBILITATING CONDITION TINNITUS
FOR five years in the Eighties Mike Joyce was the beating heart of one of Manchester’s best loved bands.
Since then the ex-Smiths man has played with Sinéad O’Connor, Johnny Rotten and the Buzzcocks – who he says initially inspired him to pick up a pair of drumsticks.
But a lifetime playing drums at the centre of a maelstrom of post-punk has left Joyce with tinnitus – a constant, debilitating ringing in his ears.
“It was about ten years ago now. I was lying in bed with my wife,” he remembers.
“It was quite late, about one in the morning and I said to her ‘What’s that really loud ringing?’ She said she couldn’t hear anything. I thought it might be an alarm so I followed it downstairs and found nothing.”
Next morning Mike could still hear the ringing but still had no idea where it was coming from.
“A couple of nights later I was lying in bed again. It suddenly just dawned on me – it might be that tinnitus I’d heard of.”
Eventually Mike saw a specialist in Liverpool and met other people suffering from the condition. “I was quite amazed by how little people knew about it,” he says. “They didn’t realise there were quite a number of ways you can deal with it.” Mike thinks the majority of people don’t speak out because they feel isolated. “Tinnitus isn’t heard,” says the Fallowfield-born musician. “It’s an unseen illness which makes it hard to understand and harder to empathise with. It’s a noise created by the brain and the nerve endings within the ear. You automatically think you’re hearing that highpitched sound when in fact you’re not. It’s not actually being picked up by the eardrum – it’s inside your head.” Tinnitus affects one in 10 people in Britain – and one per cent of the population experience it so severely it affects their day to day life. “I think it’s a lack of understanding of the condition that has led to so few people talking about it,” Mike says. “Many years ago when I saw a GP, I was told it is something that couldn’t be cured.” Mike has always performed at maximum volume, aiming to create a drum sound that really fills a room. He admits this was the root cause of his tinnitus. “I remember playing at Glastonbury,” Mike Joyce he says of their debut appearance at the festival in 1984. “It was the first time The Smiths had ever played an openair gig and the drum kit sounded weedy. The drums sounded really weak and I wanted them to sound really big.”
Mike kept asking the sound man to turn up his drums. When the The Smiths toured America the year after he asked for a huge speaker just to himself.
“I wanted it to sound like the gig,” he says. “I wanted to have my own gig right there.
“There was no health and safety. There was no one there saying you should wear these ear plugs or you shouldn’t have it that loud. It wasn’t even kind of broached.”
Each case of tinnitus is different and the sounds people hear can vary dramatically.
Mike describes his as a ‘highpitched, constant tone like the very highest note of a keyboard.’
It’s so high, he says, it sounds like the ‘type of tone only a dog would hear.’
While there may be no cure for tinnitus, meditation, special hearing aids and ambient sound treatments can help reduce the condition’s impact on people’s lives. Surprisingly, the drummer’s treatment of choice is a good book.
“I’ve found reading at night helps. When I’m engrossed in a really good book I’m not concentrating on my tinnitus – I’m concentrating on the content matter of the book.”
But the only way to avoid the pervasive noise is to protect your ears while they are still healthy – either by wearing earplugs around loud music and noise or by avoiding loud situations altogether.
Mike’s advice to young giggoers and aspiring musicians is to invest in a decent pair of professionally molded in-ear earplugs – equipment that will let you hear the music while keeping your hearing safe.
Mike is not the only high-profile figure speaking out about the condition. Coldplay’s Chris Martin has also been vocal about how tinnitus changed his life, as have The Who’s Pete Townshend and Bob Dylan.
To find out more about the Share Your Sound initiative visit www.tinnitus.org.uk/sys.
For information about how to avoid, identify or treat tinnitus go to the British Tinnitus Association’s website at www. tinnitus.org.uk.