That stairway to Heaven’s a bit crowded!
ANOTHER day, another dead rock star. Deaths so far this year include Keith Flint of the Prodigy, eric haydock of the hollies, Peter tork of the Monkees, Andy Anderson of the Cure and Paul Williams of Juicy Lucy, to name but a few. And we’re not yet halfway through March.
not long ago, newspaper obituary pages were dominated by military veterans. My late friend, the pioneering obituarist hugh Massingberd, used to label them affectionately the Moustaches.
those with particularly colourful lives included Briga-dier ‘Speedy’ Bredin, ‘who would step briskly into his crisp shorts which stood erect in the corner of his office’, Lieutenant-Colonel ‘titus’ oatts, the commander of a tribe of head-hunting natives who ‘ regarded throwing hand-grenades as effeminate’, and Lieutenant Geoffrey Knowles, ‘ who as a subaltern in Srinagar was bitten in the buttocks by a bear — he survived but the bear expired’.
now, alas, most of these great war heroes have passed on, and it is the next generation that is shuffling off the mortal coil. Last year’s deaths included ray thomas of the Moody Blues, Aretha Franklin, Dolores o’riordan of the Cranberries, Chas hodges of Chas and Dave, Mark e. Smith of the Fall, Danny Kirwan of Fleetwood Mac, Al James of Showaddywaddy and Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks.
rock stars always used to die young, often in drug- related incidents. In that wonderful spoof rockumentary, Spinal tap, the surviving members list the strange ends that befell the group’s drummers.
John ‘ Stumpy’ Pepys died in a ‘bizarre gardening accident...the authorities said, “Well, best leave it unsolved”.’
eric Childs died ‘ from choking on vomit’; but the police had no means of determining whose. ‘You can’t dust for vomit,’ notes the lead guitarist, nigel tufnel.
And Peter ‘ James’ Bond, who replaced eric Childs, also came to a sorry end, when he spontaneously combusted; apparently, all that remained of him was ‘a little green globule on his drum seat’.
Most groups have suffered one or two losses. others have been wiped out. By 2014, all four original members of one of my favourite groups, the ramones, had died, the oldest at 65. Some go in unexpected ways. When nico of the Velvet Under-ground died in 1988, hugh Massingberd noted that she had given up heroin for bicycling, ‘which was to turn out the more dangerous amusement — she died when she fell off a bicycle on holiday.’ But nowadays, old age is often to blame. It seems like only yesterday that Alan Longmuir of the Bay City rollers was a teeny-bopper, clad in tartan- edged trousers six inches too short, but he had reached the age of 70 when he died last year. Some time ago, I worked out that 32,000 people had, at one time or another, been in the pop charts, a figure roughly the size of the population of Windsor. And here is the problem. our current reverence for rock music means that we now expect to read obituaries of a wide range of pop stars, however obscure. Last week, the times even devoted a full-length obituary to Doug Sandom, who died last month, aged 89. Doug who? he turned out to have been the Who’s first drum-mer, who was sacked in 1964 because the rest of the band thought him too old, even though he was only 34.
SANDOM carried on playing part- time in unknown groups, but remained a bricklayer for the rest of his working life.
‘to the end he kept his original drum kit at the foot of his bed,’ was the poignant way his obituary concluded.
All very interesting, but if valuable column inches are now to be allotted not only to anyone who has ever been in a group but to anyone who has ever been fired from a group, where will it all end?
the number of musicians in line for obituaries will soon triple to 96,000, which is roughly the population of the city of Bath.
to find space for them, it will be necessary to ditch all further news of the Kardashian family, all further news of President trump and all further news of Brexit.
on the other hand, perhaps that’s not such a bad idea after all.