Old and in the way?

Nigel Williamson celebrates the musicians still trying to rock into their eighties and mourns those who have recently and heroically passed away.

- Nigel Williamson

These are busy but sad times for someone like me who makes his living writing obituaries of popular musicians for The Times.

The paper’s editor once suggested that obituaries of rock stars are our generation’s equivalent of a previous era’s tributes to war heroes. That is not to denigrate the sacrifice of those who served their country. But for those of us who’ve had the luxury of growing up in peacetime (aside from a few controversial interventions in the Falklands, Iraq and Afghanistan), rock stars serve as our military heroes with their own campaign medals, battle scars and victories and defeats along with it. For Douglas Bader, we had David Bowie. For Winston Churchill, we had John Winston Lennon.