When the journalist Kate Mossman was a child, she developed an obsession with the rock bandQueen. Mossman came of age in the 1990s, but the irony and snark of that decade left her cold. Instead, she lived for the “middle-aged musicians from the 80s in jacket and jeans, and for the open-hearted, non-cynical pop times that had come before”. Watching Queen’s posthumous single These Are the Days of Our Lives on Top of the Pops in 1991, she “felt something within myself ignite”. Though she was captivated by the strange longing of a monochrome Freddie Mercury, who had died weeks earlier, it was drummer Roger Taylor who became the focus of her obsession. On the mantelpiece of her childhood home sat a holy relic: a beer glass he had drunk from during a solo gig. Twenty years later, while on her way to interview Taylor and Queen guitarist Brian May for a magazine profile, Mossman confesses: “I think I’m going to black out.”
Her sharp yet heartfelt interviews with Taylor and May – which took place separately – appear in Men of a Certain Age, a compendium of Mossman’s work previously published inthe Word, the now defunct music magazine, and in political weekly the New Statesman. The book features 19 encounters with ageing male musicians including Shaun Ryder, Bruce Hornsby, Jeff Beck, Ray Davies, Sting,Dave Gahan, Jon Bon Jovi,Nick CaveandTerence Trent D’Arby. Mossman tops and tails the articles with present-day thoughts, reflecting on her expectations, the preparation, the long journeys to far-flung homes, and the peculiar and sometimes fraught dynamic between interviewer and interviewee.
When Mossman was starting out, music journalism was still dominated by male writers and older musicians were accustomed to being interviewed by men their own age. The presence of Mossman, a young woman who wears her musical passions on her sleeve, is distracting for some but for others it is an invitation to unburden themselves. “The older man often ends up being vulnerable because he feels he is safe:it’s just a pretty lady!”
Few of her interviewees could be classed as hip. Yet their respective career arcs mean they’ve experienced it all: fame, wealth, adoration, loss, disdain and, in some cases, addiction. In Mossman’s bleak yet fascinating interview with the Soft Machine co-founder at his home in France, Kevin Ayers drinks two bottles of wine, plays some songs in the street outside his house and then, shockingly, tries to sleep with her. This prompts an altercation between Ayers and his manager, with the latter shouting: “It’s not 1967, Kevin!” Paul O’Neill, the man behind the madly successful prog rock act Trans-Siberian Orchestra, takes Mossman’s hand, puts it inside his leather jacket and “press[es] my fingers around the thick, bobbly grip of a Glock semi-automatic pistol”. In Moscow, Kiss’s Paul Stanley throws plectrums at her face.
Mossman’s writing is terrific: curious, bracingly honest and brimming with smart turns of phrase. Books by music journalists documenting their rock’n’roll adventures tend to be gonzo in spirit, full of bad behaviour and knowing irreverence. This isn’t one of those. Men of a Certain Age instead captures the strange, often solitary and frequently mortifying life of an interviewer whose aim is to make a connection with a stranger, to get to the human being behind the entertainer; success is by no means guaranteed.
Nowadays, Mossman’s writing assignments go beyond rock’s elders: she profiles politicians, scientists and philosophers, too. It’s with characteristic candour that she reveals how, when considering the life of an interviewee in the days before an interview, she feels, “like I’m standing at the foot of a mountain, and I get miserable with the expectation. But I still get that strange vibration, every so often, that we are going to get on.”
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Men of a Certain Age: My Encounters With Rock Royalty by Kate Mossman is published by Bonnier (£22). To support the Guardian order your copy atguardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.