Kate Mossman specialises in profile journalism of the highest order, her preferred subject rock stars well past their prime, two or even three decades older than herself. Carefully observing their tics and gestures, and if possible their environment, she brings them to life on the page, making them interesting even if they are not. What makes her work even more impressive, not to mention unusual, is that most of the musicians she writes about in this compendium are far from fashionable or cool in the accepted sense; indeed, some were positively vilified by the music press during the period of their peak popularity and they still bear the scars.
Men Of A Certain Age contains 20 profiles that have previously appeared in either The Word or The New Statesmen. They are an eclectic bunch, ranging from country icon Glen Campbell, whom Kate idolises, to her childhood crush, Roger Taylor of Queen, passé rockers like Kiss and former Journey singer Steve Perry, punks like Shaun Ryder and Johnny Rotten and oddballs like psychedelic recluse Kevin Ayers, whom she skewers, albeit not in an unkind way, even though he proposed they sleep together. For whatever reason, often musical, she has some spiritual connection with the men – they are all men – in her book and in an era when fake news is everywhere, Mossman is its antithesis. She delves into the truth, crafting beautiful descriptive sentences about what she sees and what her subjects tell her, often in off-the-cuff remarks that reveal far more about them than they realise.
My attention was drawn to this book by The Blue Moment, my former Melody Maker colleague Richard Williams’ music blog. However, in this instance Richard had prudently invited his friend Caroline Boucher, a former writer on Disc & Music Echo, to review it simply because she was a female journalist who could contrast and compare her experiences with those of Mossman, which she did admirably. More specifically, Caroline pointed out that Mossman described Gene Simmons’ hair as resembling ’loft insulation’ which made me laugh out loud and – having encountered Simmons myself – was very true. This sharp-edged observation prompted me to buy the book.
Caroline also made the point that when she was a music writer, a period that coincided roughly with the years I spent writing for MM, we tended to give whomsoever we were interviewing the benefit of the doubt. We were generally kind to them. Also, we didn’t tend to dwell too much on extraneous matters like how an interview was set up, how we travelled to where it took place or the furnishings in the room where it occurred. We rarely even mentioned what, if anything, the interviewee ate, drank or smoked during our allotted time with them. Mossman, however, excels in this aspect of her character sketches, drawing the reader into the experience of the interview as much as the dialogue between them which, in her case, often veers off into territories where a watchful PR might feel the need to steer it back towards whatever the interviewee was supposed to be promoting, like a new record or forthcoming tour. This, of course, makes Mossman’s work that much more readable or interesting. “There is no more boring question than, ‘Tell us about your latest album’,” she writes in one of her profiles.
In new text that top and tail her interviews, Mossman writes about herself and occasionally lets us in on her technique. “The older man and younger woman dynamic is particularly fruitful,” she writes in a foreword to her interview with Tom Jones. “The older man often ends up being vulnerable because he feels he is safe: It’s just a pretty lady!... I have felt – and seen – the palpable relief on the face of a rocker when I show up, rather than a male writer their age: a brightening of the eyes, and a fractional loosening of the shoulders.”
The Tom Jones interview was done via Zoom which Mossman dislikes because, “you cannot ‘feel’ the body, so to speak, the tics and the tensions. It is harder to detect shame and embarrassment, awkwardness and irritation… the invisible force field between two people, containing all your unconscious projections onto one another.”
As a result of her penetrating gaze, I learned a great deal more about the characters of the subjects than I knew before, which is not always the case with interviews that appear in today’s mainstream music magazines. Who knew that Bruce Hornsby owns paintings by Edward Hopper, of whom he is a huge fan, as am I? Or that a group with a seemingly unlimited complement of musicians called Trans-Siberian Orchestra, founded by the now deceased Paul O’Neill, make millions performing prog-rock style Christmas music? Or that Neal Schon’s philosophy for Journey is that it doesn’t matter who’s in the group so long as the musicians on stage can reproduce their music competently and entertain their fans. Or that it took Ray Davies five attempts to pass his driving text? Or that Tom Jones lives alone in a flat near the Houses of Parliament. Or that Shaun Ryder and Bez, both broke, used reality TV to pay their tax bills. I did, however, know that Jeff Beck was the world’s greatest guitarist, an opinion to which Mossman concurs.
The book’s final interview is with Cary Raditz, the ‘Carey’* whom Joni Mitchell sang about on Blue, that mean old daddy who romanced her in the Cretan fishing village of Matala where they lived together in a cave, albeit fairly briefly. After reading it I learned more about Joni than anything I gleaned from the two biographies of her on my shelves.
Men Of A Certain Age has 340 pages, b&w illustrations throughout and costs £16.74 on Amazon.
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