Rod Stewart was worried he’d never sing again after he battled throat cancer in 2000. “I woke in hospital and the doctor said, ‘Don’t worry, your voice will be back in six months.’ Six months came up and no voice. Seven months, no voice. Eight months, no voice. I could talk but not sing,” he told the Telegraph in 2001. Nine months after the surgery his voice finally came back.

Raspy rocker Rod Stewart yesterday revealed for the first time that he underwent harrowing throat surgery for deadly thyroid cancer last year – and that it improved his singing voice.

“It was scary – and it could have been very nasty,” the 56-year-old, bottled-blond crooner said of his life-and-death battle in today’s editions of the London newspaper The Sun.

“It was only because of a CAT scan that it was spotted,” a still-shaken Stewart said of the cancer. “If I had left it a couple of years, it would have been a very different story.”

Stewart, who calls the frightening ordeal a “turning point” in his life, said his world was first turned upside down when he underwent a routine exam at Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles last April and they discovered the tumor.

He had emergency surgery the next day to have the tumor removed. But his worries were far from over.

“I didn’t realize it would be devastating for my voice. They cut you right through the neck,” Stewart said. ” . . . They cut through the muscles, and [the muscles] go through memory loss, and you forget how to sing. The muscles just shrivel up.

“I woke in the hospital, and the doctor said, ‘Don’t worry, your voice will be back in six months.’ Six months came up, and no voice. Seven months, no voice. Eight months, no voice. I could talk, but I could not sing.

“It only came back to its former glory about four weeks ago – about nine months after the operation.”

A grateful Stewart added that, “As far as my voice is concerned now, it’s really weird . . . It has a new warmth to it – that’s the upside. It’s like I’ve gone back to the 1970s rasp.”

The strutting singer, famous for such hits as “Maggie May” and “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy,” admitted to The Sun he even kept his ex-wife, model Rachel Hunter, in the dark about his ordeal until he bared his soul to the newspaper.

Stewart explained Hunter was experiencing her own health scare at the time – what turned out to be a cyst under her arm.

“I only told Rachel all about it [yesterday], actually . . . I didn’t want to worry anyone about it,” said Stewart, who is dating photographer Penny Lancaster, 26.

Stewart has vowed to join the crusade to find a cure for thyroid cancer by performing charity work and helping to raise money for research.