Eighties pop legend Paul Young recounted a terrifying incident during a holiday that left him with multiple fractures in his leg and landed him in intensive care for urgent treatment. The ‘Wherever I Lay My Hat’ singer suffered the ordeal less than a day into his idyllic getaway on the Greek island of Santorini, when he slipped and tumbled down a set of hotel steps while on his way to breakfast.
In a chat with the Daily Mirror, the 69-year-old artist described the moment disaster struck: “It had been spitting with rain. The going under foot, as they say, was quite good as I was walking on the flat, but when I got to the top of the steps, as soon as I put my foot on the first step, my leg slipped out from underneath me. I fell and my leg cracked as soon as I hit the step.”
He continued, detailing the harrowing fall: “Once I’d gone down, I couldn’t stop. There was no handrail, so nothing to hold on to. I just thought, ‘I’ve lost control’. I fell down to three or four more steps, fracturing my leg again and again. It was a multi-fracture.
“When I came to a stop, I looked down and my leg was in a slightly weird position, underneath my bottom. I thought ‘I don’t like that. My leg shouldn’t be like that’, so I tried to straighten it up and that’s when the pain started.”
After the accident, which occurred in September, Paul’s wife Lorna, 53, quickly sought help at the De Sol Hotel and Spa, leading to Paul being whisked away to Santorini General Hospital in Karterados. There, doctors conducted x-rays and discovered he had sustained several fractures to his left thigh bone.
He recounts the ordeal: “All the multi-fractures were right at the top in the femur, the leg’s biggest bone, by the ball joint so it was very worrying. The fractures were so close to each other, there was a danger of the leg snapping.
“The only medication they had was paracetamol. I was screaming out all the time and most of the time I had my eyes shut because the pain was terrible.”
Stranded without surgeons at Santorini hospital, Paul spent nine agonising hours on a gurney in a corridor, desperately trying to organise a private flight to Athens for critical treatment. The next morning, after reaching Mediterranea hospital, he underwent an operation where a metal rod was inserted into his femur and held in place with screws at both ends.
In a harrowing twist, Paul remembers regaining consciousness during surgery.
“I remember coming out of the anaesthetic because I remember thinking ‘I can feel this and it’s painful’. I could hear lots of banging and drilling going on but I couldn’t get the words to say anything. I think when they went into the leg, the procedure was not as easy as they thought it was going to be.
“They only had so much time and I think there’s a point where they can’t give you any more anaesthetic, so maybe [as the anaesthetic wore off] they had to rush to finish the job off.”
Paul, recounting his ordeal, recalled ending up with a “messy” wound and being moved to intensive care for two days following severe haemorrhaging, which required three blood transfusions due to significant blood loss. He shared: “For the first few days, there was so much blood loss, they were changing the sheets every day. A lot of people were coming in to look at the wound and they were all speaking Greek so I didn’t know what they were saying. I was semi-delirious a lot of the time because of the blood loss. It was a frightening time.”
Following a two-week hospital stay, Paul, still experiencing anaemia, travelled back to the UK in a private plane that flew at a lower altitude than commercial flights to reduce the risk of a potentially fatal blood clot associated with high altitudes.
After returning to Britain, he spent a couple of days at the private Cleveland Clinic in London for monitoring and assistance with using crutches and managing stairs before heading home to Dunstable, Bedfordshire. There, he gradually regained his strength and relearned to walk.
However, at November’s end, he encountered a serious setback when a bolt at the bottom of the rod in his leg snapped, causing the metal fixture to shift downward.
“The pain was tremendous,” Paul recalled. “I’d just started to feel like I was getting better. I was using just one crutch around the kitchen and had started to drive my car again. Then I woke up one morning in agony. I thought, ‘Why aren’t the painkillers working?’.”
After undergoing another 10-hour operation to fix the broken fixture, Paul added: “I’ve never had something like this happen to me before. It’s the worst injury I’ve ever had.”
Today, five months after his harrowing fall, following regular sessions of physiotherapy, hydrotherapy rehabilitation, along with daily resistance band exercises, Paul is now “off the crutches”. Although he still suffers a lack of sensation in his left knee and is “annoyed” about not being able to “dance on stage”, he remains “quite positive” about most things and can even look back at his experience with a bit of humour.
“I’m accident-prone. I’ve done so many stupid things over the years. Once in Australia, I slid off the side of the stage and dislodged two ribs. On an American tour, while riding a quad bike in Antigua, I hit some sand dunes, tumbled forward then got run over by my own quad, fracturing two more ribs. I just can’t believe that my biggest break would come from simply walking down to breakfast in Santorini!”
Eager and “fighting fit and ready” for his upcoming nationwide tour featuring “conversation and acoustic version songs”, Paul also reminisced about how a childhood stutter severely affected his self-esteem.
He said: “In the early days, especially when I was tired, it really started to show itself, so I was a little bit reluctant to speak, which made me quite shy. Back then, I could never have believed I’d be able to do a solo talking show like this and the funniest thing? I’ve discovered that I’m actually pretty good at it!”.
The artist, known for his time with Streetband and Q-Tips in the 70s before soaring to fame with hits like ‘Love of the Common People’ and ‘Every Time You Go Away’, is gearing up for next month’s performances alongside Jamie Moses – Paul’s good mate and guitarist. The shows promise to entertain fans with what Young calls “a bit of a double act”, featuring an interactive Q&A session where Paul braces for even the most “outrageous” queries from attendees.
Paul Young’s UK tour named ‘From No Parlez To Secret Of Association’ kicks off on April 1. Tickets are available at paul-young.com.