That whole entourage thing...

  The following may seem trite to most but it's something that crosses my mind from time to time.  If nothing else it genuinely sheds light on the profound depths of my shallowness.

  I want to say something brief about fame and how our relationship with it has changed. These days everyone knows someone who's had a brush with it, at some point or another. But social media has altered the face of fame, possibly irrevocably. We probably have famous friends or even heroes and heroines that we follow on FB or Twitter but the specific nature I'm thinking of deals with generational fame.

  See, when I was  kid, we all said, "I want to be like so and so."  In my case, I wanted to sing like Stevie Wright or Steve Marriott or Sean Bonniwell, Alice Cooper or Eric Burdon.  Cooper being the odd man out here because the others are what we now loosely call white boy soul. But we wouldn't sing like that.  We'd merely get rollicking drunk on our parents cheap liquor and try to imbue ourselves with their spirit while we attempted to belt out Sky Pilot Or The Eagle Never Hunts the Fly or In My Mind's Eye or Reflected or St Louis.

  Where was I going with all this?  Oh yeah!  Social media.  Well, now on FB, I can leave a question for a favourite guitarist from a favourite 60s band and he'll cheerfully get back to me within 24 hours. And just now, a famous hero's wife (who in her own right is a celebrated soul so perhaps I should say I feel no small pride in being a Tweet buddy with a famous lawyer who has a rocker husband) started following me on Twitter. Don't get me wrong.  It isn't a simple nostalgic parlour trick.  This happens as much with contemporary celebrities (and/or their admin and interns) as with artists from decades gone.

  Part of the whole thing back then was  the unattainability.  The untouchableness. They made their fortune out of that mystique. They were and are exactly as the tabloids herald them - STARS!  I mean many of these people owned jet liners for Christ's  sake. Seriously! And now they are just mortal as the winter of our disco tents closes in.

  But the part I like, the thing I love the most about this modern world is that though it would appear the stars have arced, fallen and crashed back to earth, our hearts are lifted still by their not at all stellar and even all too human toil.

Bring it...