Why the show must go on for Stacey Kent
WHEN Stacey Kent walked on stage in Poland last month, she opened her mouth to sing only to find that no note would come out.
She whispered her way through three numbers before breaking down in tears.
The 41-year old American singer told the 1,200-strong audience that she was unwell with a cold. What she failed to mention was the reason she couldn’t shake it off. She was recovering from breast cancer.
Just over a year before in April 2007, Stacey and her Walsall-born husband Jim Tomlinson – who is also her saxophonist and songwriting partner – had started recording a new album. She was getting ready for bed when she made a shocking discovery at their north London home.
“I was brushing my teeth. Under the brightness of the bathroom lights, I spotted a tiny dent on my left breast. I had never seen it before and knew it wasn’t right. I felt it and found a little lump.”
I was young, healthy and still had lots to do in my life. Jim and I started to cry.
As her sister Debra had been diagnosed with breast cancer seven years earlier, Stacey knew better than to ignore it. “The next morning I saw my GP and was immediately sent to Barnet Hospital for a sonogram and biopsy,” she says.
“I was warned that it didn’t look good. Sure enough, the doctor said I had cancer.”
The news felt surreal. “I was young, healthy and still had lots to do in my life. Jim and I started to cry. I said I was sorry to put him through this.”
Stacey had two types of cancer: a tubular tumour and a ductal carcinoma. She and Jim, 41, made two decisions. They would keep her illness a secret and they would continue to work on the album, Breakfast On The Morning Tram.
“It was incredibly hard,” she says. “I was singing these heart-breaking songs, thinking: ‘Am I dying? Is this the last album I’m going to make?’ The cancer I had was non-aggressive but it was the spreading kind.
“It was hard for us to go to sleep at night. Every night, Jim said to me, ‘If you wake up, wake me up too’ because he didn’t want me to be alone with my demons.”
She went to Barnet Hospital every few days for tests, including an MRI scan. “I’ll never forget lying in a tube on a table having my MRI,” she says.
“I felt so alone and vulnerable. I had experienced fear before in my life but not this kind of fear.”
She also had several painful mammatome biopsies in which a suction gun pulled out samples of tissue around her breast. Stacey was mentally prepared for a mastectomy.
“I said to my doctor, ‘If I have to have that, so be it’. All that matters is my life. I don’t define my womanhood by my breasts. I even had a fear of keeping the breast and whether that would mean I’d be living with a time bomb.”
The tumour was removed by surgery. Two weeks later, she learned that the cancer hadn’t spread. Within a week she was back at work and within five weeks Stacey, who performs around 200 concerts a year, was back on stage.
“I didn’t want to be stupid and compromise my health, yet it was very important for me to do what I do,” she says.
“There is nothing I love more than being on stage and sharing music with people. That’s my job, my role, my place, my ticket on to the planet.”
Stacey and Jim, who met at Oxford University and married in 1991, toiled in a band until the late jazz musician and broadcaster Humphrey Lyttelton played one of their recordings on Radio 2 in 1996. Stacey released her first album the following year. Now feted by jazz fans, Stacey has sung at birthday parties for Clint Eastwood and Sir Ian McKellen.
To conserve energy during concerts she sang sitting on a stool. She also avoided aftershow album signings. In between gigs, she had radiotherapy at Mount Vernon Hospital in Hertfordshire five days a week for four weeks.
All the time she kept it secret from her fans. “I was tempted to blurt it all out but I didn’t want them to see my discomfort,” she says. “If people had applauded me with sympathy I don’t think I could have sung.”
Every day for the next five years, she has to take the drug tamoxifen to help keep the cancer at bay. Every three months she has check-ups.
“This last appointment was very hard,” she says. “It was the first anniversary and the first two years are the most crucial. I’m living optimistically that it’s done and it’s over. But I still have the fear and that’s partly because my sister Debra had a recurrence four and a half years after her original breast cancer.
Fortunately for Stacey and women like her, a recent audit by the Association of Breast Surgery and the NHS Breast Screening Programme found that women whose cancer is detected early enough live as long as those who never develop it. “Not everybody does make it through,” says Stacey. “But if you do, you think, ‘This wakes you up to living your life’. It’s made it all the more delicious. Everything and every day is delicious.”
Stacey will perform a benefit concert at Indig02 in Greenwich, London on October 13 as part of Breast Cancer awareness month. For tickets, call 0844 844 0002 or visit www.staceykent.com
