The ragtime pianist Eubie Blake was born in 1887 and died 96 years later. On his 92nd birthday, in 1979, as he cut himself a slice of well-deserved cake, he is reported to have said, “If I’d known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.” So much for music being a rocky career path. Considering the number of world tours this year and next by stars in their 70s and 80s, it isn’t surprising to discover that what was once viewed as an unreliable profession has, for some, turned into the polar opposite.
“They all grew up in a world where their parents wanted them to go and work for a bank or something like that, get a job with a future and a pension,” says David Hepworth. The UK music writer’s new book, Hope I Get Old Before I Die: Why Rock Stars Never Retire, documents with typical erudition why musicians who first achieved fame in the 1960s and 1970s aren’t giving up anytime soon.
Hepworth, who is now in his mid-70s, has skin in the game: as well as having been instrumental in British pop-culture magazines such as Smash Hits, Q, Mojo and The Word, he was one of the presenters of the BBC’s coverage of Live Aid, the concerts that Bob Geldof and Midge Ure spearheaded in 1985, at Wembley Stadium in London and John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia.
The event “was an unpaid advertisement for an entirely new beginning for rock’n’roll ... Though no one knew it at the time, Live Aid announced the dawning of the Age of Spectacle.” What happened on the day, he writes, was that casual music fans – the “floating voters” who neither knew nor cared about who played keyboards for The Boomtown Rats or drums for The Pretenders – were entranced by “the picturesque combination of big-name bands playing their big-name hits under cloudless skies”.
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It formed images of irreplaceable stars, be it Freddie Mercury’s leading of Wembley through synchronised handclaps, Bono’s emotional reach-outs or Paul McCartney’s emergence as the genial Mr Thumbs-Up. Their uniqueness makes such musicians – you can also include the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Elton John and Bob Dylan – more fascinating, and therefore more appealing, as they get older. “If you’re a successful, recognisable rock or pop singer, there’s nobody else like you. I mean, there isn’t anybody like the Rolling Stones, is there? There’s just the Rolling Stones.”
Even Noel and Liam Gallagher, who are relatively young bucks in their 50s, now have this type of magnetism. “The universe of people in their 40s and 50s who want to go and see Oasis is greater than the universe of people who went to see them in the mid-1990s,” Hepworth says.
It’s worth keeping in mind that many of those fans work in a world where permanent jobs with generous pension schemes are no longer the norm. “I spoke about this years ago to the Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood, and he told me that all the guys in his class in the 1960s who’d left school, who had done their A-levels and went to work for a bank or the government, were all made redundant in their 50s.
“Ronnie, of course, continued to live off his name, which is effectively what rock stars do. Of course, none of us realised that their names would live for so long ... If musicians can do what they did when they were 25, and if they can still do it profitably, why wouldn’t they?
“The money thing is interesting in the sense that, while many people might say they don’t need the money, the truth is that everybody, in every walk of life, always wants the money. If you’re in your 60s, 70s and 80s, and somebody comes along and offers you big bucks, more often than not you’re going to take it.
“Also, musicians may have made a lot of money over the years, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve hung on to it. It’s a very odd job, or career, in the sense that it isn’t a salaried position. Musicians might go five years without earning anything, and then they go through a year where they earn a fortune.”
It’s also about having a purpose in life. Rock stars, Hepworth says, have ended up doing something that many people would love to do, which is to keep being useful. Adulation and money are in the mix, of course, but knowing what they’ll be doing in the months, if not years, to come is crucial.
“It doesn’t matter who they are, and it doesn’t matter how much or how little money they’ve got. Musicians live for the next gig – and having a date in the diary, whether it’s next year or beyond, is pivotal. That’s their focus.
“The dream of their parents used to be that it would be really good to be done with working nine to five for five days a week, and then to be able to walk on to a golf course any day they want, but for many people that dream isn’t there any more. If people are desperate to retire and go on golf courses, it usually means they’ve hated the job they’ve been doing for 40 years ...
“I think it was Bob Dylan who said if you get up in the morning and do what you want to do, then you’re a success. I think that’s true, and it applies to everybody.”
Hope I Get Old Before I Die: Why Rock Stars Never Retire, by David Hepworth, is published by Bantam
