‘The older male rock star isn’t just my specialist subject, it’s my obsession,’ admits Kate Mossman in the opening pages of Men of a Certain Age. Over the 15 years she’s spent interviewing ageing rockers such as Sting, Tom Jones, Ray Davies, Glen Campbell and Nick Cave for the Word and the New Statesman, she describes feeling ‘something inside of me ignite… so excited, yet so at ease’. ‘How is it,’ she asks, ‘that in the presence of a wrinkly rock star twice my age, I sometimes feel like I’m meeting… me?’
Having encountered my share of these guys myself, I know precisely what she means. Rock journalism is a field in which all the writers are fans, but, as Mossman notes, ‘part of the art is pretending not to be’. Consequently, she bookends each of the 19 insightful and often funny interviews republished here with personal memoirish introductions and afterwords, making the book as much about fandom as about rock stars. I relished her honest analysis of the yearning for connection that interviewers feel when they meet artists who’ve set their hearts ablaze by the music they made – and sometimes the poses they struck– in their youth. As professional journalists, we’re sitting with their older, sometimes wiser, incarnations and asking them to explain themselves and make sense of their impact on us.
It’s often weird. My blushing 13-year- old self was somewhere in the mix while I was chatting with A-Ha’s Morten Harket, utterly bewildered by the fact that the 45-year-old me was bonding with the 1980s pin-up over a shared love of houseplants. The electric exhilaration I felt at 15, walking home from school with Pink Floyd’s ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ exploding through my spongey headphones, was both soothed and confounded as I stood in Dave Gilmour’s kitchen watching the hands which played that spine-tingling riff wash up the mug I’d just been drinking from.
But I’ve never been so overwhelmed by the prospect of an interview that I feared I might black out, as Mossman did on her way to meet Brian May at an Italian restaurant in Holland Park in 2011. She’d grown up as a devotee of Queen – ‘nutcase/ stalker’, she says – at a time when the band’s fist-pumping, stadium-chanting, gee-tar noodling pomp was deeply uncool.
Born in 1980 – a member of the generation, she says, that ‘slipped down the crack between the spotty cheek of Gen X and the well-moisturised buttock of the millennials’ – and raised in rural Norfolk, Mossman loathed the irony that suffused the 1990s culture in which she came of age. ‘Perhaps it was fin-de-siècle ennui,’ she writes, and the acute awareness that the rock’n’roll of our parents’ generation was all coming to us ‘second hand’, but Jarvis Cocker and Damon Albarn upset her by being ‘so arch, so sneering, so over it’. By contrast, Queen’s shameless performative passion dialled right into the heart of a shy, academic girl who didn’t trust her own feelings to fully unfold. She hid her obsession from friends – ‘this secrecy produced a kind of intensity that makes me rather uncomfortable now’ – and was so embarrassed by the more sexual lyrics rattling from the car speakers on trips with her dad that she pretended to be asleep.
In the event, Mossman’s lunch with the ‘religiously kind’ May is a benign affair which leaves her feeling ‘like a child again’. But in retrospect she’s aware of the ‘barely disguised eroticism’ in her write-up of her interview with the Queen drummer Roger Taylor. She locates it in her description of his wet hair and her unfounded assumption that he’d just rolled out of bed. She also confesses that meeting the object of her teenage affections caused an ‘easing up in my heart, in my body… I could hold my head up higher and look to the sky a little more’.
Mossman is a tender chronicler of the sex symbol on the slide. She gets the artist formerly known as Terence Trent D’Arby to joke: ‘The only thing I could think to do with a cock ring now is keep my house keys on it.’ Elsewhere she cracked me up by reminding readers that the young Shaggy – Jamaica’s ‘Mr Lovah, Lovah’ – has ‘an aptitude for pastels’.
Not every interviewee is willing to accept their transformation from sex symbol to dadlike bloke. Maybe that’s understandable after a pretty young woman like Mossman has spent hours asking them rapt, interesting questions about what makes them so fascinating. When she met Soft Machine’s Kevin Ayers in Carcassonne in 2008 she says he assumed ‘I would be coming back to his and sleeping with him’. Ayers’s manager stepped in while Mossman waited outside Ayers’s house. ‘After a brief silence,’ she writes, ‘I heard the crash of a few pots and pans in the kitchen and the manager shouting “It’s not 1967, Kevin!”’ Ayers, she notes without judgment, ‘was from a better age, when rock stars and journalists hooked up on sheepskin rugs and wrote features together in blissful, claret-fuelled symbiosis’.
Now when we’re all reassessing the ways in which old male rockers treated women, Mossman is refreshingly kind and capable of putting these men in the cultural context. She’s no apologist for abuse, but her book features mostly decent guys who’ve muddled their way through chaotic lives of unimaginable fame and money. They are compellingly odd as a result, and Mossman makes allowances without ever flinching from their peculiarities. Above all, her interviews illuminate the music she loves. Her failure to forge a desperately sought connection with Sting leaves him thrillingly remote in his falsetto yelps. Her warm friendship with the virtuosic Bruce Hornsby brings his more abstract keyboard experiments gently into the reader’s emotional range. All the minor chords, swollen egos and backstage bust-ups find safe harbour in this book. It’s a rocking good read. Encore!
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