The question
How close have you come to dying?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
A recurring Guardian Q&A prompt asked directly across respondents and years.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Right after 9/11, Kenny and I went to perform for the troops in Pakistan and Uzbekistan. As we were flying in, an electronic voice went off: “Warning: missile launch! Warning: missile launch!” The Taliban had fired a rocket at us. I was waiting to see the back of the plane blow up, but it didn’t and we landed.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 14 November 2020 source ↗
Rolling a quad bike.
In a different sense, I’ve helped to try to resuscitate a dead man.
Anna dared me to jump off a cliff in Menorca on holiday a couple of years ago. I did. I fell 30m through the air, hit the water at an odd angle and shattered my coccyx.
When I was seven or eight, I got run over and was actually under the car, which was scary. I just ran out; it was totally my fault. I was fine – all I got was a tiny scar on my knee.
That my baseball team, Baltimore Orioles, is always in the basement.
An astronaut, an archaeologist, an actor, and a musician.
Amazing Grace, on bagpipes.
My teenage years in the Runaways: I was still naive enough to think good things about the world and life and people, and I was having fun playing rock’n’roll around the world, living the dream.
I had a cafeteria job, serving food, and some people were really nasty. There was a stack of nice, cool plates, and a stack of hotter plates that had just come out of the kitchen. So, if a person was an arsehole, I’d hand them a hot plate with a smile and watch them deal with it.
I don’t think I’d change anything: the bad forms you more than the good.
Marc Almond, Sheryl Crow, Jake Shears, Jo Nesbø, Yann Tiersen, Rick Astley
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