Happy Mondays star Bez thought he was going to die amid his battle with COVID-19.
The 56-year-old dancer felt like he had suffered a heart attack when he fell poorly with coronavirus last year, and he has admitted he didn’t think he would survive.
The maraca-shaker told the Daily Star newspaper’s Wired column: “I had COVID a week before they made the announcement.
“I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t tell if it was my heart or my lungs.
“I got to the hospital and I said, ‘I’ve been having this heart attack for three days’ and they plugged me into the machines and everything and I had a swollen heart and a virus.
“I really seriously thought I was going to die.”
Fortunately for Bez, his wild partying days are long behind him, and he’d been training for a boxing match and following a strict health routine before he fell ill, which he believes saved him.
He added: “I continued my juicing and taking my Vitamin C, drinking my apple cider vinegar and I did get over it very, very quickly.”
Bez’s bandmate Shaun Ryder, 58, also battled with COVID and he feared for the ‘Step On’ rocker as he has several underlying health conditions, including an underactive thyroid.
At the height of his battle with the virus, Shaun – who went bald from alopecia – was having hallucinations and claimed to have been visited by aliens.
However, one positive to come out of his coronavirus experience was his hair starting to growing back from the vitamins he got from only being able to eat fruit.
Bez added: “Shaun had it for like three weeks.
“He was hallucinating and having visitations from the aliens telling him he would be all right.
“I was quite worried about old Shaun as he isn’t the healthiest man in the world.
“I’ve always told him to take Vitamin C and all that but he says, ‘I’m allergic to it.’
“But it transpired he could only eat fruit as he was that ill, and he is alopecia so all his hair has fallen out, but from only eating fruit and getting his Vitamin C his hair started growing back. Like I told him, ‘It was a COVID miracle.'”