So, who killed the pop star, then? For Sylvia Patterson, a music journalist who’s been writing about pop since her time on Smash Hits magazine in the 1980s, it’s a pertinent question. In her brilliant new book I’m Not With the Man, she wonders: “Whatever happened to the weirdos, the rock ‘n’ roll rebels, the children of the revolution who not so much raged against The Man as barely acknowledged the concept of authority?”
Patterson grew up in Scotland, obsessed with such “weirdos”, in thrall to the likes of David Bowie, T-Rex and The Sex Pistols. When she began interviewing singers in the 1980s, she found an embarrassment of riches awaiting her: there was Adam Ant, the beautiful dandy highwayman, and Billy Idol, the peroxide cartoon-ish rock star with the Elvis sneer.
There was The Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde, impossibly cool and impeccably aloof, and Dexys Midnight Runners’ Kevin Rowland, the donkey-jacketed former hairdresser who had a tendency to punch people – and, later in life, to wear dresses. Each was a bonafide misfit who could only ever have found their place in the world through music.
Patterson’s book is essentially a compendium of her best interviews over the years, those conducted with the kind of aforementioned creative mavericks who didn’t have it in them to follow anything so sensible as a career arc, but simply did what came most instinctively to them, whatever the cost. She takes a walk with Hynde, only to find her so determined not to answer questions that she frogmarches the journalist to the nearest bus stop in order to offload her onto public transport.
