Pete Townshend and Nick Cave discuss “the musician’s curse” of tinnitus: “It’s a pain in the ass"

By editorial board on February 10, 2023

"Don’t try calling a tinnitus helpline, it just keeps on ringing. One morning, Pete recalls, after a night in the studio trying to crack a difficult song demo, I wake up hearing birds in my head."

Pete Townshend‘s longtime struggle with tinnitus once again became an issue, was forced several times to the cancellation of shows “If my hearing is going to be a problem, we’re not delaying shows,” Townshend says. “We’re finished. I can’t really see any way around the issue.”

 What do you do when the ringing gets loud? 

“Warren Ellis (Nick Cave music partner) claims his tinnitus is so bad that other people can hear it. I think this is nonsense and have told him so, but he says the reason I can’t hear his tinnitus is because my own tinnitus drowns it out. (NME)

“Still, it’s funny I should read your question now because I am sitting here alone in my hotel room in Melbourne, having just come back from rehearsals with Warren and the band, and my very own ‘choir of crickets’ is screaming its idiotic head off. I’m debating whether I should go down to the hotel restaurant, which for some reason thinks it’s cool to play unbelievably hideous music extremely loudly while you are eating, to drown the little fuckers out.”

“Dear, sweet tinnitus — the musician’s curse. Mine is actually pretty manageable most of the time, it comes and goes, and only really kicks off when I am playing live music, which now I come to think of it is most of the time. An ear specialist once told me there was not much I could do other than to ‘love my tinnitus’ — and then charged me three hundred quid. But, you know, I don’t love my tinnitus, I don’t love my tinnitus at all, it’s a pain in the arse.


Instead Pete Townshend Blames Headphones for Hearing Loss

Pete Townshend:

"I have severe hearing damage. It's manifested itself as tinnitus, ringing in the ears at frequencies that I play guitar. It hurts, it's painful, and it's frustrating."

"One morning, Pete recalls, after a night in the studio trying to crack a difficult song demo, I wake up hearing birds in my head, realizing again—reminding myself, and feeling the need to remind the world—that my own particular kind of damage was caused by using earphones in the recording studio, not playing loud on stage," Townshend wrote on his web site Dec. 29.

"My ears are ringing, loudly," the guitarist wrote. "This rarely happens after a live show, unless the Who play a small club. This is a peculiar hazard of the recording studio."


What hurts (source Lifescience)

Hearing loss is typically painless and gradual in its inception. So we don't notice it's early stages, except perhaps as a ringing in the ear known as tinnitus.

The decibel (dB) scale is logarithmic, such that 40 decibels is 100 times as intense as 20 decibels. Some common sounds:

20 dB: A whisper
60 dB: Normal conversation
100 dB: Chainsaw
120 dB: Rock concert
140 dB: Jet engine
180 dB: Firecracker

AC/DC frontman Brian Johnson has been told to stop touring or face total deafness.


 

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