Uncommon People: the Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars
by David Hepworth (2017 Bantam Press)
Jump to it!
- Good Golly Miss Molly!
- A Day in the Life
- What a waste! What a waste! But I don’t mind
- Moving waves, the wind has left you
- Elsewhere on the Bookshelf
Good Golly Miss Molly!
Well this is fun! Hepworth starts with a bang: Little Richard singing the originally outrageous “Tutti Frutti” (no, kids, it wasn’t about sweets…) in 1955. He ends with the whimper of a Wall Street stock market launch of Netscape in 1995. So the first was A wop bop a loo bop a lop bam BOOM announcing the “First Rock Star”, while the second set in motion an internet BOOM that would would eclipse the music industry, and strangle the life out of the rock star. For the author these events bookend the Age of the Rock Star.
Of course there have been stars since. Today’s musicians are at least as talented and charismatic than those of the BOOMers generation. But they don’t live up to (down to?) the ideals of Hepworth’s heroes. Are they the rebels, innovators, style gurus, iconoclasts and all-round Bad Boys and Girls of the past. Well maybe, but it was David Hepworth’s era. As a journalist and broadcaster, he met, interviewed and hung out with some of his rock icons.
A Day in the Life
40 short chapters. Each focussed on one artist or group. And not only one year, but one day
- 6th July 1957 – young Paul McCartney listens to The Quarrymen a local skiffle group in Liverpool and is introduced to John Lennon
- 26th September 1965 – The Who escape from a gig-turned-riot in Denmark (“… the band dealt with adversity in their customary way. By taking it out on each other”)
- 16 August 1977 – a clapped-out King Elvis dies an undignified death (and business flourishes for the hangers on)
- 24th November 1991 – Freddie Mercury succumbs to AIDS
Their stars rose, flared impossibly bright and then set almost as fast (except the ever-Rolling Stones, of course).
Why did this motley cast of talented poseurs and performers become the style icons that millions wanted to imitate, to spend their pocket money on, to love and hate in equal measure? How did these flawed and indulged poets and chancers and dancers become like gods whose every off-hand comment, pose, tantrum and excess we followed as if drawn to drug-fuelled Pied Pipers?
What a waste! What a waste! But I don’t mind.
But the author is a better writer than to just trot out the well-known fan club stories. He makes sense of the soap opera that was Fleetwood Mac. He calls out the outrageous fabulist nonsense that Bob Dylan told about himself. He argues that The Beatles would have been nothing without Ringo, and that Bob Marley and the Wailers at the Lyceum was the greatest concert ever. He is very entertaining on how the black country boys Black Sabbath quite accidentally stumbled into a winning formula based on mock menace. (And if nothing else, seek out his appreciation of Ian Dury’s triumphant 1978 when “the raspberry was on top”.)
If the fans did look up [from communing with their boots] they saw Ozzy stationed at the side of the stage so that they could get an unimpeded view of what this performance was all about, which was serious young men operating heavy machinery…
David Hepworth (on Black Sabbath)
Moving waves, the wind has left you
We will all find some of our favourites left out. There is no way we’d agree with Hepworth eclectic roster. It’s a matter of taste in the end, or perhaps the chance of what we heard in our teens and who we were with. I recall The Beatles because I had older teenage sisters in the 60s. I sat in our back garden and heard Dylan singing in the distance one evening in 1969. My real musical journey began with Focus in 1971 and fizzled out long before Axl Rose, or Curt Cobain or Prince had flared into view. Even Bowie means little to me – it just depends where you were standing. But when Hepworth writes about them all I am moved to seek out their music and add a soundtrack to these intriguing narratives. Conveniently, each chapter closes with a playlist from the year in question.
But was it ever mostly about the music anyway? Or was it more about the moment, the look, the chaos just below the surface or just visible off-stage? Maybe you had to have been there.
Elsewhere on the Bookshelf
At the Crossroads… – Welcome (grandpops-bookshelf.co.uk) – A review of Mark Radcliffe’s selection of important moments in popular musical history.
Fabulous Creations – Vanishing Worlds – Welcome (grandpops-bookshelf.co.uk) – including a review of David Hepworth’s Fabulous Creations, his history of the LP.
When Words Fail: A Life with Music, War and Peace by Ed Vulliamy (2018 Granta Books) – with illustrations by his Mum, Shirley Hughes! It’s a moving and personal memoir.
The Music Instinct: how music works and why we can’t do without it by Philip Ball (2010, The Bodley Head)
David Hepworth has had a distinguished career. He presented The Old Grey Whistle Test and the Live Aid concert at Wembley Stadium in 1985. He edited many music magazines including Q, which I liked so much that I had it sent to me overseas. In ‘1971, Rock’s Golden Year’, he makes a fair case for this being the most significant year in rock music history, leavened with the sort of anecdotes that only rock stars seem to generate.
The recent documentary ‘Moonage Daydream’ is a good introduction to David Bowie. He talked some right twaddle in his twenties (didn’t we all), but he became such an interesting guy. On the Glass Spider tour in 1987 he played 86 gigs in six months to over three million people. Each gig had a half-hour interval, which Bowie used to spend watching a tape of Coronation Street. It’s hard to imagine Mick Jagger doing that.