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.
