00:00 Introducing CJ Wildheart and his tinnitus experience Sean: Hello everyone, and welcome to Tinnitus Talk, a podcast on all things tinnitus. My name is Sean and today we have a special guest on our podcast, CJ Wildheart. He’s been a professional musician for over 30 years, played in several bands and formed the band ’The Wildhearts’ back in 1989. Ed, also known as ‘Ed209’ on the Tinnitus Talk Support Forum had the chance to interview him about his tinnitus, which he speaks about very candidly. Before we continue to the interview, let me just remind you that we are creating this Podcast with a small group of volunteers. If you’re interested in volunteering for us, do let us know. It’s a great way to do something meaningful for the tinnitus cause and we are always seeking new people to help out. You can help out behind the scenes with this Podcast. We also have other projects going on, like maintaining the Tinnitus Talk Support Forum, promoting educational content for tinnitus patients, running awareness-raising campaigns, writing media articles and taking part in research projects like survey design and data analysis. There are many different skills that we can also use so if you are interested, please send an email to [email protected] Sean: Now, without further ado, let’s listen to the interview. Eddie: Hi everyone, and welcome to the Tinnitus Talk Podcast. My name’s Eddie Clarke and it’s with great pleasure that I can introduce today’s guest, CJ Wildheart. How are you CJ? CJ: I’m alright - I can’t hear anything, the ringing’s too loud! Eddie: So, we’ve just had a bit of a discussion off air, so it’s obvious that CJ’s got tinnitus, so we’ll get right into it. First of all, can you tell us about your history a bit more so for people who don’t know who you are, can you tell us about your background? CJ: Right, well I’m 51 and I’ve been a professional musician since I was about 18 and playing in bands since I was about 15. I’ve had quite a long career and I play in a rock band called The Wildhearts and we’re very loud and very noisy and for many, many decades I didn’t really look after my ears. Eddie: I’ll just add to that. I’m a huge fan of The Wildhearts. I’ve been to loads of the gigs; probably about ten gigs or something like that, but there’s always been a bit of a jinx as well with your band as there have always been incidents. The first time I bought a ticket you split up, so I never even got to see you. That was in the 90’s. CJ: We split up a few times…. Eddie: Yes, I was really looking forward to it. So, fast forward about five or seven years then you were playing a gig at JB’s in Dudley. I think this was an infamous one. Something happened with Danny which I can’t really repeat on air. CJ: Oh, we sacked him onstage, didn’t we? And we kicked him out. It was pretty bad! Eddie: The guy from Anti ProduCt, the bass player? He took over and did a few songs and that was my first experience of The Wildhearts. I was like ‘Ok, so that’s the live vibe’. So from there on it’s all been sweet. I suppose the first question is, can you explain what your tinnitus sounds like? Or what you hear? Go into that a little more? CJ: Right, so I’ve always, well for 20 years, I only wore one, squidgy-like earplug on stage and that was mainly for pitching my vocals and also to isolate one side of my head away from the rest of the band so I could hear my guitar better and that caused a real battering to my right ear. I mean, it started off as a ring, like an intense ringing that would eventually never, ever go. I used to do a lot more gigs than I do now and I noticed the more I toured and the more gigs I played the ringing would start metamorphosing into some sort of weird radio signal, go up and down and sort of weird wind sounds. 04:05 Coping, self-medication and proper hearing protection CJ: It would keep me up but I play in a rock and roll band so I would self-medicate. Eddie: Yes, that’s quite common! CJ: I could wake up…… Eddie: Yes, I hear this a lot…. CJ: I could go to sleep whenever I wanted to go to sleep. So, I didn’t have a problem. I mean I didn’t have to wake up and do a shift at a factory or work in the office so, you know, being a professional musician, being on tour, you know I could wake up at 12 or 1 in the afternoon and I could go to bed at 6 AM and we were always partying. There was always a lot of noise. It was only when it was dead quiet when you’d really, really notice it and, you know, I’d take something and go to sleep, and so it wasn’t a problem until I stopped doing drugs and stopped partying and I surrounded myself with solitude and silence because of how noisy my job is. That’s when it became a major issue and I realised I had to do something about it or I wouldn’t be able to play live any more. So, the step I took… Eddie: So, what did you do? CJ: Well it was advice from my drummer. He’s always looked after his ears and he uses attenuators and uses moulds and he told me to buy some random, cheap pair and I found some for about £30 online and I tried them out and, at first, I was just using one squidgy plug and one attenuator. Now I use both attenuators and I use them on the frequency which basically has filters in them and they knock everything down quite a lot and it protects your ears, but you can hear everything. It took me a while to get used to them but the ringing is nowhere near as bad as it used to be. You know there’s a lot of science gone into these things and you really should use them. You should really protect your ears and they do work. You know, I have friends who can’t play any more because it’s so bad for them and I’ve never reached that point and when it was really bad for me I could self-medicate. It didn’t become a problem. It wasn’t ruining my life or ruling it. 06:14 Tinnitus awareness in the music industry and related technological trends “You know that whole thing of all men play on 10? Well, no they don’t, all men play on about 0.5 now” Eddie: The next question was going to be: did you ever speak to any other musicians about it? Is it something that is openly discussed in your opinion or is it something that’s not really talked about? CJ: No it is, it is…. Eddie: Because from the outside looking in, a lot of people don’t really see what goes on in the professional music world. It’s very sort of insular and tinnitus does get mentioned every now and again but not in any kind of serious detail and there are people in the community that I am representing now who are literally suicidal with this. It’s taken over their life and it’s completely devastated them and sometimes you’ll see an article that will just say ‘oh, you know, this guy’s got ringing’ and it doesn’t really go into the detail of what it can do to some people. CJ: I mean, it depresses you when it’s really bad. It can really make you down because, I mean, it’s constant. It’s not something that goes away, but musicians talk about this. I mean we’re old school musicians, we’re an old school rock and roll band and, remember, most musicians these days are using in-ear monitors so they don’t get … and a lot of bands don’t even have amps on stage any more. They don’t have the physical volume. Ed: The back line has changed, hasn’t it? A lot of digital…. CJ: Yeah, a lot. It’s silence now, they’re in silence. All you’re hearing is drums and they’re all on in-ears so things are changing. I think you know amongst a lot of professional musicians it isn’t such a problem as it used to be. You know the whole way of performing music has changed. We don’t use it and you know it’s something we’ve looked into but we’re still old school. People talk about… I know just about every old punk rock musician or rock and roll musician I know has this to varying degrees and, as I said, some of my friends have had to give up. But a lot of people just live with it. Eddie: One guy, Paul Gray, I don’t know if you know the bass player from The Damned, he quit for about 20 something years because he literally said he couldn’t get out of the house because he couldn’t stand any noise.