Free Spirit

A lot of rock stars kill themselves by accident. Only a few do it purposefully. Keith Emerson appears to have been one of the latter.

He is destined to be a remembered as a 'prog rock legend' – when perhaps he should simply be hailed as a great musician, and a great and free spirit.

Before the juggernaut of ELP took to the road, Emerson had long paid his dues on the club circuit and found fame as the keyboard player with The Nice.

He added a little spice to his solos by throwing knives into his keyboard and amps. And The Nice stirred things up in the States with their own (wildly superior) version of Bernstein's 'America', particularly when Emerson decided to burn the US flag on stage.

I recall seeing Emerson and his knives at a free concert in London's Hyde Park in an era when the music represented a counterculture – rather than being a willing and greedy part of the establishment.

Emerson was his own man – to the end. That's how he should be remembered.

God Bless The Eagles

I really like the Eagles. There, I've said it. I don't care who knows. I think they've played some of the greatest rock music, written some of the best crafted songs and sung some of the finest harmonies.

In a roundabout way, I was reminded of one of their best lines when an old friend and newspaper colleague posted the fact that he'd finally been made redundant after 40 years by a company whose bottom line is... the bottom line.

Good old boys down at the bar,
Peanuts and politics.
They think they know it all,
They don't know much of nothing.
Even if one of them was to read the newspaper
Cover to cover,
That ain't what's going on.
Journalism dead and gone.

And rock lyric writing with any real meaning seems pretty much dead and gone too.

The papers and magazines are generally full of confectionery... and so is the music.

The Eagles may be jaded old rockers, but at least they bothered to write about America's ignorance, arrogance and greed, about what presidents really mean when they talk about "freedom", and about the quagmire of Iraq.

Which hip young songwriters with that kind of mass audience did anything similar?