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Sunday 20 July 2008

Aural danger

Marcus Berkmann on what failing hearing means for a music-lover

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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 Worse, the ability to hear in that ear has been replaced by a monstrous variety of noises, as his brain tries to compensate.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 self-pity, 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.

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