It's Too Late to Die Young Now

Book excerpt: It's Too Late to Die Young Now answers the question: what became of the rock writer the day the music died? There is no field of journalism more mythologised or more derided than rock journalism - with good reason, according to Andrew Mueller. And he'd know. Starting out writing for the Sydney music street press in his teens, by his early twenties, Mueller was working for the legendary UK music weekly Melody Maker, earning a living by listening to records, going to gigs, hanging out in seedy pubs and travelling the world with his favourite rock groups. In barely two years, he went from a childhood bedroom with a poster of Robert Smith to The Cure's tour bus. Though it didn't seem like it at the time, the years Mueller was living the dream - the late-eighties to the mid-nineties - were actually the last hurrah for the music scene as we knew it. The era of flourishing live pub venues and record stores, and rock journalists as cultural arbiters and agitators, is now long gone. Featuring cameo appearances from luminaries of the Seattle grunge boom and the Britpop response to it, and encounters with the likes of U2, The Cure, Pearl Jam, The Fall and Elvis Costello, It's Too Late to Die Young Now is an Almost Famous for Generation X, and a hilarious and heartfelt eulogy to a life that seems even less probable now than it did at the time.