The arrival of each new David Hepworth book is not unlike the release of the albums about which he writes with such precision and rigour. Hotly anticipated by the nostalgic ageing and the inquisitive young alike, it comes in its familiar jacket, the black-and-white photo redolent of the golden age of the British music press, the orange livery mirroring that worn by Penguin Classics. It’s a formula that has seen him enjoy critical and commercial success. But Hope I Get Old Before I Die is different, because it’s a book that, since rock and roll’s infancy, nobody thought they’d ever have to write.

From its inception, pop (and rock) music was about youth. It offered a sound and a culture that stood in direct contrast, if not opposition, to the smugness of America’s Greatest Generation and to the choking conformity of postwar austerity Britain. It was made by the young, for the young. It was supposed to be ephemeral, disposable, temporary. The consumers would grow tired of the dance and move on to more adult, societally useful pursuits; the performers would have their moment in the spotlight, then develop jowls and get proper jobs. 

For three decades (from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s) this pattern was largely followed. Pop stars came and went. Many of the greats – Buddy Holly, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Bob Marley, John Lennon, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, Marc Bolan, Otis Redding (the sad pantheon is familiar) – died young, thus avoiding questions of post-fame irrelevance or how to navigate middle, never mind old, age. The rest were expected to retreat (depending on the deals they’d signed as starry-eyed hopefuls) to their stockbroker mansions or bedsit obscurity. The contempt and suspicion in which midlife musicians were held were tangible. In the mid-1980s Bob Dylan and Neil Young had new albums – Knocked Out Loaded and Landing on Water respectively – out the same week. At NME, where I worked, both discs were flung to me to review: ‘Do them together, no more than two hundred words.’ Dutifully, I slaughtered both records – they are useless – and ended with a sneery ‘gentlemen, retire…’

But here we are, forty years on, and Dylan and Young are as active as ever. Young pours albums out with dizzying frequency. Dylan tours continuously, though tendonitis means that his fluid guitar playing has now been replaced by a more rustic approach, Bob sitting hunched over a piano. They are not outliers or oddities: a phalanx of seventy- and eighty-year-old artists continues to work, attracting adoring multitudes and banking stupendous-sized cheques. They do so with the avid encouragement of several generations of fans, enthusiastic cheerleaders and devoted consumers. This was not how it was supposed to be. Hope I Get Old Before I Die (the name is, of course, an inversion of Pete Townshend’s snotty declaration in ‘My Generation’ and the title of a song on the debut album by They Might Be Giants) is Hepworth’s attempt to explain how we got where we are today – how we, musicians and music fans, came to be living in what he describes as ‘Rock’s Third Act’.

The turning point, he reckons, was Live Aid (in which he himself played a central role, presenting the BBC’s coverage with Mark Ellen). When Paul McCartney performed, he was greeted like some sort of curio from the past, an Old Testament prophet emerging from the haze of the desert; he was forty-three years of age. Cut to Glastonbury 2022 and no such bewilderment surrounds appearances by the octogenarian Macca: digging an old legend is now commonplace, unremarkable, almost compulsory. Live Aid did three things. It convinced artists that there was no need to be embarrassed about their back catalogues or their thickening waistlines – audiences would lap up the former and, probably, share the latter. It told the music and publishing industries that there was no upper age limit for the enjoyment of music, particularly old music. And it tipped the wink to bands that when record sales faltered, they could still make a handsome living strutting their stuff not in the half-ignored distance of festival fields, but in enormodome sports stadiums. A little over a year after Live Aid, Hepworth himself launched Q magazine, for rock fans tired of the music weeklies’ year-zero punk fundamentalism. Within four years, the Rolling Stones were hatching a gunpoint re-formation and embarking on the Steel Wheels tour, a concert series of previously unimaginable logistic complexity. And the record companies, inspired by the move from analogue albums to digital CDs, were plotting ever more gargantuan, and expensive, ways to repackage old tunes. Rock’s Third Act had arrived.

All of this might have made for a leaden, slightly academic book, but Hepworth is too canny to fall into that trap. The theorising is marbled casually through thirty-six short chapters, each of which chronicles the later-life antics of a plethora of extraordinary, often unnervingly eccentric, performers, or some development in the media that has changed the way we discover, absorb and relate to music. The author knows that what people really want in a book of this kind is details, however trivial, about the artists they love, something between studied reportage and garden-fence gossip. Thus we are taken on a romp through the back pages of our heroes: Pink Floyd managing to lose money from one of the biggest-selling albums of all time; Bob Dylan turning down the invitation to pick up his Nobel Prize in Literature because of some unspecified ‘previous commitments’ (astonishingly, he wasn’t playing that night); David Bowie outflanking ‘is-it-him?’ gawpers by carrying a copy of a Greek-language newspaper under his arm.

Chapters careen by at satisfying velocity. Hepworth presents a surreal succession of images of the respectable playing gleeful host to the once-reprehensible: self-confessed coke fiend Elton John the centrepiece of an all-but-state funeral; Tony Blair (himself a survivor of a rock band called Ugly Rumours) smooching Oasis at Number Ten; and, most recently, the president of Ireland, Michael D Higgins, reverently attending the final journey of hellraiser Shane MacGowan.

The writing is straightforward and unflashy, the sheer depth of knowledge and thought rendering pointless unnecessary embellishment. There are personal reminiscences in here too. My favourite involves an interview Hepworth did with Rolling Stones drummer and notorious tight-mouth Charlie Watts for a documentary: a zealous editor reduced an already curt interchange to just seven words! But Hepworth can sting too. There’s a moment when Bob Geldof is desperately cajoling (or flattering) Pete Townshend into re-forming The Who for Live Aid. ‘As susceptible as ever to hearing an argument underlining the band’s place in the march of mankind, Townshend agreed,’ Hepworth writes. Earlier, Roger Waters gets an even more expertly aimed, and probably better-deserved, boot up the rear.

Some things get lost in the stampede. That fact that this industrial-strength nostalgia hasn’t taken hold in black music is mentioned but not explored. Equally absent is any investigation of the role of hair. So many of the great survivors (McCartney, Dylan, Young, Robert Plant, Rod Stewart, Eric Clapton) have locks of a luxuriousness that defies the statistical norm, while those who are losing the follicle wars (Sir Elton, Paul Simon and, one assumes, The Edge) are forced to monstrous, often risible, lengths to stem or reverse the recession.

In the end, all of this huge change is put down to twin addictions. Those on the stage are in the inescapable grip of the creative process, unquestioning adoration and the teetering cliffs of cash that accompany it. But we, the followers, are junkies in our own way. The continued activity of these elderly behemoths validates our youthful choices. It persuades us that we are not alone on our journey and helps elevate our collections of albums, books, posters, ticket stubs and autographs into something important – what Mick Jones of The Clash, reflecting on his own stash of ephemera, calls ‘the museum of me’. The most moving passage in the book is a reflection on the relationship between Bruce Springsteen and his disciples. People go to see The Boss again and again because they detect in him (and his E Street Band, its membership virtually unchanged over decades) a sense of continuity and a vision of family that they aspire to, and which few of us find in our workaday lives.

Hope I Get Old Before I Die is another triumph for Hepworth. Part whizz-bang storytelling, part social history, part forensic examination of an understudied phenomenon, the book is destined to become the go-to text on a subject we never thought we’d have to survey. David Hepworth is himself a case study in what he writes about here: life’s creative autumn. He produced his breakthrough book, 1971: Never a Dull Moment (2016), in his mid-sixties. In the eight years since, he has unleashed a further seven titles, each as insightful as the last. And all the while sporting an unfeasible mop of flowing curls.