‘My hospital notes said: estimated female’: jazz musician Gill Hicks on being caught in the 7/7 bombings

After being pulled from the wreckage, she spent months learning how to speak again. Now, 20 years on, Hicks is performing her beloved jazz standards on stage – and remembering those who saved her life

When Gill Hicks takes to the stage, she says with a small laugh that she hopes she can get through just the opening number, “without breaking down in a heap”. It will be emotional. Wryly titled Still Alive (and Kicking), the show is Hicks’s own way to mark the 20th anniversary of the suicide bombings on London’s public transport that killed 52 people, and injured more than 700 – Hicks, a survivor, lost both her legs. In her show, she weaves her story of survival and resilience around singing the jazz standards she has always loved.

She has already performed a version of it in Australia, where she now lives, but for its London outing she hopes around 20 members of the medical and emergency teams who attended that day will be in the audience. “They are extraordinary,” she says, “and their actions not only saved my life that morning, but I honestly believe they have saved me every single day since.”