Styrene, a feminist punk hero acknowledged by everyone from Beth*Ditto to Karen O as one of music's most*extraordinary women, went to her GP in the south coastal town of St Leonards-on-Sea, and was told to take painkillers. Eventually, after months of*growing agony and being bounced between GP and A&E, she demanded an MRI scan. The diagnosis sent her reeling: breast cancer had spread to her*spine and lungs. Then "a little fall" fractured her spine in two places.
Three months on, the singer is promoting the ironically upbeat album, Generation Indigo, from a St Leonards hospice bed, barely able to move, in a room containing a TV and a wheelchair. But despite only recently being given cancer "wonder drug" Herceptin (her liver is too weak for chemo), she bears no grudges. "My GP said it was a tricky one to find," she says.
