Why do the cool die young? I don’t mean famous, cool people like Jimi Hendrix or Jim Morrison. They are members of the 27 Club – the pop stars who died at 27. I mean the schoolboy gods of my youth, the marvellous-looking, self-assured ones, effortlessly going out with the prettiest girls. And now seven of them – friends and contemporaries from school and university – are dead by the age of 50, either by their own hand or thanks to drink or drugs.
The majority of my wild contemporaries have transformed into sober professionals
None of the femmes fatales I know have died. Why is it only the cool men who’ve gone? As the cliché has it, they had it all. Take Alex Mosley, who died of a heroin overdose in 2009, aged 39. His death was covered by the press because his father, Max Mosley, the Formula 1 chief, was caught in an orgy, and his grandparents were Oswald Mosley, the fascist leader, and Diana Mitford.
Alex was the cleverest boy in my further maths A-level lessons at Westminster School in the late 1980s. Stick-thin, pale-faced, with a mop of black hair, he was extremely cool and attractive but didn’t spurn us nerds. He helped me, in vain, to understand the more obscure corners of calculus – and then asked me to his impossibly glamorous 18th birthday party. The nerds pogoed seamlessly with the cool boys to Dr and the Medics, playing their number one hit, ‘Spirit in the Sky’.
Alex excelled at Oxford, where he got his maths doctorate at 25. He went on to study at the LSE and set up the admired Notting Hill restaurant, Hereford Road. But his mighty intellect didn’t keep him alive. Why not? Looking back at those seven contemporaries who died, they had something in common. It wasn’t being cool that killed them. But some of the same characteristics that made them cool were also fatal.
The sprezzatura – and looks – of youth are hard to maintain in middle age. And those contemporaries never developed the bourgeois virtue of pleasure deferral or the inner voice of restraint and fear that saved us nerds; the inner voice that said, ‘You must go home early and learn your Latin vocab.’ Their inner voice said, ‘You mustn’t go home early. You must be naughty.’
One of my cool school contemporaries, who thankfully survived, says that while some boys felt pressure to go to the best universities and get the best jobs, his set felt pressure to be the most glamorous, hedonistic and self-destructive; the Keith Richards of the gang.
One of the seven, Mark Myers, who died in 2021 at 50 after developing a heroin habit, founded the pop group Senseless Things and helped compose ‘Can’t Stand Me Now’, a hit by the Libertines. At school, Mark, another sweet, gentle soul, was already in a band.
As Lynn Barber wrote in A Curious Career, it takes bravery to be an aspiring pop star: ‘The ones I admire are those who started writing and composing in their teens, pouring their hearts out alone in their bedrooms, often with no encouragement at all. They had the guts to go out and expose themselves to the ridicule of their classmates by getting up on stage. So brave, so young! I think they’re heroic.’
That lack of restraint – the fifth bottle, seeing it through till dawn – was thrilling to us cautious nerds, too, as we worried about our bedtimes and hangovers. But that devil-may-care attitude sparked generosity. At Oxford, another contemporary – dead at 34 from an overdose – once bought a round for a dozen people, including several strangers, in the King’s Arms. One of them said to me, as he drank the pint my friend had just bought him, ‘So he should – he can afford it’. Well, lots of people who can afford it aren’t generous. And, I noted, the stranger didn’t buy my friend a drink in return.
Most of the seven had plenty of money, including Alex Mosley. And all of them drank too much or took too many drugs. But then most rich people who over-indulge in youth don’t die young. The majority of my wild contemporaries have transformed into sober professionals. Lots of them don’t drink, let alone take drugs. Several are fitness fanatics, addicted only to Parkrun and cold-water swimming.
They also started families and found rewarding jobs. None of the seven lasted long at jobs where they had to turn up at an office and put up with quotidian demands from a boss. Some of them hadn’t been told off since school. They were all clever and some, like Mosley, had profitable business ventures. But affluent neglect meant they could also leave jobs when they wanted. They could swerve responsibility. Their inner voice never told them to stop. And so they didn’t until it was too late.
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