Curse of the famous: Too old to rock 'n' roll, too young to die

I've often wondered if famous bands and singers get bored of singing the same songs again and again. How does Madonna perform "Like a Virgin" for the nth time and yet retain the freshness? Keith Richards still prances around like a new-born monkey on stage (or as Elton John put it: "a monkey with arthritis"): "I can't get no... satisfaction".

Bob Dylan has just announced dates for a 2016 tour. Axl Rose raced around the stage in Gurgaon in 2012, singing the same songs he was 20 years ago.

Not everyone though chooses to go on and on. Billy Joel is technically "retired" now; Russel Senior of the British band Pulp became an antiques dealer in his hometown of Sheffield. At 40, he'd had enough.

In a recent interview to an American radio station, Sir Elton took a swipe at bands that go around singing greatest hits packages. Bands who choose to do so, said Sir Elton, "simply go crazy".

One needs to keep producing new albums to stay sane and provide new parts to your live shows. But is anyone interested? The Daily Mail reports Elton as saying: "People like Billy Joel, who is a great songwriter and one of America's finest, say there is no point because people don't want to hear them. And I kind of get that as well, but it is very frustrating that you play new songs that people don't want to hear but I can't not try and have a go. Usually when you play a new song people hurtle towards the toilets quickly."

This is both true and sad. The audience is to blame. Perhaps it's not such a bad thing that John Lennon was shot when he was. If he were still alive and playing, he'd be miming his old self for jaded baby boomers. Imagine that. The artist evolves but the audience refuses to.

David Bowie had to die to reach the top of the Billboard charts. His album, Black Star, debuted at No1, posthumously. That's a heavy price to stay relevant. Bowie had many avatars. The only one the media highlighted was Ziggy Stardust. That's the price of fame.

It's not very different for writers, even though it is different. A writer is different from a rock star to the extent that writing is not necessarily a young person's game. But famous writers suffer the same fate when they die. Their life's work is reduced to that one most-famous book. Everything else is forgotten. Posterity couldn't care less if Salinger had written nothing after The Catcher in the Rye. In the tributes that BBC and CNN put on after he died, Catcher was the only work mentioned.

One's best-known book or hit song can become a life-long curse. As it happens, Salinger went on to write some brilliant stuff post-Catcher: Nine Stories (1953), which remains my bible; Franny and Zooey (1961); and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction (1963).

I was present at a poetry reading given by Andrew Motion, Larkin's biographer, in Oxford, circa 1998. Larkin had told him he had nightmares of girl scouts singing his most famous poem "This Be The Verse" around a campfire, holding hands as they did so: "They f-you up/ Your mum and dad/ They don't mean to/ But they do".

The list goes on. Tagore's vast output is diminished to one booming cliché of a poem "Where the Mind is Without Fear". When Umberto Eco died in February, the newspapers spoke of only one: The Name of the Rose. Few wrote about Travels in Hyperreality, his influential collection of essays, or the 30-odd titles that he put out over the course of his writing career. The same goes for Robert Frost. The woods are ugly, unfair and shallow.

Sometimes, it helps if you vanish from the scene. The American writer Annie Dillard hailed as the Thoreau of her times, has been missing for 17 years. Henry Roth took a long leave of absence after the success of Call It Sleep, first published in 1934. It would be 60 long years before he published his monumental work Mercy of a Rude Stream, in four volumes. Nirvana was playing on the radio.

Sometimes, it's good when success comes late. It doesn't mark your life. By the time you are identified with that One Big Work, you are ready to die. This was Jean Rhys' story. She wrote beautiful, slim, understated novels about mistreated, rootless women: After Leaving Mr McKenzie (1931), Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Good Morning Midnight (1939). Then, silence. It would be 27 years before she would publish Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966. She died 13 years later. Wide Sargasso Sea became her super-hit novel, the only one she is remembered by. The novel still sells thousands of copies and is widely prescribed in American schools. Norton put out a beautiful edition of her complete novels in 1985. Not many cared for it. By that time, Rhys was dead and couldn't care less herself.

One wonders what will happen to Chetan Bhagat. His demographic will grow up and lose interest in him. Bhagat will become older and stop writing about young people. Isn't he quite old already? I shudder to think through Bhagat's fate. Not everyone is Salman Khan.

(Courtesy of Mail Today.)