Jaz Dhami on Cancer, Grief and Learning to Feel Again
The singer who took the stage the same day he was told he had cancer
Jaz Dhami found out he had cancer on the same day he was due on stage in Nottingham. He went ahead with the show anyway, not knowing if it would be his last. Born in Handsworth, Birmingham, to a Punjabi family, Dhami was a quiet, music-obsessed teenager until his father sent him to India at sixteen to study Indian classical music.
Away from home, with no phone in his village and only letters from his brother to keep him going, he built the discipline that carried him through everything that came later. He went on to become one of the best known voices in British Bhangra and Punjabi pop, performing to tens of thousands of people at festivals across Europe and five nights for the Royal Family at Windsor Castle, the last of which fell during his own cancer treatment.
Three weeks after his diagnosis, his brother Harvey was diagnosed with brain cancer following an aneurysm, and Dhami spent the next two and a half years driving between his own appointments and his brother's, including flights to Germany for treatment. Harvey died in February last year. "That cancer saved my life," Dhami says. "It didn't take my life. It made me see things differently."
Quotes
"Cancer saved my life. It didn't take my life."
This Episode Is About
Jaz Dhami talks about finding out he had cancer hours before a gig, and choosing to perform anyway. He and Naroop Jhooti talk about what it meant to keep singing through years of treatment while also driving his brother Harvey to his own cancer appointments, and what changed after Harvey died.
The conversation moves through suppressed emotion, meditation, fasting and the years Dhami spent as a teenager training in India, and ends on what he now does each morning before anyone else in his house is awake.
Who This Episode Is For
- Men who put everyone else first and never check on themselves
- Sons and brothers acting as a family's emotional glue
- Anyone caring for two sick relatives at the same time
- Men who were taught that showing emotion makes you weak
- South Asian men navigating family expectation and personal choice
What You'll Takeaway
- Suppressed emotion can turn into physical illness
- You can love someone and still not save them
- Twenty minutes of silence counts as a morning routine
- Grief doesn't end, you just carry it differently
- Only the patient can choose their treatment path
- Crying on camera doesn't make a man less of one
- Visualising your future as a teenager can shape decades
