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Rock Icon, 52, Reveals He Spent 'Seven Months In Bed' After Emergency Surgery
Rock Icon, 52, Reveals He Spent 'Seven Months In Bed' After Emergency Surgery originally appeared on Parade.
Queens of the Stone Age made the difficult decision in August 2024 to cancel their remaining tour dates so that frontman Josh Homme could 'prioritize his health' and 'receive essential medical care.' No more information was given at the time, but it seems that Homme's medical issues were more serious than anyone imagined.
In a new interview with Consequence, Homme, 52, explained that he was in immense pain right before filming Alive in the Catacombs in July 2024. Playing in the famed Catacombs of Paris was a 20-year dream for Homme. At that moment, he could have either abandoned the project to seek medical treatment or played through the pain.
He chose the latter. "I was in a very difficult physical spot, and I'm really thankful that I was, actually," he said. "I couldn't think about anything else but where we were. It's better that I was unwell, because I think if I was well, we would've maybe been more 'California' about it and thought 'Man, it's so cool to be here...' And something about that kind of sucks."
It's good that Homme's pain made him focus and appreciate on the historic nature of this performance, because it would be his last one for a while. "I performed in the Catacombs, and within about 20 hours, I was being sedated and put under," he told Consequence.
Homme, who was diagnosed with cancer in 2022 (and declared cancer free a year later) returned to the states to undergo emergency surgery. He then 'spent the next seven months in bed,' said Homme.
'I had a lot of time to think, you know? I was told I was gonna spend 18 months, two years there, so I was not excited,' he added.
(Consequence said Josh was being intentionally vague about the nature of his illness for privacy's sake).
By December 2024, Homme's doctors told him everything was going to be okay, which just made him want to get out of bed even more.
"I felt like a rodeo bull leaning on the gate,' he said. 'It's like, when you open this [explicative] gate, I'm gonna run. I'm gonna run."
Homme said that new QOSTA music is on the way. In June, the band announced a run of intimate theater performances dubbed The Catacombs Icon, 52, Reveals He Spent 'Seven Months In Bed' After Emergency Surgery first appeared on Parade on Aug 1, 2025
This story was originally reported by Parade on Aug 1, 2025, where it first appeared.
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