ROCK ’N’ ROLL EMBARRASSMENT
‘I SAW rock ’n’ roll’s future,’ an over-excited manager once declared, ‘and its name is Bruce Springsteen.’
Me, I thought I saw rock ’n’ roll hell when I watched a documentary a few years ago and it was about Status Quo.
By then, 35 years into the game, Rick Parfitt and Francis Rossi had played the same songs so many times that tying their shoelaces must have presented a bigger challenge. The drugs, alcohol and groupies were gone and in their place were beans on toast on the tour bus and early to bed with cocoa on gig nights.
Poor Rick, after showing his heart by-pass scar to the fly-on-the-wall crew perched at his bedside in a Dundee hotel room, then gave the fans a glimpse of the towel he kept between his knees to ease the arthritis.
I now realise that what I saw then was only rock ’n’ roll purgatory. Rock ’n’ roll hell is performing, as former Dollar star David Van Day and his wife Sue did on Friday, to the elderly residents of a Northamptonshire care home as they dropped off and gently snored their sleep-of-the-just accompaniment.
‘It was a bit embarrassing,’ said one relative.
Embarrassing was what Dollar did in the 1980s. This was something else. DONALD Trump divides the planet’s people into winners and losers. He is the archetypal ‘winner’, of course, while those who disagree with him are ‘losers’. If they persist with their dissention, he is liable to conclude they are losers with bad breath or low intelligence – or just menstruating. I don’t seriously believe such a man could become US President. But there is a morbid fascination in seeing just how far along the road to the White House the American public will let him go. Already the answer is terrifying.