Date: 24 January 2016 Page: 19 Circulation: 92643 Readership: 386000 Size (Cm2): 1291 AVE: 12109.58 Display Rate: (£/cm2): 9.38

KNOCKIN’ ON HEAVEN’S DOOR

A spate of early rock-star deaths created the legend of the 27 Club. But the recent loss of a clutch of elderly musicians has made ‘69ish’ the fatal age, write Matt Rudd and Nicholas Hellen

David Bowie, Glenn Frey, far left, and Lemmy, bottom, failed to make it past 70, while Amy Winehouse, right, and, above her, Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin, died at 27

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his has been a tragic month for senior celebrities. First, Lemmy from Motörhead pegged out four days after achieving his three score and

achieving his three score and 10. Next, it was David Bowie and Alan Rickman, both 69. Then, last Monday, Glenn Frey, a founding member of the Eagles, succumbed in New York at the tender age of 67. Tradition has always dictated that 27 is the most life-

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threatening age to be a rock star. Members of the so-called 27 Club of rock’n’roll bucketkickers includes Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse. Yet new research for The

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Sunday Times suggests that those who survive their twenties are by no means out of the woods. Beware the 69ish Club. In an analysis of 1,042 deceased musicians, 83% died before reaching the biblical age of 70, compared with just 20% in the UK male population. While rock stars in the 25 to 29 age bracket are 25.5 times more likely to die than the national average, the prospects for 55 to 69-year-olds are far from rosy. As the excesses of youth catch up with them, midlife rockers are still twice as likely as the general population to take the stairway to heaven. Rock-stardeathspeakinthe 55 to 69 age group, a whole two decades earlier than the general UK male population. Les Mayhew, professor of statistics at City University London’s Cass Business School and adviser to the Office for National Statistics, undertook the research. “The ones dying at this [later] age might have overcome [wilder rock-star vices] but if they’ve remained smokers for the rest of their lives, they lose the standard 10 years,” he said. It is hard to be more precise about the likely years lost to other harmful addictions such as cocaine or heroin. “The ones who have survived are either lucky or they’ve managed to abstain at a much earlier age,” Mayhew added. In the 1970s, Bowie lived to full rock’n’roll excess. The record producer Tony Visconti claimed the singer took enough cocaine to kill a horse and Bowie’s former lover Romy Haag said he wasn’t doing lines of the drug but “bowls of it”. Bowie himself described his intake as “phenomenal”. “I really did think that my thoughts about not making 30 would come true,” he said in an i i i 2013 “D h d

interview in 2013. “Drugs had taken my life away from me. I felt as though I would probably die.” The Thin White Duke kicked his addiction after relocating from America to Berlin in 1976, but it wasn’t until 2004 — six months before he survived a

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near-fatal heart attack — that he managed to give up his 50-a-day smoking habit. Studies show that those who quit smoking at 25 to 34, 35 to 44, or 45 to 54 years of age live for approximately 10, nine and six years longer respectively than those who continued to smoke. Bowie was 57 when he gave up.

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f anything, Lemmy made Bowie’s lifestyle look tame. Besides a prodigious intake of amphetamines, the Motörhead frontman consumed a bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey a day from the age of 30. In 2013 he switched to vodka and orange “for health reasons” but by then it was too late. His autopsy attributed his death to prostate cancer, cardiacarrhythmiaandcongestive heart failure. Frey of the Eagles had a long history of intestinal problems thatheblamedonhisearlieruse

of drugs and alcohol. Cancer, drug overdoses and alcohol poisoning are among the main causes of death for rock stars, but there are other hazards to think about for anyone considering a career on stage. The first rule is to avoid twin-engine aeroplanes. Buddy Holly, Otis Redding and John Denver are among 18 musicians in our 1,042 sample to have died in plane crashes. A further 45 died in car crashes, well above the national average. There are other, stranger risks. Les Harvey, guitarist of Scottish band Stone the Crows, l d hil i

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was electrocuted while tuning up for a gig in Swansea. Keith Relf of the Yardbirds went the same way: death by electric guitar in his home studio. Terry Kath, lead guitarist of Chicago, shot himself with a 9mmpistolthathepresumed— wrongly — was unloaded, while Michael Edwards, the Electric Light Orchestra’s cellist, wins the award for the least rock’n’roll demise: he was crushed by a hay bale on the A381 to Teignmouth, in Devon. Yet there are, of course, rockers who defy the odds. Keith “I don’t have a drug problem, I have a police problem” Richards has defied medical science to reach his eighth decade, along with fellow Rolling Stones Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts. Fifty per cent of the Beatles are still with us. And both Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend, founding members of the Who, perhaps the wildest of the original rock bands, will continue their Hits 50! tour next month. Their frontman, Daltrey, is one of the few rock stars who chose to steer clear of hard drugs. “They didn’t work for me,” he said. “They gave me a dry throat and I couldn’t sing. It was a straightforward decision. I was either going to be a good singer, and care about what we’re doing on a stage, or I could chuck it in right there. “There were some great bands out there, fantastic bands, and they never made it. I didn’t want to be part of one of those bands. So I left the other three to it.”

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s something of an outlier, Daltrey can offer a unique perspective on life inside the rock world. “I’ve watched so many friends turn into absolute a******** on drugs,” he said. “When you’re in their comi ff d ’ ll

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pany, it starts off and you’re all mates and then someone disappears to the toilet and they

“So many times in my life I’ve had to be tough and the ones I was tough with are still here,” said Daltrey. “The ones where I wasn’t tough enough didn’t make it. And that’s something I think about often. It’s something I think about when we perform today. The two of us that are left.” Daltrey himself has survived plenty of rock’n’roll skirmishes, from car crashes to a fractured eye socket, courtesy of a microphone stand swung by Gary Glitter. He was forced to postpone the second leg of his band’s latest world tour last September after contracting viral meningitis. He will return to the stage next month just shy of his 72nd birthday. For any prospective rock stars, the statistics might be bleak but the advice is clear. Don’t smoke. Don’t do drugs. Consume no more than 14 units of alcohol per week and eat your five a day. It doesn’t sound very rock’n’roll, does it?

Musician deaths

150 The age at which musicians

number of rock deaths

come back and then someone else disappears, and before you know it, you’re not sitting with your friends any more. It’s like you’re at a different party.” Daltrey has lost two of his bandmates over the years. Drummer Keith Moon died in 1978, at the age of 32, overdosing on prescription drugs after years of alcohol and drug abuse. In 2002 the bassist John Entwistle died of a heart attack aged57aftertakingcocaineina Las Vegas hotel.

And they say rock ’n‘ roll will never die...

die, based on 1,042 deaths

100 50 0

20

-2 4

30

-3

40 4

-4

50 4

*Source: Human Mortality Database

60 70 -4 -6 4 4 4 Age at death

-5

h e r a w o e i h d y s . s y 0 n d I y

HARD DRUGS DIDN’T WORK FOR ME. THEY GAVE ME A DRY THROAT . . . SO I LEFT THE OTHERS TO IT, SAID ROGER DALTREY OF THE WHO

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Expected age of death for UK males alive in 2011*

80

-8

90 4

-9

4

10 0+

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Tombstone blues: the 27 Club’s first member He died years before anyone had ever heard of rock’n’roll but Robert Johnson, the American king of the Mississippi Delta blues, can legitimately claim to be the founding member of the 27 Club. A hard-living singer and guitarist whose music had a huge influence on Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards and many others, Johnson died in 1938 after drinking from a bottle of whiskey that had been poisoned, apparently by a jealous rival. He was 27 and had recorded only 29 songs, among them such seminal blues classics as Cross Road Blues and Hell Hound on My Trail. The mysterious circumstances of Johnson’s death prompted a torrid wave of speculation that he had done a deal with the devil in exchange for his musical talent. Not all rock stars meet a grisly end, though, and some have lived well beyond the average for their ilk. BB King, the son of a sharecropper who became a blues icon and played with the Rolling Stones, died in his sleep in Las Vegas, Nevada, last year aged 89. Pete Seeger, the American folk singer who wrote Where Have All the Flowers Gone and If I Had a Hammer, died of natural causes in New York in 2014. He was 94.

Robert Johnson, top, died young, but Pete Seeger, left, lived to 94 and BB King to 89

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Date: 24 January 2016 Page: 19 Circulation: 92643 Readership: 386000 Size (Cm2): 1291 AVE: 12109.58 Display Rate: (£/cm2): 9.38

David Bowie, Glenn Frey, below, and Lemmy, bottom, failed to make it past 70, while Amy Winehouse, far right, and, below her, Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin, died at 27

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Date: 24 January 2016 Page: 19 Circulation: 92643 Readership: 386000 Size (Cm2): 1291 AVE: 12109.58 Display Rate: (£/cm2): 9.38

David Bowie, Glenn Frey, far left, and Lemmy, bottom, failed to make it past 70, while Amy Winehouse, right, and, above her, Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin, died at 27

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