90s music legend ‘struggling’ as chronic condition revealed

That’s exactly the cost to Groove Armada’s Andy Cato and Tom Findlay, the electronic music duo who achieved massive success with dance hits including Superstylin’ and I See You Baby.

Although 30 years of subjecting their ears to extremely loud music has damaged both men’s hearing, they’re re still regularly performing DJ sets at gigs and festivals throughout the UK and internationally to thousands of new and old fans.

But the difference these days is that their hearing is protected during the gigs, and while Findlay, 53, now wears hearing aids to bolster his damaged hearing,

Cato, also 53 and operates a farm on the Oxfordshire-Wiltshire border, has to endure the incessant ringing in the ears caused by tinnitus.

Groove Armada’s Tom Findlay (left) and Andy Cato (Image: Stewart Williams/PA)

Findlay says: “I knew I had chronic hearing loss – I was often having to ask people to repeat stuff, and almost tuning out of conversations, particularly in environments where there was a lot of background noise or reverberation. I was really struggling to pick things up.

“I’ve probably been struggling with problematic hearing loss since my late 30s to early 40s. So I knew it was there, and I was slightly in denial.”

But he eventually had a hearing test about 18 months ago, and has been wearing hearing aids when necessary since then.

“Wearing hearing aids seems like something people feel a bit of stigma about, and it’d be good to take that out of it because it’s been transformative for me.” he admits.

But why does he think there’s so much stigma around wearing hearing aids?

“It’s associated with ageing, and we’re all a bit uncomfortable about that,” he observes. “It’s about a sense of frailty – there’s some discomfort about that in a way that’s quite different from the way we feel about glasses.

“Glasses can be a sexy accessory, can’t they? But hearing aids definitely aren’t.

“We’re all wearing earpods now most of the time, so they just look like that. And while I used to put off social situations where I knew I’d struggle, I don’t do that any more, and that’s great – it gives you a lot more confidence.”

Andy Cato from Groove Armada performing at the Isle of Wight Festival in 2007. (Image: Stewart Williams/PA)

It’s a slightly different story for Cato and his tinnitus, and he says: “I think you have to live with it, so the ideal thing would be to stop it in the first place.”

He explains that when they’re DJing, he and Findlay stand between two huge sets of speakers that are separate to the main speakers in the club or on the festival stage.

In the early days of their career, he recalls: “We’d come out of clubs and it would be funny that we could stand outside the door and not be able to hear each other.”

Findlay says in those days they gave no thought to any damage the excessive noise may have been doing to their hearing. But eventually they started wearing in-ear monitors, and then hearing protection.

“Now, when we DJ, we both wear hearing protection, which is essentially filtering out the real low-end frequencies which do a lot of the damage that don’t necessarily add to your experience massively,” he says.

“You just don’t get that real thudding stuff, and that means when we’ve done a gig, we don’t leave with our ears ringing.”

Groove Armada’s Tom Findlay (left) and Andy Cato (Image: Stewart Williams/PA)

“I do!” interjects Cato, referring to the ringing of his tinnitus.

“Well, Andy does,” says Findlay with a chuckle. “I don’t.

“So we’re doing some damage, but a lot less damage than we would have done before. If we’re going to prolong our careers, protecting our hearing is going to be a necessity for us.”

The pair are hoping to help start more discussions about hearing loss, protecting hearing and reducing the stigma of wearing hearing aids, and they’ve teamed up with Specsavers to encourage over-50s to take a quick online hearing test which will give them the chance to get on ‘The Testlist’ to secure tickets for exclusive music events. Groove Armada will headline the inaugural Testlist event at London’s Phonox on October 15.

The duo, who formed Groove Armada in 1996, are squeezing the performance in among upcoming tour dates in the UK, Spain, Ibiza and the US, and Cato says: “We’ve got an incredibly busy summer yet again – it’s an amazing privilege to be still doing this 30 years later.”

And although many of their original fans are from the Nineties rave generation, younger people are also loving their music – Cato says the average age of their last gig was about 20.

“It was absolutely wild energy – amazing,” he says. “We’re playing music made last week, and it still feels really vibey.”

But despite such a packed touring schedule, both men have secondary careers too. Cato owns a farm in France and rents a National Trust farm in Oxfordshire, using regenerative farming methods, and he’s the co-founder of Wildfarmed, a sustainable food and farming business.

It is a 729-acre National trust plot on the Buscot and Coleshill estate.

“It’s very, very full on,” he says. “The nub of it is that we farm in a way which can make us far more resilient to droughts and floods, and that will massively help nature recovery.”

The farming focuses on wheat, oats and barley, and Cato says: “I’ve definitely got a pretty endless supply of excellent bread, and I’ve got a little veg patch in the garden of the farm – although it’s getting a bit neglected.

“When you combine our gig and harvest schedule with drought, it gets a little bit tricky to keep those leaves going.”

Findlay has also found his own “side hustle” has had to take more of a back seat because Groove Armada is still so popular. After an extended period of depression around 2010, he had cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) which helped him so much he decided to become a therapist himself.

“Probably for a lot of it [the depression] I didn’t even know that’s what I was experiencing because I don’t think we were having the conversations openly around mental health at that time that we are, thankfully, now.”

He worked in the NHS as a counsellor, and then at King’s College London, but he’s just decided to leave there, and explains: “I partly trained because I thought all these gigs were going to come to an end and I thought I needed a side hustle, but the gigs have been better than ever and people keep coming. So I’m going to carry on counselling but in a voluntary capacity.

“It’s quite hard when you’re trying to combine that with making tunes and gigs. I just never felt like I had any downtime. But I’ve loved doing it – it’s an amazing thing to share experiences with people and help them make important changes in their life.”

And as well as loving being a therapist, Findlay says the training helped him personally too, explaining: “Now I occasionally get moments where I don’t feel great, but I’m able to self-correct and find ways of thinking and ways of behaving that are really helpful.”

For a chance of getting free tickets to Groove Armada’s set at London’s Phonox on October 15, take the over-50s online hearing screener and get your name on The Testlist by September 13.