The best advice that Gavin Rossdale has ever received came when his band Bush were supporting David Bowie in the mid-90s. At the time, Bush were riding high. Their 1994 debut album Sixteen Stone, with its frenzied riffs and angsty, singalong choruses, had made the London quartet the latest grunge stars in a decade teeming with them, but there was a catch: bad reviews. Lots of bad reviews. It seemed that wherever Rossdale looked, someone was giving Bush an almighty kicking, each one making him want to throw himself out of the nearest window. One night, he asked Bowie about it, enquiring: “How do you deal with this shit?” and the icon calmly imparted three words that became a mantra for the Bush frontman: “Outlive your critics.”
Rossdale tells that story with the breeziness of a man who’s just done that. His place as everyone’s favourite punch bag – albeit a punch bag with great hair and perfect cheekbones – has longsince been put to rest as, sitting in his hotel room in Oklahoma, he looks back over the group’s frantic early days. He lives in LA these days and has the tan to show it, although his accent remains true to his London roots.
“Even to recount it doesn’t make sense. It feels like a different age, a different time,” the affable 56-year-old reflects. “It had its moments, but if you didn’t sell any records and you had no attention, no one gave you a shitty review. I learned to live with it. It was a reaction to the success.”
For a moment, Rossdale is perplexed at how he let all the bad press get to him, and then he remembers. “We were all caught up in the romanticism
