Hope I Get Old Before I Die: Why Rock Stars Never Retire

Written by David Hepworth

Narrated by Paul Fox

From the author of Abbey Road and Never a Dull Moment, the basis for AppleTV's 1971 documentary, come the stories of how rock icons like Pink Floyd, Bruce Springsteen, Mick Jagger, and more have survived, thrived, and remained the most powerful forces in music.



When Paul McCartney closed Live Aid in July of 1985, we thought he was rock's Grand Old Man. He was forty-three years old. As the forty years since have shown, he—and many others of his generation—were just getting started.



This was the time when live performance took over from records. The big names of the '60s and '70s exploited the Age of Spectacle that Live Aid had ushered in to enjoy the longest lap of honor in the history of humanity, continuing to go strong long after everyone else in the business had retired.



This is a story without precedent, a story in which Elton John plays a royal funeral, Mick Jagger gets a knighthood, Bob Dylan picks up a Nobel Prize, The Beatles become, if anything, bigger than The Beatles, and it's beginning to look as though all of the above will, thanks in a large part to technology, be playing in Las Vegas forever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Jul 15, 2025
• ISBN: 9798331971687

David Hepworth

David Hepworth is an influential journalist, music writer and editor, having helped launch and edit a number of major entertainment magazines, including Q, Mojo, Empire, Heat and Word. He is the only person to have won both the Periodical Publishers Association's writer of the year and editor of the year award, and in 2004 he released a book ‘The Secret History of Entertainment’.

Reviews for Hope I Get Old Before I Die

[tytania-2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Essays about our favorite old geezers. Not the greatest writing I've ever read, but worth it for the observation: ""Our relationship with the pop music of our youth is unique. Its roots are sunk at a time when the clay of our personalities is at its most malleable; these roots stay as deep within us as our inclinations in the matters of religion, politics & football. Turning out to see these heroes when you are in your fifties or sixties is a perfect opportunity to demonstrate to the world that the fourteen-year-old you made the right call all those years before. You like to think you chose the right music when the truth is that the music chose you.""

[gpower61 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

In his groundbreaking 1970 survey of pop culture, Revolt into Style, George Melly characterised pop music as existing in an perpetual present which denied both past and future. ‘The words “Do you remember”, he wrote, ‘are the filthiest in its language’. Pop was ‘the country of “Now” where everyone is beautiful and nobody grows old’. Pop music was made by rebellious youth for rebellious youth and a pop star’s career inevitably of mayfly duration as one wave of idols was rapidly succeeded by another.

More than fifty years on from Melly Hope I Get Old Before I Die portrays a pop world that has been stood on its head. He would recognise many of the names in this book - Paul McCartney, the Rolling Sones, Bob Dylan, the Who - but perhaps little else. The youthful rebels of his book are now octogenarians yet as popular as ever. Many of them are knights, honoured by Presidents, regulars at state occasions, and one is a Noble laureate. Pop music is no longer about ‘Now’ but continuity and the reassurance of the past. Rock concerts have become spectacular events at which audiences and performers celebrate a shared history. Or maybe they are celebrating the basic yet somehow miraculous fact of survival. The audiences are multigenerational, a far cry from the ‘screaming adolescents’ of Melly’s day, but no one wants new songs from these senescent rockers, they just want to hear ‘some old’. Time was when even pop stars seemed unconvinced that being a pop star was a proper job - “I’d rather be dead than sing ‘Satisfaction’ when I’m 45”, said the 31 year old Mick Jagger - but it has become possibly the only one that can go on indefinitely. As Hepworth says even British judges now have to retire at seventy-five while the likes of Jagger and McCartney show no signs of stopping.

How did we go from perpetual present to endlessly regurgitated past? As a teenager in the late ‘70s I often wondered why bands like the Who and the Stones bothered to continue. They seemed increasingly irrelevant, making albums bought by the faithful, played once or twice and then filed away forever. Hepworth argues that Live Aid in 1985 was the turning point. The then extravagantly unfashionable Queen - formed in 1970 and regarded by many at the time as past their sell-by date - stole the show, upstaging young bands like Spandau Ballet with a set comprised of golden oldies. He also observes how the internet played a crucial part by making the music of the past instantly accessible. This, in turn, influenced the music made by new bands. Perhaps above all it just took the passing of time to transform the dated into the classic and turn rock dinosaurs into legends. It is probably inevitable that we will always eventually feel the pull of the music we loved when young as so many of our memories are contained within it.

Since 2016 David Hepworth has produced a sequence of books which celebrate the pop and rock of the 1960s and ‘70s. With his latest he has finally arrived in the present with the twist that pop’s present is a celebration of its past, so he is still ploughing his familiar nostalgic furrow. The format will be immediately recognisable to anyone who has read any of the others: short chapters which combine opinions, facts and anecdotes in an engaging and witty style which entertains but sometimes feels less than fully thought through. Certainly this one leaves a lot of important questions not so much unanswered as entirely unexplored. Whatever happened to innovation and the shock of the new? Why do major movements like mod, hippie, punk or rave no longer happen? If pop is now largely about the past does it have a future? How do young artists establish themselves in this heritage obsessed culture? To an extent Hepworth is exploring the same territory as Simon Reynolds in his book Retromania. The difference is that Reynolds was dismayed by pop’s increasing tendency to eat itself while Hepworth, apparently unshakeably convinced that the music of the ‘60s and ‘70s represents the high-water mark of pop, seems more than content to let the old times roll.

The final chapter has an unmistakably valedictory tone as he muses on the passing of time as measured out by pop records, and the musicians and original audiences of ‘classic rock’ gradually slipping into history. After all, massively successful though it has been, what Hepworth calls ‘Rock’s Third Act’ can’t go on forever. And what then?