Touching the void | 17 March 2012

In April, for the first time in ages, I am going to a wedding. At least it will make a change from all the funerals. The middle-aged pop fan feels this all the more deeply, because few of our favourite musicians seem to make old bones. Or, more accurately, they make old bones, but at three or four times the speed that everyone else does.

Some of these rock deaths are relatively mundane: falling down stairs (Sandy Denny), car crashing into a tree (Marc Bolan), ski-ing into a tree (Sonny Bono). Others are bizarre. It was Chicago’s guitarist Terry Kath, of course, whose career came to a premature end during a boozy game of Russian roulette. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘it’s not loaded.’ Jim Morrison was always thought to have breathed his last in the bath, but it now seems to be widely accepted that the mighty drugs hoover overdosed in a nightclub, and various friends and acquaintances carried him back to his hotel room under cover of darkness.