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After hours of singing and strumming his guitar continuously, Dubai-based Portuguese musician Glenn Perry’s fingers cut through the steel strings and his throat began to swell with excruciating pain. The singer-philanthropist completed a 25-hour singathon, where he sang, played the guitar, and piano continuously, without food, water, sleep, and a few bathroom breaks late on Friday evening.
The singer may have broken a world-record, but the point, according to him, was not to appear in the Guinness World Records; rather it was to “draw media attention to the plight of the victims of the recent typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines.”
He began the singathon at 6.47pm on Thursday, December 5, and he completed it on Friday, December 6 at 7.56pm. He sang for 25 hours, and seven minutes at the Arabian Courtyard Hotel in Dubai.
“The media attention on every natural calamity does not last for more than two weeks. I’ve seen this with all the recent tragedies. I noticed it with the coverage of Hurricane Katrina, the tsunami in Japan, the 2001 tsunami is Indonesia and Sri Lanka, the disaster in Uttarakhand… every single one of them. I’ve been to each one of these locations and even though no one talks about it, the people in these places continue to suffer, and slowly aid towards these places too stop,” added Perry.
Perry’s efforts have raised Dh10,000 in 25 hours.
“After the singathon, I got calls from people across the globe saying that they want to help. All funds collected will be going to various charities still working in Tacloban and surrounding provinces,” he said. The singer had completed a 24-hour singathon in 2010, which he did on World Hunger Day.
“Fasting without food and water for 24-hours is something a lot of people can do, but singing continuously for even six hours is not an easy task,” said Perry, who is now sporting bandages on several of his bruised fingers and his voice is hoarse.
Perry sang close to 400 songs for the singathon. “I sang a lot of songs from memory. Everything from the Beatles to the Rolling Stones.”
“I would recommend that no one ever attempt something like this ever again. My vocal chords are completely fried and every muscle in my body is aching,” he said. After completing 10 hours of the singathon, Perry said that he almost fell off stage six to eight times due to exhaustion.
Perry, who is also running the Dubai Music Institute in Karama, said: “Several of my students and parents kept asking me to sip some water when they saw me fall off.
“I refused to do that because, when I was in Tacloban, I had the money to buy both food and water, but it just wasn’t available. It was the images of their sufferings that led me on; that gave me the strength to carry this on.”
“I haven’t seen anything this bad, ever. I personally buried six bodies. The typhoon has orphaned so many children, they really need our help.”
An ardent music lover, Perry said that for the kind of stress that people face in Dubai, music is the most cathartic solution to their problems. -dhanusha@khaleejtimes.com
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