EXCLUSIVE: Anastacia has candidly revealed that speaking about her cancer journey was a matter of ‘survival’ and ‘didn’t really know’ what she was doing
Pop rock legend Anastacia revealed to the Mirror that speaking out about her cancer journey was a matter of survival. “Did I think it was brave?” she said backstage at the Isle of Wight festival, “I didn’t really know what I was doing. It was out of survival.”
The Chicago singer, famed for hits such as I’m Outta Love and Left Outside Alone , has twice beaten breast cancer, and has been presented with GQ’s Humanitarian Award for her work in raising awareness around the issue.
“I think it’s a choice,” she said, “and my choice was to raise awareness to what I didn’t even know about. Why don’t we know that 75 percent of women that get cancer aren’t hereditary? Because that’s a big number.
“So that was why I was like, ‘I’m going to tell on you guys, I’m telling on cancer, I’m telling on doctors…’ No offence to doctors, they can’t tell us because it’s not science, so I said, ‘okay, well, I’m gonna tell’, and I have a big mouth.”
Accompanied by her chocolate Yorkshire terrier Broady, Anastacia also spoke about relationships, having confessed to Hello last year that she’s no longer interested in “crippling” romantic partnerships.
“Sometimes I have somebody, and sometimes I don’t,” she told the Mirror . “It’s nice later in life to just enjoy what you’re doing without it being the focus. Let other people and their marriages and relationships in and out be the focus. My music is my focus, my dog is my focus.”
Indeed, the musical spark has returned to Anastacia’s life with a vengeance in recent years.
Translating a selection of obscure German artists into English for her 2023 covers album Our Songs awoke the songwriter in herself, which had lain dormant since 2017’s Evolution album.
“I’m writing new music,” she revealed. “It’s refreshing to know that I still can do it. I don’t have a plan of sorts, I just keep getting in a studio with somebody here and there and writing.
“I don’t write before I get in there, and it could be the first time I’m meeting somebody, but there’s always a kinetic energy and you just go for it, bounce off the energy going on.”
Clad in a star-studded leather jacket, her mid-afternoon set was a crowd-rousing run of windswept, big-hearted country soul anthems, disco funk and a surprise cover of Guns N’ Roses’ Sweet Child O’ Mine , which she originally recorded for 2012’s cover album It’s a Man’s World .
“I did a greatest hits album of all rock songs,” she told the Mirror, “so I just thought maybe it would be good for this festival to have just a little moment of something they’d appreciate. It’s not an easy song to sing.”
A quarter of a century into her career, she’s thankful to still be performing. “I can’t even believe I’m doing it, it’s really wild,” she said.
“But I love it even more, maybe, than when I was first starting, because I was so unaware and so naive, and thinking ‘this is going to end tomorrow’. And now 25 years have gone, and it’s not ending tomorrow unless you want it to end at this point.”
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