Will 2016 be worst year for rock stars dying since Hendrix and Janis Joplin in 1970?
David Bowie, Prince, Glenn Frey, Maurice White, Jefferson Airplane’s Paul Kantner, Frank Sinatra Jnr among those to have died in first four months - and with each death, we lose a part of ourselves
In 2016, I’ve had to abandon my long-held, entirely non-scientific theory about the timing of the deaths of much-loved musicians.
It’s not the they-come-in-threes theory, which, if true, might provide solace in a year when David Bowie, Merle Haggard and Prince have been lost. If that numerological reasoning holds true, maybe there won’t be any more enormously influential titans exiting for a while.
No, my theory was calendrical. They die in December, it always seemed to me.
That idea is partly based on the memory of the most shocking rock death – John Lennon’s murder in December 1980 – as well as a long list of others who left as the days grew shorter. For starters: Joe Strummer, Kirsty MacColl, Curtis Mayfield, Captain Beefheart, Ian McLagan, Odetta, Roy Orbison, Frank Zappa, Ike Turner and Teena Marie. None would “make it through December”, to paraphrase a great Haggard song.
The sense that bad things are about to happen around the holidays haunts me partly because my father died in December 1990. And I can’t help but remember writing James Brown’s obituary in Christmas 2006. As one of my favourite ‘70s English rock bands, Mott the Hoople, whose drummer, Dale “Buffin” Griffin, died in January, put it: Death May Be Your Santa Claus.