Add Bernard Sumner to the list of artists who’ve contracted the novel coronavirus.
Speaking with The Current’s Jill Riley, the New Order frontman revealed he caught COVID-19 from a colleague in the past month.
“I’m just recovering from coronavirus actually,” he explained. The illness rendered his voice “gruff,” and he can’t smell anything, but Sumner counts himself as “one of the lucky ones. I didn’t get it too bad. I’m ok.
Walking the interviewer though the symptoms (“I had a little bit of a temperature, but not much”), Sumner experienced relief for four days, then the issues returned. “When it came back, it was more severe, but still not too bad. I just felt extreme fatigue, like a really bad hangover. And then it went away, and I’m okay.”
Sumner is one of 1.37 million recorded COVID-19 cases across the U.K., resulting in more than 51,000 deaths.
As coronavirus cases surge across the country, prime minister Boris Johnson ordered England enter a new lockdown, beginning Nov. 5.
“I’ve heard horror stories over here about it,” Sumner told Riley in the recent interview. “A couple people who know people who’ve died from it. I’m very lucky.”
Sumner and New Order returned to a Billboard airplay chart last month for the first time in nearly three decades, as “Be a Rebel” debuted at No. 38 on the Adult Alternative Songs list.
They were due to return to the road earlier in the year, for a co-headlining tour of North America with fellow Brits Pet Shop Boys. The health crisis put those plans on ice. New dates are penciled in for late 2021.
The electronic-leaning outfit formed in 1980 after the dissolution of Joy Division, and has logged six titles on the Billboard Hot 100, and nine albums on the Billboard 200. In the U.K., New Order has led the Official U.K. Albums Chart with two titles, and snagged seven Top 10 singles.
