Sting

Tuesday

Helen Brown

My obsession with ageing rock stars – by Kate Mossman

‘The older male rock star isn’t just my specialist subject, it’s my obsession,’ admits Kate Mossman in the opening pages of Men of a Certain Age. Over the 15 years she’s spent interviewing ageing rockers such as Sting, Tom Jones, Ray Davies, Glen Campbell and Nick Cave for the Word and the New Statesman, she describes feeling ‘something inside of me ignite... so excited, yet so at ease’. ‘How is it,’ she asks, ‘that in the presence of a wrinkly rock star twice my age, I sometimes feel like I’m meeting... me?’ Having encountered my share of these guys myself, I know precisely what she means. Rock journalism is a field in which all the writers are fans, but, as Mossman notes, ‘part of the art is pretending not to be’.

Thursday

Christopher Sandford

The Sting paradox

From our US edition

As a fitfully employed, freelance hack, there are few jobs I consider beneath me. I’ve peered anxiously over the boundary wall of Eric Clapton’s English estate to the approaching noise of guard dogs to see if Clapton might care to supply an impromptu quote or two in lieu of the formal interview his management had aggressively denied me. I’ve been informed by a source close to Roman Polanski that he considered me a ‘nosy fellow’ — enough, perhaps, to give pause to anyone who happens to recall the director using that same phrase to Jack Nicholson immediately prior to inserting his flick-knife in Nicholson’s left nostril in a scene from Chinatown.

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