Bedtime reading for boomers

You will search in vain for a new life of any rocker who made his name after the advent of punk

THERE’S NO EASY WAY to break this to you, but next year will be the fiftieth anniversary of Don McLean’s “American Pie”. That’s right. Half a century since you first heard that interminable dirge about “the day the music died”. Go back the same distance in time again and Lenin was instigating the New Economic Policy, the Allies were demanding $33 billion in war reparations from Germany, and Einstein was winning his Nobel Prize.

What day did the music die? McLean believed it was back in February 1959, when a charter plane carrying Buddy Holly and several members of his band crashed, killing all on board. Other dates are available. Some people think the break-up of the Beatles meant the end of the rock dream. Some people go for Jimi Hendrix’s death at 27. Some people think the music died the