Julie Burchill

Rock’n’romance is dead

Great love affairs between bandmates are the product of a different time

  • From Spectator Life
Fleetwood Mac (from left, Stevie Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham, Christine McVie, John McVie and Mick Fleetwood) in September 1977 [Getty Images]

The alchemy wrought by a young man’s ability to gyrate and croon at the same time is notorious, turning shy mama’s boys from Presley to Rotten into love/hate machines. Something magical happens when someone – however unsightly – sings a song well, allowing him access to a quantity and quality of women undreamt of when he was just walking and talking like a normie. Two words: ‘Mick’ and ‘Hucknall’.

The romantic image of the modern musician as tasty but troubled troubadour roving from town to town on his lonesome (except for his bandmates, backing singers, roadies, drug dealer and manager, of course) and taking sensual solace where he may is a powerful one, long propagated by he-sluts who would be intimate with a jack-in-the-box if it looked at them the right way. But there is another sexual cliche which musicians go in for when the ceaseless sexual smorgasbord causes a bilious attack and they think that they might want to set up something a little more a la carte. And then – just as men traditionally had it off with their secretaries rather than roam too far from home – they may turn to a bandmate. You might call them ‘randmates’.

In his 1995 autobiography Take It Like a Man, Boy George wrote of his relationship with drummer Jon Moss as being ‘built on power-tripping and masochism’ adding that ‘our love, however diseased, was the creative force behind Culture Club’. Recently Moss was awarded a reported £1.75 million to be paid by his erstwhile bandmates for ‘lost earnings’ after being told to stand down from the band’s 2018 European tour when the aftermath of the ‘great unresolved romance of the century’ (as Moss once called it) proved too tense.

Just as men traditionally had it off with their secretaries rather than roam too far from home, roving musicians turned to a bandmate.

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