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Artist News Gigs & Festivals
Jess Glynne cancels upcoming shows after haemorrhaged vocal cord
By Andy Malt | Published on Friday 28 June 2019
Hey, you remember when Jess Glynne pulled out of her performance at the Isle Of Wight Festival at the last minute and you were all like, ‘God she’s so awful and lazy’? Yeah? Well now she’s cancelled all of her upcoming shows because a doctor says she has to. Which means you’re a terrible person.
Earlier this month, Glynne cancelled her Isle Of Wight set minutes before she was due to go on stage. In an initial statement her management put this down to “exhaustion”, and she later told fans that she had felt “incredibly weak and full of anxiety”.
The Mirror, however, discovered that she’d been drinking until the early hours the previous night after the last show of the Spice Girls tour, on which she had been the support act. The newspaper then ran off to tell Isle Of Wight Festival boss John Giddings, who said it was “shocking behaviour” and promptly banned Glynne from ever playing his event again.
Now, it turns out, she was right to feel anxious about performing, because she’s haemorrhaged a vocal cord. This is not the first time she has damaged her voice, having undergone vocal cord surgery in 2009 and 2015. As a result of the recurrence of this problem, she has cancelled all shows until mid-July, including this weekend’s TRSMT festival in Glasgow.
In a statement, she says: “It absolutely kills me to say this – especially given what has happened in the past few weeks – but on the advice of my throat surgeon, I am going to have to cancel my next shows through until 14 Jul and I hope to be back as soon as possible after that. I know many of my fans feel I let them down so badly when I pulled out of the Isle Of Wight Festival, but the reason I knew I just wasn’t going to be able to make that performance has now been made clear to be by my doctor, Dr Zeitels”.
Addressing earlier criticism, she goes on: “It is true that I went out and celebrated the end of the Spice tour. That was a massive high for me and I wanted to mark it with the women who’d become friends and mentors to me. But I had also been suffering on and off for weeks with anxiety about my voice. It wasn’t right. I wasn’t sounding my best and I felt there was something wrong”.
“Two days ago”, she adds, “I came to Boston to see my surgeon who told me my vocal cord has haemorrhaged and that if I wanted to remain as a performer I needed to urgently take a break, rest my voice completely for the next ten days, and try [to] remain in total silence to give my vocal cords a chance to recover”.
This means that Glynne has also been forced to cancel the rest of her shows in the Forestry Commission’s Forest Live series. She had already played the first two of those dates, but the remaining three – in Sherwood Pines, Dalby Forest and Cannock Chase Forest – will not now go ahead.
A replacement act for her Sunday set at TRNSMT is set to be announced in due course.
