Hope I Get Old Before I Die
From the bestselling author of Abbey Road comes the story of how enduring rock icons like Pink Floyd, Bruce Springsteen and many more have remained in the ever-changing music game.
‘May be his best yet…recommended to anyone for whom pop music means anything at all’ Daily Mail
‘Hepworth is a genuinely great writer, with a winning turn of phrase’ Guardian
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When Paul McCartney closed Live Aid in July 1985, we thought he was rock's Grand Old Man. He was forty-three years old.
As the forty years since have shown he - and many others of his generation - were just getting started.
This was the time when live performance took over from records. The big names of the 60s and 70s exploited the age of spectacle that Live Aid had ushered in to enjoy the longest lap of honour in the history of humanity, continuing to go strong long after everyone else had retired.
This is a story without precedent, a story in which Elton John plays a royal funeral, Mick Jagger gets a knighthood, Bob Dylan picks up the Nobel Prize, the Beatles become, if anything, bigger than the Beatles, and it's beginning to look as though all of the above will, thanks to the march of technology, be playing Las Vegas for ever.
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'Offers solid insights into the compulsions and drives that keep bands reforming' Sunday Times
'The book is destined to become the go-to text on a subject we never thought we'd have to survey' Literary Review
Reads like a series of rich, fast-paced and immensely funny short stories' The Oldie
Praise for David Hepworth
'Such a clever writer' Spectator
'Hepworth's writing is sublime' Daily Mail
'A refreshingly independent thinker' Daily Telegraph
'Hepworth's knowledge and understanding of rock history is prodigious' Sunday Times
David Hepworth has been writing, broadcasting and speaking about music and media since the seventies. He was involved in the launch and editing of magazines such as Smash Hits, Q, Mojo and The Word, among many others.
He was one of the presenters of the BBC rock music programme The Old Grey Whistle Test and one of the anchors of the corporation's coverage of Live Aid in 1985. He has won the Editor of the Year and Writer of the Year awards from the Professional Publishers Association and the Mark Boxer award from the British Society of Magazine Editors.
He lives in London, dividing his time between writing for a variety of newspaper and magazines, speaking at events, broadcasting work, podcasting at www.wordpodcast.co.uk and blogging at www.whatsheonaboutnow.blogspot.co.uk.
He says Chuck Berry's 'You Never Can Tell' is the best record ever made. 'This is not an opinion,' he says. 'It's a matter of fact.'