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.
