Too scared to sing — how a teenager with cancer found his voice

Phoenix Sumption was a sixth-former who played guitar in a band, when he received a challenging diagnosis By Helen Rumbelow, 25th December, 2024

Time froze for a split second, as a tiny Vietnamese grandmother in the audience stood and turned towards the crowd, filming with her phone as they clapped and whooped. She had escaped the war in Vietnam, survived a refugee camp in Hong Kong, started a tough new life for her family in Britain, and lost a daughter.

Now her 17 year old grandson had just finished performing his first song on a public stage. This is one challenge so many of us, myself included, would consider an ordeal, but is was even higher stakes for him. This family know what difficulty is, and what it means to sing even when - or especially when - it feels dangerous.

“Hi,” her grandson said softly to the darkened auditorium when it was his time to perform, sitting down on a chair and announcing that he would be singing a slowed-down acoustic version of Abba’s Mamma Mia. He could have looked vulnerable - his frame is slight, and he used crutches to reach the stage - but his face was set. “My name is Phoenix.”

All afternoon I watched the rehearsal; for a singing programme specifically targeted at people who had previously been too scared, self-conscious or clueless about how to sing in public. It is run by Tanya Holt, a singing teacher and author of the self help guide Too Embarrassed to Sing.

She is known as a kind of “voice-whisperer”, prising those who can only bear to sing in the privacy of the shower out onto stage for the first time (they can put clothes on first, naked singing is just my anxiety dream).

After a few months of lessons her willing victims then go up on stage to perform in a small Covent Garden venue. As I survey the dozen or so waiting to rehearse with a pianist on stage, I feel like a triage nurse: their T-shirts tremble, their tongues - quite important for what is about to come - are as dried and shrivelled as their courage. Why is this so hard?

“It is like getting naked,” Holt says. “Which is such a first-world phenomenon, because singing is an innate part of most cultures, humans crave singing. But in western society, you are judged very harshly on your voice. It’s shameful if you can’t sing. The people who come to see me are absolutely terrified.”

It’s important to note at this point that Holt - a fabulous creature in a green turban and silk pyjamas - is something like a snake charmer too. After decades as a professional singer, she has spent years in formal training on the technicalities of making sound.

She believes that anyone can sing given enough practice and with the right techniques, even the ones that say, “Yes, but seriously, not me.” She was sent from England to a French covent boarding school at the age of five, “a violent, horrible institution, one thing that saved me was going to church every day to sing together. Singing saved me.” But the more she has trained nervous singers, the more she see the urge to sing in public as deeply psychological.

“I’ve lost count of the number of people sent to me by their therapists,” she says. Several of those here tonight have clinical anxiety, and somehow find putting themselves through this palpitation-inducing challenge helps.

“We know, scientifically, people feel better when they sing,” Holt says. “But it’s more than that, it’s the quickest way to express yourself. It’s literally, finding your voice.”

As I watch the rehearsals, I turn my head to Phoenix Sumption sitting in the audience, also watching. We find a quiet place to talk. His mother died of cancer when he was a little boy. He went to live with her sister and her children. He grew up in London, a creative teenager: he played the guitar in a band, was about to start studying music at sixth-form college. Then in August last year, his life changed.

“I was having just a normal day when I fell down the stairs at home, and that’s how they found it,” he tells me.

In hospital, a scan of his knee at first appeared to show a fracture, but on closer look it was a tumour. He was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, a rare bone cancer that mostly affects teenagers.

“I had a lot of time in hospital for chemo, and I also had an operation to remove my leg where the cancer was,” he says. His voice is deep and calm. I look down at his jeans: he wears a pair ripped at the knee on the left side only, the side of his prosthetic leg. The metal glints cooly though the rip.

“Music helped me get through it,” Phoenix says. “When I had chemo, I would play my guitar right there on the bed, and I started to sing along.”

I can well imagine his soft voice - he experimented with a mix of country and pop - humanising the clinical institution. The nurses, I say, must have loved that.

“They did,” he says, laughing, “they really did.” When transport difficulties meant it was too hard for him to bring his guitar, a nurse insisted he continue with her guitar.

Phoenix and his family associated his starting to sing with his recovery. A Sai Ta, his uncle is a promising young London fashion designer whose pieces have been worn by the singer Rihanna. He paid for Phoenix’s lessons while treatment was continuing. “I have anxiety days, and it’s a way to express my emotions.” Phoenix says “it makes me happier.”

There’s another woman, in a gold sequin top, waiting for tonight’s performance with a clenched jaw. Why is she putting herself through this?

“I was looking for something terrifying,” Claire Bennett says. Now 38, she was a professional athlete, captain of the England fencing team that won gold at the Commonwealth Games in 2010.

Since then she has worked as a performance coach with elite musicians and orchestras: but she realised she needed to put her principles into practice. She spent a lot of her athletic career grimly focused on awards or approval. She needed to show her clients that she could be terrified and experience joy at the same time.

“I’ve never been able to sing a single note, I’m tone deaf,” she tells me. “But I wanted to show my clients that you can do something really difficult with the right mindset.”

Never a single note? No, she says, adding something that Holt hears a lot: she was rejected by school choirs at primary age and learned to be ashamed of her voice. Even after lessons, she says, singing in public feels “like the biggest stretch.”

It’s showtime. The lights go dark and it’s hard to know if the audience are more nervous than the performers. OK, not really, the performers are definitely more nervous. Holt sits in the front row, mouthing the words in time as each singer takes their turn. Bennett stands on stage and faces the audience.

“I was a fencer for Great Britain,” she says, the sequins dazzling in the spotlights, “but I put way too much pressure on myself to perform, which meant I didn’t really get seen.” Bennett dedicates this song to her daughter, to show her adults can do scary things too. 

And Bennett goes straight into the first line of A Sunday Kind of Love, by Etta James, like a diver past the point of no return. At every “oh yeah!” She sings, Bennett grows louder, the energy of her courage races around the room. Afterwards, Bennett is euphoric and says to me, not since national competition “have I felt so alive.”

Then Phoenix takes to the stage, carefully setting up on a chair, placing his crutches aside and announcing his song, Mamma Mia. “Yes, I’ve been brokenhearted,” he sings, his voice so tender the entire room holds its breath. “You know that I’m not that strong.”

The entire “Team Phoenix” crew, his cousins, aunt and grandmother fill the front rows. They lean forward, poised between nerves and containing the spring to a standing ovation. There’s an almost imperceptible falter when he loops the verses. But he’s Phoenix, which means we end on the line, sung with exquisite tenderness “there’s a fire within my soul.”