Hope I Get Old Before I Die by David Hepworth: Pop Music that rolls back the years …
Hope I get Old Before I Die by David Hepworth (Bantam £25, 432pp)
Hope I Get Old Before I Die is available now from the Mail Bookshop
Occasionally a book comes along that is so up your street it’s basically standing on your doorstep waiting for you to come home, and this is one of those for me.
David Hepworth is a rock journalist of terrifyingly long standing, having written for NME in the 1970s, presented The Old Grey Whistle Test and, in 1985, Live Aid, and having launched, edited and published some of the best popular culture magazines of their era, including Smash Hits, Q, Mojo and The Word, the last of which is one of my favourite magazines of all time.
Now aged 74, he has filled a busy retirement writing a series of quite brilliant books on the rock ’n’ roll years, about which he seems to know everything.
Uncommon People: The Rise And Fall Of The Rock Star was one of the best, and A Fabulous Creation: How The LP Saved Our Lives was pretty good too. All were written with great wit, love, kindness and a complete lack of the often brutal judgment that so blighted rock journalism in its heyday.
He loves music deeply, and he even has nice things to say about some of my own favourite albums, which is a rare and beautiful thing.
This new one is subtitled Why Rock Stars Never Retire and charts the sea change whereby rock, once a young man’s game, is now predominantly an old man’s game.
He notes that when Paul McCartney played Let It Be at Live Aid, ‘he was greeted in the manner of a venerable ancient briefly stepping down from rock’s notional Mount Rushmore in order to bestow his blessing on the kids who were gathered that day, largely for old times’ sake’.
Never too old for Glastonbury: Paul McCartney performs at Glastonbury aged 80
As it happens, he had recently celebrated his 43rd birthday. And, in 2022, when McCartney played Can’t Buy Me Love to an even larger crowd at the Glastonbury Festival, ‘he was seized on as one of the few things a 21st-century festival audience… could possibly be expected to agree upon’. He had recently turned 80. ‘This time there was no thought of apologising for the years. This time the years were the point.’
Hepworth asks how pop music, which was once supposed to be exclusively about the shock of the new, came to have such a comfortable relationship with its past, and this is what his book sets out to explore.
By coincidence, this is something I have been thinking about lately, as since my mother died last autumn, at the ridiculously young age of 92, I have been playing the music of my own far-distant youth on a loop.
I was in the pub a few weeks ago with a book, when Spotify started playing School by Supertramp, an old favourite of mine I had barely heard for more than 40 years.
And when its wonderful piano solo started up, I found I was weeping uncontrollably. Music has this effect, at least on me, right now.
Still in Vogue at 66: Madonna
And Hepworth’s book had a similar effect once or twice. Each chapter considers a different artist and their (often very unusual) life paths. One of the best is about Nick Lowe, the 1970s/1980s singer songwriter who reinvented himself as a world-weary troubadour writing country-soul inflected songs about middle-aged doubt, disaster and lovelessness.
Seasoned Lowe watchers liked to refer to these albums as his Brentford Trilogy in honour of the unglamorous London suburb where they were conceived.
Everything about them seemed like an exercise of self-deprecation in the English style… ‘Whether they were true to Nick Lowe’s real life we could not possibly know, nor would we have any right to know. What was most important was that they sounded true.’ Lowe’s trio of albums The Impossible Bird, Dig My Mood and The Convincer, are also the greatest mid-life crisis records in rock and roll.
‘What made them different from the middle-aged records that everybody else would go on to write was that they accepted the great learning of middle age, the learning which seems to evade so many of his contemporaries, and that is that by this point you really have nobody to blame but yourself.’ One of the best songs from this period is called Lately I Have Let Things Slide.
In truth, you could quote at length from nearly any of the chapters here. Each one takes a case history and investigates it, cogently and often very wittily.
There are chapters on the strength of the Pink Floyd brand (far more important than any of the individual participants). On Madonna’s tendency to make new hits from other acts’ old flops, on the 40-year soap opera that is Fleetwood Mac.
On the ‘not entirely lonesome’ death of Who bassist John Entwistle. On the remarkable last act of Wilko Johnson, on Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize for Literature, at least a couple on the Rolling Stones and a few on The Beatles, whom Hepworth believes were, and are, underrated.
Old Rockers: The Rolling Stones last year
Danny Baker has said, ‘David Hepworth’s books go against one of the core rules of rock ’n’ roll. You are supposed to get worse the more you release. He doesn’t seem to get that.’
This is spot on. Hope I Get Old Before I Die may be his best yet. It is certainly strongly recommended to anyone for whom pop music means anything at all or, like me, far, far too much.