Why I Can’t (and Won't) Stop Thinking About Danielle Moore

Rhonda on the Crazy P frontwoman's death and how we need to keep pushing for menopause research.

I’m travelling alone on a ferry from Athens to Andros; Tracey has been at the funeral of a friend around her own age and is catching me up tomorrow. She is feeling sad and broken.

The sun glitters on the water. I’m excited about my trip. I love this kind of travel.

I glance at my phone. Danielle Moore has died. She was fifty-two – three years younger than me.

I grasp hold of the railing, dizzy. How?

Though she hailed from Manchester and we had common acquaintances, I never met Danielle. But I felt like I knew her through the songs she performed with her band Crazy P, some of which she wrote. Her voice – described by Elias Leight in Billboard as ‘burnished, breathy’ – was, IS, the soundtrack to so much of my life, the fuel for so many of my kitchen discos.

But as well as having, in Ed Potton's words, 'the voice of a soul diva, the moves of a burlesque dancer and the wit of a nightclub compere’, Danielle was by all accounts just a straight-up wonderful human being: humble, down-to-earth and socially minded, as any glance at her social media will reveal. Her last two Insta posts were about Gaza. Meanwhile, after her death, friends and fans alike posted about Danielle’s ‘endless light and magic’, her ‘generous, brave soul, brilliant, kind’, her ‘energy and aura unique’, her being ‘rare on this earth’, ‘the sort of human to aspire to be’.

Says one, ‘Your music saved me.’

And music can save us; god knows, it saves me daily. But tragically it wasn’t enough to save Danielle Moore. Having previously suffered periods of anxiety and poor mental health, she found herself burnt out by her work/touring schedule and also by her fluctuating hormones – it was concluded by her coroner that perimenopausal symptoms had a 'more than minimal impact’ in her decision to take her life. Successful, creative women don’t throw themselves under trains for no reason.

Danielle’s husband has said he wants to use her death to highlight the mental impact of this transitional period that can be so hard on so many women.

We’re lucky in many ways: HRT is easier to get than it was for previous generations of women, and there is much more public discussion around perimenopause and menopause and their effect on mental health, and hence a greater availability of information.

BUT there’s so much that is still not known, and I’ve watched in horror as more friends than I can count have struggled with symptoms so intense that they’ve barely been able to work. Many of us are so exhausted from holding it together in the face of erratic hormones combined with our other problems and our responsibilities that we struggle to get out of bed in the morning and cry at the drop of hat.

And we can’t help thinking that if men had to deal with this kind of shit, a lot more resources would have been pumped into research than have been. As it is, a lot of it seems to be pure guesswork. I’ve literally had a gynaecologist shrug her shoulders in front of a screen displaying my blood test results, and say, ‘This could mean absolutely anything’, before going on to give me a biopsy and then take one coil out and shove another in, all within the space of five minutes, ‘to see if any of that helped’. Without any forewarning and hence any painkillers, and with only the offer of a cup of tea afterwards before I had to drive home feeling as if my insides had been torn apart.

It didn’t help… Eventually, on a hunch, I came off my HRT and that did solve my problems.

Yet for others, HRT is a lifesaver.

How do we know which? How can we save our own lives? Should we be self-diagnosing?

And then there’s the marketing and the fear-mongering now that menopausal women have become a saleable demographic. How do I know if I need the collagen that countless Instagram ads mercilessly bombard me with? How do I know if I’ll wither like a raisin and fall apart if I don’t spend substantial portions of my income on supplements? How do I know if I’m getting enough collagen from my diet and producing enough in my body? (Here are some articles that may or may not help you decide, or may only make you more confused, from the BBC and The Guardian.)

I stand on that ferry sad as fuck, knowing how sad Tracey is too at the early, brutal loss of her own friend.

But I am also, somehow, deliriously happy to be alive and free, and I dance in the Mediterranean sunshine to Danielle’s sublime voice on my headphones, singing their brilliant track There's a Better Place (god I really hope there is, Danielle), grateful in spite of everything and that she was ever here at all.

RIP beautiful songbird. Thank you for the music.