Aural danger
Marcus Berkmann
The Guardian had an interesting — and, frankly, terrifying — piece the other day by Nick Coleman, the Independent’s long-serving and shamelessly cerebral rock critic. I used to know Nick slightly: we talked drivel on the same radio show for a while a dozen years ago, and he wrote a piece about my first cricket book, in which he described me as ‘faintly posh and indefatigably sunny’, a combination of words that makes my girlfriend fall about to this day. Actually, I liked him a lot: he has an incredibly dry sense of humour and loves music to his core.
And a terrible thing has happened to him. Without warning, or apparent reason, he has lost his hearing in one ear. Worse, the ability to hear in that ear has been replaced by a monstrous variety of noises, as his brain tries to compensate. ‘It is the auditory equivalent of the illusion experienced by amputees,’ he explains. It’s not conventional tinnitus, ‘but entirely reactive to input in the good ear ... When two or more voices are joined in amiable conversation, I hear trains entering underground stations.’ And music, his ‘great passion in life’, has become a nightmare. ‘What I can hear is monophonic, on the far side of whatever uproar happens to be filling my head.’ He manages to write about all this with great eloquence and without a trace of selfpity, or the rage he must surely feel. Because the chances are that this will get no better. His ability to cope with it might, but the hearing in that ear seems to be gone for good.
As it happens, Nick is the same age as me: 47. We are at that slightly worrying age when bits of us start dropping off and people we know keel over for no apparent reason. It may be that, for rock critics, what seems the most important of the five senses is also the most vulnerable. For a few years at the beginning of the 1990s I reviewed a lot of gigs for the Daily Mail, an experience that gradually eroded my desire ever to see live music again, and, after a particularly deafening Tina Turner concert in Antwerp, curtailed my ability to. For ten days after this dismal, sweaty event, I had savage ringing in my ears. I felt I could go on no longer, and retired immediately from the gig treadmill. The tinnitus gradually subsided to manageable levels, and didn’t really bother me until a couple of years ago. Then, overnight, thanks (I believe) to a series of highly stressful events, the volume was suddenly turned up, and every day I found I was inadvertently listening to something a little like Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music.
I went to the doctor. He asked me whether I had ever listened to loud music. I said I used to for a living; he wrote down ‘rock critic’ and that was the end of the conversation. It was clearly my own fault. Contributory negligence through attendance of terrible Neil Diamond concerts at Wembley Arena. Not that doctors can do anything anyway: as a tinnitus sufferer your only hope is to try to train yourself to cope with it. Apparently, I’m quite lucky: it’s in both ears (it’s much worse if you have it in only one ear) and it’s a high-pitched whine (with a ‘carpet’ of white noise behind) rather than a bassy roar or rumble. Sometimes it’s not so loud, sometimes it’s even louder, usually depending on my stress levels. But is it really louder, or am I just blanking it out less effectively? The main thing is that it hasn’t affected my ability to enjoy music. In fact, music has become more important than ever. Most of the time I can disregard my tinnitus when outside, or indoors listening to music, but not indoors in silence. So I play music while I work, all day every day. ‘Turn that music down!’ shout my kids.
For me, though, it’s just inconvenience, mixed with fear that it’ll get worse, and a sudden awareness of the fragility of good health. For Nick it must be like a punishment for a crime he doesn’t remember committing. The strange thing is that I feel that I am hearing music, in the sense of discerning, processing and enjoying it, better than ever. It’s just the bloody ears that start letting you down. Critical faculties on an upward slope, physical faculties on a downward slope. When do the two slopes cross? Or have they crossed already?
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