It was a bad year to be a bright light in 2016. We lost David Bowie, Prince, Glenn Frey, Leonard Cohen, Merle Haggard, Sir George Martin, Terry Wogan, Muhammad Ali and many more. When we heard on Christmas Day about George Michael, it seemed like something more than chance was at work.
Many of us felt our remaining stars — Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Willie Nelson et al — should be taken into protective custody. “Until we know they are safe,” we said, “wrap them in cotton wool, check their vitals hourly.”
Not everyone was as worried. A man I knew well, who made his living at the more “controversial” end of the radio spectrum, saw only opportunity. “Tom,” he said, “we could do a daily radio slot: celebrity obits.” There was something in this. Those slots draw big audiences. Like a car crash they exert a morbid fascination: you want to look away, but you can’t. “And the Lord knows,” he added, “there are enough of them. They’re dropping like flies.”
He was right about the daily slot, as for every lost megastar there were many lesser but still quite blinding lights. People like Ian Bairnson, who died in April but not before contributing to four hit singles: Magic (Pilot), Wuthering Heights (Kate Bush), Mull of Kintyre (Wings) and Making Your Mind Up (Bucks Fizz). Chas Newby, who passed last week, was the original left-handed bassist with the Beatles. Yes, McCartney was their second left-handed bassist.
Sadly, we never got to explore my friend’s vast empathy for the departed as his radio antics caught up with him. He strolled into an on-air minefield and was never heard from again. Yet I thought of him when I heard of Tina Turner’s death last week. She was his favourite. “She had it all,” he said, “the talent, the voice, the attitude.” He wasn’t wrong.
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There was a certain air of familiarity to Turner’s backstory: a disrupted family life, poverty, picking cotton as a child, before grabbing the mic at a gig — by Ike Turner — to show people what she could do. As she said in the excellent 2021 documentary Tina: “Look what I have done in this life, with this body.”
Yet she wasn’t alone: that generation, born to parents who lived through the Second World War, was exceptional. From Dylan to the Beatles, via the Beach Boys, the Kinks, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young et al, they lit up the world. Their parents lived through humanity’s darkest hour: the death camps and worldwide conflagration. Was it a coincidence these children would offer the most dazzling burst of creativity the world has seen since the Renaissance?
This year is not quite at the 2016 level, but already we have lost Turner, Johnny Fean (Horslips), Tom Verlaine (Television), Burt Bacharach, Andy Rourke (the Smiths), David Crosby and many others. And May is not yet out.
In his Sunday Times interview last week, Paul Simon spoke of the passing of Gordon Lightfoot and Jeff Beck and said, prophetically: “My generation’s time is up.” It put a chill through me. Simon is 81; Dylan, 82; McCartney, 80; Young, 77; Mitchell, 79; Nelson, 90; Mick Jagger, 79. They all seem remarkable, superhuman, but Simon is on to something, isn’t he?
As my father-in-law once said, aged 75: “Statistically, Tom, I have to accept if I’m not in the departure lounge, I’m certainly on the concourse outside.”
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There is no avoiding it: some very bright lights will be leaving our skies in the years ahead. People whose songs about being young and alive in the 20th century will be heard for generations to come. As Dylan himself sang: “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.”
And I’m still not over Bowie.
