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    Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of The Rock Stars
    Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of The Rock Stars
    Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of The Rock Stars
    Audiobook10 hours

    Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of The Rock Stars

    Written by David Hepworth

    Narrated by Matthew Lloyd Davies

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    Recklessness, thy name is rock.

    The age of the rock star, like the age of the cowboy, has passed. Like the cowboy, the idea of the rock star lives on in our imaginations. What did we see in them? Swagger. Recklessness. Sexual charisma. Damn-the-torpedoes self-belief. A certain way of carrying themselves. Good hair. Interesting shoes. Talent we wished we had. What did we want of them? To be larger than life but also like us. To live out their songs. To stay young forever. No wonder many didn't stay the course.

    In Uncommon People, David Hepworth zeroes in on defining moments and turning points in the lives of forty rock stars from 1955 to 1995, taking us on a journey to burst a hundred myths and create a hundred more.

    As this tribe of uniquely motivated nobodies went about turning themselves into the ultimate somebodies, they also shaped us, our real lives and our fantasies. Uncommon People isn't just their story. It's ours as well.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateNov 21, 2017
    ISBN9781541481701
    Author

    David Hepworth

    David Hepworth is a music journalist, writer, and publishing industry analyst who has launched several successful British magazines. He presented the definitive BBC rock music program Whistle Test and anchored the coverage of Live Aid in '85. He has won Editor and Writer of the Year awards from the Professional Publishers Association and the Mark Boxer Award from the British Society of Magazine Editors. He is the radio columnist for the Guardian and a media correspondent for the newspaper, and the author of Never a Dull Moment.

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    Reviews for Uncommon People

    4/5

    27 ratings4 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A fun read with plenty of nostalgia and space for arguing about provocative statements of opinion made as fact. It is probably the comparison of one’s own lived musical experience to Hepworth’s selection of defining “rock stars” which makes this book so engaging, readable and enjoyable.I was born in the early sixties and the music of the seventies and early eighties were the soundtrack of my life, so I am probably in about the middle of the age group at whom this book is aimed. My musical tastes were for glam rock before I was a teenager and now are more towards progressive rock and country rock, so for me this book is more about the general soundtrack, rather than the music to which I really listened. As Hepworth says, “All history is subjective. This book is no exception.”But this is well written journalism with plenty of fascinating anecdotes, humour, knowingness and enjoyably arguable opinions to keep me interested. And as written by someone who started working as a music journalist in Britain in the seventies, it also appears well researched about the first twenty years of this survey.
    • 4/5
      Fascinating, well researched account of what it means to be and is demanded of rock stars. David Hepworth gives each year its own short chapter, focusing on a particular incident of such a celebrity.A couple of times he bizarrely generalises: ‘everyone thought this...’ ‘everyone had this record...’ which reminded me of the crowd chanting ‘we are all individuals’ and the lone voice squeaking ‘I’m not’, which then made me question the veracity of everything else Hepworth stated. But apart from this editorial annoyance I found this book highly entertaining, and it drew back the curtain of mystique from rock celebrity in a way I hadn’t considered before.
    • 4/5
      "Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars 1955-1994" by David Hepworth, offers a brief history of popular music and its stars from Little Richard to Kurt Cobain. With the music industry now dominated by digital downloads and fleeting moments, the rock star, like my youth, is a thing of the past. The book is set out with a chapter per year, featuring the career progression of a relevant rock identity and a playlist at the end. Good fun and an easy read.
    • 4/5
      David Hepworth has a long and impressive track record as a music journalist, and be brought to bear very effectively in his previous book, 1971: Never A Dull Moment. In that book, he offered a detailed annal of that year, analysing the most successful music that was released and setting it in its historical and social context.In this latest book, he takes a different tack on the upper end of the rock music world. His basic premise is that the age of the rock star, like the age of the cowboy, has now passed into history. Starting in 1955, he moves through each of the next forty years, profiling a range of leading musicians through the prism of one particular day that would prove to be a significant axis point in their careers. Hepworth is very knowledgeable about his subject, and knows how to construct a compelling argument. His pen portraits of the various stars he selects are clear and engaging, and he manages to bring his subjects into sharp focus. As will always be the case with this sort of book, I did not always agree with his selections, or his conclusions. I could, however, always follow the logic of his arguments.There were some occasions where I think he felt constricted by his own choice of format, and there were a couple of years for which his arguments were slightly contrived. They were very minor failings, though, and as a whole, the book gives an interesting and coherent insight into the history of rock stardom. I always enjoy reading books by people who know their subject, and can express their own enthusiasm for it clearly, without seeming to preach, and that is a skill that Hepworth has in abundance.