I don’t know what it is, but I’m in trouble.” Those were the panictriggering words that greeted Marty Wilde Jr when he answered his mobile one day last April. His father, Jr soon discovered, had regained consciousness on his bedroom floor with no memory of how he got there. There, bloodied, bruised and unable to pick himself up, he just about managed to call his youngest son.
“He’s just 10 minutes away, so I just lay on the floor until he came,” Marty Sr tells Vintage Rock, three months after that terrifying collapse. After being rushed to hospital, doctors diagnosed atrial fibrillation, which, in simple terms, is an irregular, sometimes overly fast heartbeat. It means the octogenarian crooner now has a pacemaker to keep his old ticker in check.
“I’m a little breathless to what I used to be, so I’ve got to be careful,” Marty Wilde tells us down the blower from his home in Hertfordshire. “Other than that, I feel great – mind-wise I’m sharp, which is the important thing when you get to my age. I’m very fortunate to have got this far. Especially with what’s going on at the moment.”