Morrissey Reveals Cancer Scare

DURING a recent interview with Spanish newspaper, El Mundo, Morrissey revealed that he'd undergone treatment for cancer and that doctors had 'scraped cancerous tissues four times already.'

"If I die, I die. If I don't, then I don't. As I sit here today I feel very well."

The announcement comes after spells of ill health have forced the former-Smiths frontman, 55, to cancel a number of shows over the past couple of years, including 22 shows of his U.S. tour after collapsing backstage in Boston in June 2014.

Since the beginning of 2013, the singer (full name Steven Patrick Morrissey) has suffered pneumonia, a bleeding ulcer, food poisoning and a respiratory infection.

Morrissey has previously been told to slow down by doctors

Morrissey revealed the cancer treatment during an email interview this week, in which he told journalist Javier Blanquez:

"I have had four cancer-scrapings, but so what. If I die, I die. If I don't, then I don't. As I sit here today I feel very well.

"I know I look quite bad on recent photographs, but I am afraid this is what illness does to the overall countenance. I will save relaxation for when I'm dead."

Morrissey said in another interview last year that although doctors had advised him to decelerate, he struggled because performing was so 'engrained' within him.

Last year he published his autobiography, which Telegraph critic Neil McCormick called 'the best written musical autobiography since Bob Dylan's Chronicles', while Sunday Times critic AA Gill said it a was a 'pooterishly embarrassing piece of intellectual social climbing.'

Morrissey also released his first album in five years in July 2014, World Peace Is None Of Your Business, and is currently working on a debut novel which he hopes to publish in 2015. He joked, "With luck I will be able to stop singing forever, which would make many people happy.”

Morrissey is currently on a European tour, and is set to perform at London's O2 Arena on Saturday 29 November.