Gill Hicks has lived two lives. In both, she's sung jazz. “Feel the city breakin', and everybody shakin', and we're staying alive,” she sings in her lovely rich alto, transforming the iconic Bee Gees disco hit into something more hypnotic and — given this 20th anniversary week of the London 7/7 bombings, and her attendant emotional and physical journey — infinitely more poignant.
Flanked by Dylan Paul on upright bass and Julian Ferraretto on keening violin and ethereal musical saw, and with huge images of her colourful artwork projected onto the wall behind her, the South Australian-born Hicks delivers her songs seated, an elegant hand on her transparent cane, her black tulle skirt flowing down over no-nonsense black bovver boots. A pair of prosthetic feet sit at the front of the stage, toenails painted, skin henna-ed, their very separateness carrying symbolic weight.
"I felt someone's hand in the darkness," Hicks says, taking us back to the morning of Monday July 7, 2005, when, running late for the office — her own design consultancy — she'd elbowed her way onto a crowded tube on the Piccadilly Line. She ended up standing close to one of the four suicide bombers who'd targeted London's public transport network, killing 52 people and injuring another 700.
Hicks lost both her legs and very nearly, her life. “One unknown, estimated female” read her identification tag, affixed to her after she was taken from the twisted wreckage and passed "like a human baton" along the careful hands of emergency and medical teams, many of whom (notably, paramedic Brian) became close friends and are in the sold-out audience at Wilton’s Music Hall.
A much-garlanded peace advocate and public speaker, Hicks is a winning narrator, balancing details of the sheer horror of the terrorist attack with stories of connection and love. An anecdote about a war veteran who believed she'd also had her head replaced by the NHS is laugh-out-loud funny.
When she launches into Summertime, her Ella-ish tones framed by Ferraretto's plucked violin, Hicks seems even more remarkable for the fact that the blast left her with irreparable hearing loss and one functioning lung. Having begun singing again in 2015, her voice is enchanting; unforced, silky, with excellent timing, scatting comfortably in her lower register mid-way through Bye Bye Blackbird and soaring to impressive crescendos in Feeling Good, the heartfelt closer.
There's a standing ovation during which she brings on her daughter ("My biggest achievement") Amelie, 12. "So, what has 20 years meant? I made a solemn vow in that Tube carriage that if I were to survive then I would live life in its best moments. I don't want to harbour hatred or bitterness; the people who saved me are my role models. I want to remind us of our shared humanity."
While she'll never dance, or run, or be free in the way she used to be free, Hicks feels liberated by her return to creativity: to art and the canvas. To music, and jazz.
"It feels extraordinary," says this extraordinary woman. "It's an essential part of my second life."
