Shock news: No pop stars died today!

Until quite recently, the headline ‘POP StAR DiES’ was something of a rarity. Pop stars were all young, so any deaths tended to be accidental and generally drug-related.

But things have changed. take this year, for instance: we are still only two-thirds of the way through the first month of 2016, but already the death toll is mounting. By my reckoning, pop stars are dying at a rate of roughly one every two days, or three or four a week.

David Bowie may be the most illustrious, but there are others who were well known to dedicated rock buffs, a category that includes most of us under the age of 80.

So far this year, the death list includes Dale Griffin, drummer with Mott the Hoople; Glenn Frey, guitarist and vocalist with the Eagles; Mic Gillette, trumpeter with tower Of Power and the Doobie Brothers; Gary loizzo, singer with the American Breed (Bend Me, Shape Me); and nicholas Caldwell, lead vocalist with the Whispers (And the Beat Goes On).

last month was scarcely any better: lemmy from Motorhead died in December, as did Stevie Wright of the Easybeats; Carson Van Osten, who used to play bass for todd Rundgren; John Bradbury, drummer with the Specials; and Aura lewis, who sang with Jimmy Cliff and Bob Marley.

For some reason, drummers seem to have a particularly high mortality rate: last november saw the deaths of Phil taylor, known as ‘Philthy’, the drummer with Motorhead, and Raul Rekow, who played conga drums with Santana.

You might remember that in the film Spinal tap, successive drummers meet unexpected ends: John ‘Stumpy’ Pepys dies in a gardening accident; Eric Childs chokes to death on someone else’s vomit; and Peter ‘James’ Bond spontaneously combusts in the middle of a drum solo.

in one interview, the group’s lead singer, David St Hubbins (pictured with his surviving bandmates), claimed that 12 drummers had perished, including one who had been accidentally packed with the band’s equipment and had never been seen again.

When i was a teenager in the Seventies, pop was still in its adolescence. Back then, it seemed absurd that a pop star should die of anything as conventional and fuddy-duddy as old age.

But nowadays, with the odd exception, those who die tend to have had what used to be called ‘a good innings’: Pete Seeger was 94 when he died in 2014 and Franny Beecher, lead guitarist with Bill Haley & His Comets, was 92. B. B. King, who died in May 2015, was 89, and even the ever-youthful David Bowie was pushing 70.

Oddly enough, the great pioneers of rock ’n’ roll excess — Jerry lee lewis, little Richard and Chuck Berry — are resolutely still with us, at 80, 83 and 89 respectively. But for how much longer?

Some time ago, i studied the Guinness Book Of Hit Singles and worked out that, down the years, there have been 25,000 singles by 8,000 acts that have made it into the top 75.

As most acts consist of at least four people, this adds up to a bare minimum of 32 32,000 current or fo former pop stars, which is roughly equivalent to the h population o of Windsor. this demo - graphic suggests that, from now on, we will be facing the headline l ‘ POP StAR DiES’ on a daily basis. in the long r run, it may even be simpler for editors to print ‘nO POP StAR DiES’ on the odd day when no fatality has occurred, or else th there will i be no room for any other news.

When Bowie died, hundreds of middle- aged journalists and politicians went into great outpourings of grief. tony Blair even gushed girlishly that Bowie was so good-looking it was ‘as if someone had ordered from the Almighty the perfect-looking star’.

‘no one in our age has better deserved to be called a genius,’ said Boris Johnson.

DAViD CAMEROn also described him as a ‘genius’ and his death as ‘a huge loss’, while the journalist Caitlin Moran went so far as to say: ‘ He invented something just as astonishing as a currency, or a circuit or a city.’

She then added: ‘thank you, you beautiful man. thank you for giving us us.’

Well, there’s no denying that Bowie gave us some great pop songs, but these statements seemed to me to go beyond all normal expressions of grief or admiration. instead, they were outcries against mortality: not only against the death of Bowie, but against the very fact of death itself.

Since its birth in the late Fifties, pop music has been seen as the sound of youth. For a long while, the very idea of an elderly rock star was regarded as ridiculous, an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. Sixty years on, perhaps we are only just beginning to realise that rock stars grow old and die, just like the rest of us.