It’s generally not hard to find a thoroughly depressing, joyless, plaintive, whiny, doom-laden, monotoned, earnest, life-sucking, soul-less, uninspiring, hapless and gloom-inducing article in the leftier British press. In fact, I sometimes wonder if the editors have sacked all their journalists, installed ChatGPT, and simply sit there, sipping Waitrose crémant, as they punch in evermore negative and melancholy prompts like ‘write an article about why something (gardening, cake, quantum engineering) is racist’ or ‘do a travel piece on the joys of zero emission yurting in Macclesfield’.
Nonetheless, the other day, an article caught my eye which elicited more than the usual sense of enervating ennui, and endtimes pessimism. It was titled ‘It’s just not worth it: Is this the end of sex, drugs and rock and roll?’.
Here’s my message to young people: you can have fun and still have a rich and full life
It recorded, with a faint puritanical glee, the termination of that long, storied and glorious tradition: the outrageous rock tour, complete with its cocaine, groupies, heroin, pretty girls, prettier boys, overdoses, Ecstasy, drunken roadies, hurled TVs, trashed hotels, early deaths, Satanism, orgies in Cincinnati, and, on one occasion at least, a drowned Rolls-Royce.
To get a sense of the sad, fun-free, anti-sex-league anhedonia of this Guardian piece, let me guide you to the final paragraph:
Cosentino [a touring musician] says that “a lot of people’s idea of what it means to party has changed as well,” and that she knows many members of Gen Z who don’t drink at all and never have. Touring with Green Day at 25, when Billy Joe Armstrong had just embraced sobriety, also made her realise that “maybe when you get older, you settle down and you actually take your health seriously”. Now, she says, “I go to a friend’s dinner party, have a glass of wine, then go home and go to sleep. That’s my idea of partying.
This will support repetition. This musician saw the light, and pretty much gave up alcohol, parties and fun, at the age of 25, after seeing the outrageous debauches of, yes, Green Day¸ a band so badly behaved one of them decided to cut back on the booze for a bit.
God knows how she might have reacted if she’d toured with the real heroes of gourd-whacking rock-tour excess, like Ozzy Osborne, who once snorted a line of ants, or Eddie Van Halen, who drove a tank across Beverley Hills to get a guitar back from Limp Bizkit. Or Billy Idol, who once did a three week long coke-n-hookers bender in the Mandarin Oriental, Bangkok, a party time which got so out of hand Idol eventually had to be shot by the Thai military with a tranquilliser. Perhaps, if she had toured with the genuine Viking Gods of Rockstar Devilment, Cosentino would now be going to bed at 7 p.m. after a thimble-full of organic, carbon-neutral, alcohol-free cider, and that would be her ‘idea of partying’.
Now, before I am accused of promoting cliched and dangerous excess (God forbid) let me admit that, on occasion, rock stars did get a tad out of hand, or indeed cross a line into dire and desperate exploitation (Google, if you dare, the words ‘Led Zeppelin’ and ‘mudshark’). It is also not great that so many rock stars, in the golden age of pop music (1955-2005) died before they made their late 30s. This included John Bonham of the same Led Zep, who expired after drinking 40 vodkas in one session at Jimmy Page’s house, a death which was linked, by fans, to Page’s accursed interest in black magic and Aleister Crowley.
And yet, even as I type those lines ‘a death which was linked, by fans, to Page’s accursed interest in black magic and Aleister Crowley’, I can’t help my feelings of urgent nostalgia, along with a sense of ‘ou sont les neiges d’Antan?’
Where, for instance, is Ed Sheeran’s barely-disguised obsession with the Goat of Mendes and on-stage animal sacrifice? Is Adele secretly a devotee of the demonic Mexican death cult Santa Muerte, even as she belts out her Las Vegas ballads? My guess is no. She is not. Those wonderful days are finished.
Does this matter? I think it does. I fear we have – in the urge to rein it in – driven the Bentley and the baby into the Bel Air swimming pool. We have lost something magical, and, what’s worse: gained nothing. All the data shows that young people, in their apparently admirable quest for a longer healthier eco-sensitive life, are drinking less, drugging less, kissing less, partying less, and actually having less sex. This, in turn, explains why birth rates are plunging, which means humanity is basically gonna die out. In the pursuit of more life, we make less life.
So here’s my message to young people. You can have fun and still have a long-ish life, certainly a rich and full life.
Take my dad. He died recently and ‘tragically’ from lung cancer – thanks to all his smoking. That sounds bad, right? Well yes – except he was 88, and he died next to his fourth wife (several decades younger), after a life of such drinking, womanising and sexual obsession it inspired Private Eye to entitle a review of his autobiography ‘Thomas the Wank Engine’.
Or, in truth, take me. I’ve reached an age which is so old I can’t bear to type it out, and yet, en route, I consumed a fair few substances – from ayahuasca to Tippex (for younger readers, a ‘typewriter correction fluid’) to achieve altered states. Nonetheless here I am, writing absurd articles for The Spectator. And, what’s more, the journey here was an absolute blast, to the extent I can’t tell you about my other misdeeds, or I’d get emphatically cancelled (if you’re interested, you’ll have to wait for the memoir).
So I say: bring back sex and drugs and all the rest. It might even improve the music.
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