The boy with the thorn in his side

David Cassidy was arguably the biggest solo star of the immediate post-Beatles era, yet his fame as well as his boyish good looks and extracurricular excessesovershadow the excellence of his breathily intimate, musically accomplished records. Simon Goddard, RC contributor and author of an acclaimed series of books on David Bowie, hails the work of the tortured pop idol

- David Cassidy

Her name was Bernadette Whelan, and we ought never forget it. A 14-year-old South London schoolgirl who went to a pop concert at White City Stadium on 26 May 1974 and never came home. Asphyxiated in one of the worst instances of crowd lack-of-control to make front-page news, Bernadette spent four days brain dead on an artificial respirator before her life support was switched off.

In a blameless age devoid of health and safety guidelines, nobody involved in the catastrophic mismanagement of an event claiming 750 casualties and tabloid infamy as “the suicide gig” was ever held responsible for so needless a teenage death. But there was a chill of inevitability that it should happen not to a besotted apostle of Marc Bolan, nor David Bowie, nor even Donny Osmond. Because the preordained tragedy of the most beautiful and damned had already been written.

If it was going to happen to any early 70s pop star, it was going to be David Cassidy.

In a perfectly cruel circle of fate, the career that as-good-as-ended that hideous night in White City started in the same postcode not three years earlier. Yards from the very stadium, next door at BBC Television Centre, where on 17 September 1971 Cassidy’s destiny was sealed in the 24 minutes separating Ask Aspel from The Magic Roundabout. Before that satchel-dumping Friday teatime, Cassidy was no more than a B-list pin-up in the pages of Radio Luxembourg’s