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Spectator
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
My obsession with ageing rock stars
'The older male rock star isn't just my specialist subject, it's my obsession,' admits Kate Mossman in the opening pages of Men of a Certain Age. Over the 15 years she's spent interviewing ageing rockers such as Sting, Tom Jones, Ray Davies, Glen Campbell and Nick Cave for the Word and the New Statesman, she describes feeling 'something inside of me ignite… so excited, yet so at ease'. 'How is it,' she asks, 'that in the presence of a wrinkly rock star twice my age, I sometimes feel like I'm meeting… me?' Having encountered my share of these guys myself, I know precisely what she means. Rock journalism is a field in which all the writers are fans, but, as Mossman notes, 'part of the art is pretending not to be'. Consequently, she bookends each of the 19 insightful and often funny interviews republished here with personal memoirish introductions and afterwords, making the book as much about fandom as about rock stars. I relished her honest analysis of the yearning for connection that interviewers feel when they meet artists who've set their hearts ablaze by the music they made – and sometimes the poses they struck– in their youth. As professional journalists, we're sitting with their older, sometimes wiser, incarnations and asking them to explain themselves and make sense of their impact on us. It's often weird. My blushing 13-year- old self was somewhere in the mix while I was chatting with A-Ha's Morten Harket, utterly bewildered by the fact that the 45-year-old me was bonding with the 1980s pin-up over a shared love of houseplants.
New Statesman
07-05-2025
- Lifestyle
- New Statesman
I'm doing what I should have done all along: recuperating
Illustration by Charlotte Trounce I've been a bit cooped up at home this week with a bad back, and it's all my own fault. I'd recovered well from the slight injury I suffered just before our gigs at the start of April, and so over the Easter weekend I decided to have a spring-cleaning blitz on the upstairs landing. Yes, I know, I know – moving heavy furniture, and then hoovering in a ridiculous position, and arching my back to reach up into high corners – all extremely bad news for someone with a vulnerable back. And yet somehow in my enthusiasm I forgot. After a couple of days of this exertion Ben and I decided to go to the cinema, to see the new John and Yoko documentary One to One,co-directed by Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards. We paid extra for luxury seats at the Odeon, expecting, well, luxury. I can honestly say I have never sat in a more uncomfortable seat, both too squishy to offer any support, and too long for my feet to touch the ground. I spent two hours braced upright, with Ben's jacket wedged behind me to keep me from slumping. For the final ten minutes we stood at the back of the auditorium, and I realised I had probably made a terrible mistake. Anyway, now here I am, paying for it all and doing what I should have been doing all along: resting and recuperating. I have been Googling advice for my particular back issue, and it turns out that at least two of the stretches I thought were helpful are top of the forbidden list, so I have stopped doing them. Every website tells me to avoid too much sitting down and also too much standing up. I wonder whether I can learn to hover in mid-air. I decide to spend some time lying on my back with my knees bent on the yoga mat. That feels quite good, and reminds me of my old Alexander Technique lessons for improving posture. But it gets boring after a while, so I pick up my phone and hold it up above my face in order to scroll through Instagram as I lie there. Scrolling proves tricky though, and I drop the phone, which lands corner first, and hard, in my eye socket. Ben is out so I pick myself up off the mat, swearing enthusiastically, find an ice pack in the freezer and apply that to my new shiner. Once again I am struck by how ill-designed bodies seem to be. Miraculous in so many ways, but so beset with flaws, none of which improve as the basic machinery ages. During my online searches for help I learn that I am sitting on the wrong kind of sofa, so I move. I look at pages of special seat wedges. I read about lumbar-support cushions. Dear God, I start thinking about a Parker Knoll wing back chair, and then I close my laptop before I lose the will to live. Instead I pick up Kate Mossman's book, Men of a Certain Age, in which she writes about and interviews ageing male rockers. The book is at least partly about herself, and early on she writes about her solo trips across the US on Greyhound buses. 'I enjoyed the alienation. As a road-walker, or a bus-rider, you're immediately one of the castaways yourself, and I loved that feeling – loved the danger of some of the situations I put myself in.' From my safe armchair, I'm gripped, and I know I'm going to enjoy this book. Before that I'd been reading Ian Leslie's John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, about Lennon and McCartney. Music aside, what shone through the book for me was the sheer strangeness of both John and Paul as people. They really were singular. Not just because of their musical talents, but because of their complex personalities – each of them a mixture of concealed pain, surface humour, arrogance, intelligence, superhuman levels of drive, and obsessiveness. You can see what they saw in each other, and it's very compelling. As I finished the book, I realised I missed being in their dazzling company. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Still, I haven't forgiven John for making me sit in that cinema seat, and I blame him for my back pain. [See also: David Attenborough at 99: 'Life will almost certainly find a way'] Related
The Guardian
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Brian May nearly choked on his goats cheese: my adventures with the cosmic dads of rock'n'roll
Young musicians have so little to say. Give me a rocker in his later years any day. Ask him about his childhood, his relationship with his mum, his painful lifelong love affair with his lead guitarist. Many belong to a specific anthropological group: born after the war, they got their first guitars on hire purchase and went on to date the aristocracy. They became my specialist subject as a journalist: it was impossible to resist the combination of vulnerability, extreme oddness and sharp business nous I found in so many, while others were living in strangely compromised circumstances despite years of deathless hits. I was particularly drawn to those who had continued a career under the radar, or who had slipped under it but hadn't quite noticed. It was a strange subject to pursue, but always a labour of love – because on some level, I felt a strange identification with these 'cosmic dads' of rock'n'roll. The obsession has culminated in a book, Men of a Certain Age. Here are 10 things I learned in the course of writing it. According to guitarist Jeff Beck, the rock star's distinctive 'egg-timer' face (sunken cheeks, faintly simian) was the result of bad 1960s dentistry and a teenage lust for sweets. A man on a flying horse would be hard-pressed to pull Beck out of a lineup with Ronnie Wood, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. He was the inspiration for Nigel Tufnel from Spinal Tap and his stage gear was designed by Hilary Wili, who did the costumes for Downton Abbey. ('She still finds time to stitch me something.') With their little legs, narrow hips and mysterious 'proceeding' hairlines, rockers often look like pickled versions of the boys they were when they first picked up a guitar. Greg Lake, talking about Emerson, Lake & Palmer's biggest gigs, once told me: 'I've never seen so many people together in one place, apart from in a war.' Paul O'Neill, of the US prog outfit Trans-Siberian Orchestra, claimed to have walked in disguise among his audience before a show in Germany like Henry V before Agincourt. There he met two Sunni Muslims from Iraq and, 90ft away, two Shia Muslims from Iran: 'God forbid, two years from now, they end up in two different militias and recognise each other,' he told me. 'They would unchamber their weapons and say, 'Hey, weren't we at a TSO concert together?'' Many US rockers see themselves as quasi-political figures, ambassadors of western might. This is why Sting is beloved in America. He grew up in the shadow of a 10,000-tonne ship in the docks of Wallsend. One was built and launched every year, a constant cycle of constraint and departure. The Queen Mother attended one of the launches and waved at him from her car. He told himself: 'One day, I'll be on the inside of a car like that.' His father was a milkman, and Sting and his brother would be at the dairy at 4am. The class divide between him and his bandmate Stewart Copeland, son of a CIA diplomat, fuelled much press in the early days. 'I developed no accent,' he told me. 'Now I only speak Geordie when I'm angry – and I can speak it well.' Rock wives correct mistakes, monitor manners and oversee the business side of things. Gene Simmons claims to have slept with 4,600 women. By the time I met him in Moscow, he was married to Shannon Tweed, a former erotic-thriller actor known for her work in Meatballs III. She was there at the table, flicking through Time magazine. Gene talked about the postwar British diet, citing faggots (lowgrade meatballs) in gravy. Tweed read a definition of faggots from her phone in a slow, Beverly Hills voice: 'A bundle of pieces of iron or steel to be welded, rolled or hammered together at high temperature.' 'It's a question of semantics,' said Gene. 'Though I'm not anti-semantic.' She told him to finish his porridge. 'You're burping while talking,' she added. 'I was?' he said. 'At least I didn't fart.' 'You find the truth by ridiculing yourself,' Johnny Rotten told me. Punk is the most exhausted story in pop music but Rotten speaks in strange, fresh phrases, as though he's found a way to keep himself interested. 'Vivienne's clothes were always awful,' he volunteered of Westwood. 'All those zips – she had no concept of men's dangly bits.' Shaun Ryder was similar, spectacularly engaged for someone so blasted by drugs, and strangely amused by the interview and portrait process. His hair had recently fallen out after testosterone injections for an underactive thyroid – head, eyebrows, chest and nethers. He could have been self-conscious, but he made it part of the act as he peered at the photographs and said: 'I look like Uncle Fester.' Rock stars are from another age, when journalists and musicians hooked up on sheepskin rugs and wrote features together in blissful, claret-fuelled symbiosis. After four days with the Soft Machine exile Kevin Ayers in Carcassonne, he made a little bed up for me in his large, empty house. Later, as his manager explained that no romance was to take place, I heard a brief crashing of pots and pans. It's a shame this all sounds a bit #MeToo in hindsight. It really wasn't. Sign up to Sleeve Notes Get music news, bold reviews and unexpected extras. Every genre, every era, every week after newsletter promotion Rock journalism is the only place where writers are obsessive fans – though usually pretending not to be. From the late 1960s on, it was a male domain, and male journalists were often at pains to compete with them and disguise their admiration, making statements such as: 'Let me tell you why your second album tanked.' Time and again, I have seen relief on the face of a rocker as I enter the room, a loosening of the shoulders. He would then tell me things he wouldn't tell a man, probably thinking: 'Ah, it's just a girl!' Bruce Hornsby had a big hit in 1986, The Way It Is, and found a way to live well off it by allowing lucrative cover versions by various rappers, most notably Tupac Shakur. These helped finance his life of bluegrass, jazz and atonal pointillism in the concert halls of middle America. 'Look, if you really hate it, don't come back,' he said of this new material. 'You should not come back, because I am not going to be a vehicle for your stroll down memory lane.' I love these figures who found a way to play only the music they wanted. Jeff Beck was asked to join the Stones once, but told me: 'I wouldn't have been my own master – and that would be my whole being truncated.' The artist formerly known as Terence Trent D'Arby, now Sananda Maitreya, made plenty of records but struggled to listen to them. His exit from the industry, after his second album flopped, was too painful to recall. Yet like all the best rock stars, he knew the value of his story and exaggerated his musical rivalries. Claiming that Lenny Kravitz was a 'cheaper model' of himself, he announced: 'Record companies say, 'Hey, if you like this asshole, you're going to like this asshole, plus we're making a higher margin on this asshole!'' I even found a poem on his website to his old nemesis. It was called Lenny K and read: 'Fear not / Your girls are safe! / I've got an Italian girlfriend now / And my leash is pretty short.' Queen were always suspicious of journalists, ever since the NME ran a piece about Freddie Mercury with the headline: 'Is this man a prat?' I chose a clumsy moment to ask Brian May why the press hated Queen: he was trying to swallow a piece of goat's cheese. 'I don't know,' he winced. 'Why don't you ask them what their problem was?' Sitting in his dressing room, Paul Stanley of Kiss put it like this: 'The press's dislike of Kiss was so out of whack, so out of proportion, you almost have to look at someone and go, 'Who beat you as a child?'' Kate Mossman is senior writer for the New Statesman. Men of a Certain Age: My Encounters With Rock Royalty is published by Bonnier (£22). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Men of a Certain Age by Kate Mossman review – close encounters with charismatic male rockers
When the journalist Kate Mossman was a child, she developed an obsession with the rock band Queen. Mossman came of age in the 1990s, but the irony and snark of that decade left her cold. Instead, she lived for the 'middle-aged musicians from the 80s in jacket and jeans, and for the open-hearted, non-cynical pop times that had come before'. Watching Queen's posthumous single These Are the Days of Our Lives on Top of the Pops in 1991, she 'felt something within myself ignite'. Though she was captivated by the strange longing of a monochrome Freddie Mercury, who had died weeks earlier, it was drummer Roger Taylor who became the focus of her obsession. On the mantelpiece of her childhood home sat a holy relic: a beer glass he had drunk from during a solo gig. Twenty years later, while on her way to interview Taylor and Queen guitarist Brian May for a magazine profile, Mossman confesses: 'I think I'm going to black out.' Her sharp yet heartfelt interviews with Taylor and May – which took place separately – appear in Men of a Certain Age, a compendium of Mossman's work previously published in the Word, the now defunct music magazine, and in political weekly the New Statesman. The book features 19 encounters with ageing male musicians including Shaun Ryder, Bruce Hornsby, Jeff Beck, Ray Davies, Sting, Dave Gahan, Jon Bon Jovi, Nick Cave and Terence Trent D'Arby. Mossman tops and tails the articles with present-day thoughts, reflecting on her expectations, the preparation, the long journeys to far-flung homes, and the peculiar and sometimes fraught dynamic between interviewer and interviewee. When Mossman was starting out, music journalism was still dominated by male writers and older musicians were accustomed to being interviewed by men their own age. The presence of Mossman, a young woman who wears her musical passions on her sleeve, is distracting for some but for others it is an invitation to unburden themselves. 'The older man often ends up being vulnerable because he feels he is safe: it's just a pretty lady!' Few of her interviewees could be classed as hip. Yet their respective career arcs mean they've experienced it all: fame, wealth, adoration, loss, disdain and, in some cases, addiction. In Mossman's bleak yet fascinating interview with the Soft Machine co-founder at his home in France, Kevin Ayers drinks two bottles of wine, plays some songs in the street outside his house and then, shockingly, tries to sleep with her. This prompts an altercation between Ayers and his manager, with the latter shouting: 'It's not 1967, Kevin!' Paul O'Neill, the man behind the madly successful prog rock act Trans-Siberian Orchestra, takes Mossman's hand, puts it inside his leather jacket and 'press[es] my fingers around the thick, bobbly grip of a Glock semi-automatic pistol'. In Moscow, Kiss's Paul Stanley throws plectrums at her face. Mossman's writing is terrific: curious, bracingly honest and brimming with smart turns of phrase. Books by music journalists documenting their rock'n'roll adventures tend to be gonzo in spirit, full of bad behaviour and knowing irreverence. This isn't one of those. Men of a Certain Age instead captures the strange, often solitary and frequently mortifying life of an interviewer whose aim is to make a connection with a stranger, to get to the human being behind the entertainer; success is by no means guaranteed. Nowadays, Mossman's writing assignments go beyond rock's elders: she profiles politicians, scientists and philosophers, too. It's with characteristic candour that she reveals how, when considering the life of an interviewee in the days before an interview, she feels, 'like I'm standing at the foot of a mountain, and I get miserable with the expectation. But I still get that strange vibration, every so often, that we are going to get on.' Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion Men of a Certain Age: My Encounters With Rock Royalty by Kate Mossman is published by Bonnier (£22). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
