A ROCK ’N’ ROLL MID-LIFE CRISIS
It is during an evening spent babysitting Oasis at an awards bash in 2005 that music writer Michael Odell experiences the first stirrings of a wholescale existential crisis. ‘I hid under a table when I was supposed to be looking for their award,’ he recalls.
Before long he’s wrestling with a full hand from the midlife-crisis card deck: anxiety attacks, paranoia, despair. Perhaps he should have seen it coming. His teen punk band was called Mental Elf, a name almost guaranteed to inflict karmic retribution somewhere down the line – and so it proves.
There has been a glut of memoirs from the frontier of music journalism in recent years; this one comes with a psychological twist. When things start to go awry for Odell in his early 40s, he suspects that his undying devotion to the spirit of rock ’n’ roll – juvenile rebellion, death cults, arcane artefacts and all – may have played some significant part in his downfall. You can see his point.
His shrine of ‘sacred objects’ includes James Brown’s half-eaten sandwich, Pete Townshend’s used napkin, and a salt cellar thrown in anger by Joe Strummer. His computer keyboard has no ‘F’ key, on account of ‘writing up so many expletive-ridden rock interviews’.
The book is an entertaining, if somewhat contrived account of Odell’s journey towards health and self-awareness. A series of meetings with rock royalty illuminates his way.
He steals Sting’s chips ‘to see how he’d cope’ (the Police man merrily tells him to help himself ). He plays gooseberry as David Bowie and Kate Moss (pictured left, in 2005) arrange to meet for dinner, and sets fire to himself while interviewing Slash.
A climactic confrontation with Pete Doherty – ‘You’re living like an animal, why don’t you sort yourself out?’ he yells at the troubled Libertine – clears a path to a brighter future. He grows up, gains a more balanced perspective, and finds his issues lie closer to home.
While the softening of hard facts ultimately blunts the emotional impact of his story, Rock Bottom is an entertaining and at times thought-provoking rumination on the mixed blessings of the rock ’n’ roll life.