Paul Di’Anno shares that “Going on tour is bad for my health”

Paul Di’Anno, the former frontman of Iron Maiden, spoke about his treatment progress in a recent interview with Canada’s The Metal Voice. Di’Anno has been performing in a wheelchair due to serious health issues for the majority of the past ten years. His surgery was performed nearly two years ago in Croatia. 

The fault [for the slow progress] is mine, because we keep breaking off, going to tour. And sometimes we’ve got to do that, because the fucking bills are astronomical, for medical care and that. It’s actually cheaper doing it [the treatment] privately over here [in Croatia], because you won’t get nothing done in England. So anyway, so you’ve gotta do what you can, but we’ve taken these couple of months off to get me going, I think for my sanity’s sake as well, because I’ve been suicidal over this over the last few years. It’s just too much. I’m not one of those people who should be sitting around all fucking day.

Would touring be better or worse for his health?

It’s bad for my health. It’s not good for me, because I’m not getting the physio done or the lymphatic drainage I need. Or you can sometimes, but not all the time. It’s very difficult. And, obviously, transferring from A to B, to airplanes and onto buses and that. But playing live does you a lot of good [mentally].

His current situation is unfortunately not ideal.

Yeah, I spend a lot of time in isolation, especially where I live, ’cause I live out in the countryside and I don’t get many people come to visit. And I’ve been really ill the last couple of months with infection after infection after infection, ’cause I caught pneumonia last year in Mexico. I was over there doing physio after I finished a tour.

Di’Anno continued by stating that his fight with sepsis in 2015 had left him with permanent changes to his immune system, which set off a vicious cycle in which his compromised defences failed to repel fresh attacks and increase his susceptibility to repeated illnesses. 

Somebody sneezes on me, I’ll probably go down with [a severe illness]. But that’s what you get from a sepsis. It just weakens your system.