The question
What is the harshest thing anyone has said to you?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
A fixed Guardian Q&A prompt asked directly across respondents and years.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
“You’re a wonderful musician but a terrible friend.” It was Daniel Barenboim, the famous conductor, because I didn’t have time in the calendar to work with him.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 23 November 2024 source ↗
My dad said, “You’re going nowhere.” I was seven or eight.
We’ve run out of champagne.
Edward Bond, the playwright, said I was like a turd flowing on the effluent of British culture.
I was called the N-word in Romford, by someone stepping off a train as I was getting on.
That moment in Bilbao in 2020, when I tried to cross the street and did a pirouette and suffered a dreadful break in my right leg, which means now I have 10 screws and a band in it.
Full of passion and laughter.
In 2006, I went fishing for red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico. On the way back, one of the engines caught fire and then we had one engine for 70 miles. Slowly but surely, we got to Baton Rouge in the darkness but then got very close to a very large passing ship – they didn’t see us and we didn’t see them.
One horrible afternoon in Chicago when I forgot my words in The Marriage of Figaro, in a role I’d sung hundreds of times.
Absolutely nothing.
I loved my 1 minute 40 seconds singing at the coronation of King Charles. I was the most nervous I’ve been.
Belinda Carlisle, Fran Healy, Adam Lambert, David Hasselhoff, Bruce Dickinson, Olly Alexander
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