It was former national heart-throb, Duran Duran bassist John Taylor who first identified to me the crunch moment rock‘n’roll found its conscience and lost its edge, during an interview for a fashion magazine. Taylor was on fabulously freewheeling form that day while contemplating the state of pop. “After Live Aid,” he pointed out, “pop stars stopped being heroes and turned into role models.” The last two words were delivered with withering emphasis.
A full four decades since the charity leviathan rearranged pop’s moral centre, we may have witnessed this wonky experiment, twinning rock’n’roll with public virtue, hit peak awkwardness. Rock’s official good-guy-in-chief, Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl, this week issued a short statement about a child he’s fathered behind his wife’s back. In the canon of rock’n’roll bad behaviour, it’s hardly Mötley Crüe’s tour bus. But Grohl is a purposefully post-Live Aid entertainment figurehead, replete with all the smiley, kindly, huggy trappings that have smoothed out rock’s sullen spikes. Fans appeared genuinely distressed, personally let down by him, as if the once ironic title “rock god” should by now be a verifiable identity of substance, proof and penitence.
I think about John Taylor’s quote often. The last time it really clocked me round the head was watching Chris Martin on TV singing, quite unequivocally and without any hint of personal embarrassment, the words “I will try to fix you” to Michael J Fox. The Hollywood star, incapacitated with an incurable health condition, was wheeled centre stage as the emotionally climactic set-piece of Coldplay’s umpteenth Glastonbury headline slot. I wondered for a second whether Martin, a man of such deeply held Christian faith his current single is actually titled “Pray”, believed his messaging? I tried to wince away my cynicism. Perhaps you had to be there as the fields morphed into Lourdes. Critics loved it.
The oddly imbalanced weighing scales of rock star trappings with evangelical zeal finds its way into unusual corners. What was once the sole reserve of Cliff Richard is now the natural artistic terrain of Nick Cave, currently going through another of his periodic church phases on the album, Wild God. A hefty wave of religious awakenings is swamping out the old rock excesses.
A hefty wave of religious awakenings is swamping out the old rock excesses
With rock’n’roll edging around a sanctified safe space, the answer may be lodged in a more surprising field than one might reasonably expect: Finance. Currently airing in the US, the third season of the brilliantly compelling young banking drama, Industry is driven by pure, frenetic, life-and-death old rock’n’roll energy. A transatlantic uproar precedes its transfer to the BBC in the autumn, after the airing of terrestrial TV drama’s first fully displayed erection in episode one. It shouldn’t need pointing out to any adult viewer that this is a vital plot point. Probably the most shocking detail of all Industry’s creditable and sometimes chilling habit for surprise is that it treats its audience like grown-ups.
Set in the Square Mile, Industry is drawn from direct experience. Industry is the brainchild of two ex-City workers. It features as photogenic a cast as any top-tier rock band. Its central figures are riven by rock’s historic personal sense of venal ambition, greed and high-stakes living. Distant memories. You cannot help but become absorbed in their Faustian decline. When season three airs here, Industry will ascend from cult television status to Succession-style obsession. Like Skins and Euphoria before it, the show has turned into a bona fide star machine. Playing these feral, bed-hopping, backstabbing banking rats and their appalling bosses in their smooth wardrobes has filled a void in culture.
As it progresses with each crafty season, the drugs get harder, the sex wilder, the morally ambiguous nihilism of each monstrous, conflicted protagonist more questionable. At its core is a biblical story about the corruption of the human soul in the pursuit of personal glory, told with astonishing, deft modernity. Nobody goes to church in Industry. Nobody’s trying to fix anyone. They’re beyond redemption.
Before Industry, the workings of high finance and the City were a mystery to me. After it, I recognised shared qualities with most of the London offices I once tried my hand in as a young man, new to the city, wondering how success worked here. In my favourite television show of the past decade, I’ve been reminded of the virtue of looking directly in the eye at the worst human behaviour, even personally recognising a bit of it, absorbing it, learning from it. If role models must exist, let these be them.
