80s pop legend says he’s got ’10 years left to live’ as he opens up about thoughts on death after brain tumour diagnoses
IN the 90s he was diagnosed with two benign brain tumours that required major surgery and pioneering radiation treatment to be removed.
The terrifying ordeal and the difficult road to recovery afterwards led Spandau Ballet star Martin Kemp, 62, to contemplate death and conclude if the worst were to happen he’d had a good run.
Fortunately, almost 30 years later, Martin is still here and no less content with his lot in life.
Despite his optimism, in his new podcast with son Roman, FFS! My Dad Is Martin Kemp, the bass player admits he thinks he only has another decade left.
The first episode of the show sees the father and son duo speak about all things death.
When Roman asks his dad how long he thinks he’ll live, Martin replies: “I’ll be really honest with you, 10 years.
“I don’t know how long I’ve got left but I will tell you, since I was the age of 34, when I went through all of that brain tumour scare, I spent two years of my life thinking I was going to die.
“And I think, after that, everything else, every day, every year, every month that I’ve lived, every experience that I’ve had has been a bonus.”
He continued: “I was practically resigned to the fact that I was going to die, but I was quite happy with my lot, because I had lived the most incredible experiences.’
“By the time I was 34 and I thought I was going to die, I spent two years thinking about it, I was quite happy, I thought: ‘If I go, do you know what? What a life’ and that was back then. So, every year that I live, every month that I’m alive now is like a bonus.”
The candid conversation also saw Martin share his funeral plans with Roman.
He revealed he only wants 20-30 people in attendance and would like a montage of his life highlights played for them.
Sharing his most important rule, he said: “Do not make it sad. That’s the last thing I would ever want. None of those standard hymns that people sing over and cry. None of that.
“I want people to walk out thinking ‘what a life’.”
Martin said he’d want his coffin carried into the crematorium to Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen, though he wasn’t sure on his song choice as the curtain closes. However, he did rule out any Spandau Ballet.
The former Spandau man had a career resurgence in 1998 when he joined EastEnders as smooth nightclub owner Steve Owen.
While he proved to be one of the decade’s most memorable soap villains with stellar performances, behind the scenes he struggled to learn lines and control his movements.
Not only did he have to relearn how to use his body but his brain surgery also left him with controlled epilepsy.
The first of his two tumours was the size of a “squashed grapefruit” and required surgeons to remove half his skull to get to it.
The second tumour proved to be more problematic, with Martin opting to treat it with radiation rather than surgical removal.
In 1997, doctors decided the second tumour, “a ticking time bomb”, had grown to a size where they could no longer delay removing it.
However, it would require them to cut through his brain, something Martin said would have caused “loads of collateral damage”.
Wife Shirlie came to his rescue.
“Because of the way they had to cut it out, I was told I would lose some of my movements here and there. Shirlie refused to accept it,” Martin explained.
“She hunted around the world and came across an American doctor called Professor Black who had a new machine that could treat the tumour with radiation and was non-invasive. There were only two of these machines in the world, and fortunately one of them
was half an hour from my house, at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London.
“I had one treatment of radiation, and six months later the tumour started to die. It had worked.”