Pop star Jessica Mauboy has revealed that a sudden and desperate panic attack prevented her from performing the national anthem at the Melbourne Cup.
In an exclusive interview with Kathy McCabe of Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph, Jessica said she went into the rehearsal room to find people ‘bickering’ over her shoes.
She says the argument threw her off and left her feeling “suffocated”.
She sank into a lounge and found that she could not get up, and although she could sense that she was supposed to be moving toward the stage, she could not bring herself to do it or even understand why she was not doing it – all classic symptoms of a full-blown panic attack.
Jessica tells The Telegraph that she was stunned to find “people on one side are bickering with people on another side and it started to suffocate me, it was crazy and I didn’t know what to do”.
“All I could feel was all the bad energy coming from people, time stopped and I could see it all going on around me, I could see me stuck on the lounge and I’m thinking ‘Why aren’t you getting up and getting going?’ It was really horrible.”
Jess tells The Telegraph she was mortified to be a no-show at such an important event, saying: “I couldn’t believe it was this gig. I know how to do the big gigs. I’ve done Eurovision, sung in front of Oprah, sung in front of Obama and sang the national anthem at the NRL Grand Final just a few weeks ago. But I didn’t have a moment to refocus and pull myself back together and I am still in shock that it happened”.
