What happens to rock'n'roll when you have kids? (Andrew Pemberton, Sunday Times 26 July)

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Can you marry being a rock star and being a family man? Damon Albarn sang to his daughter but Brace Paine finds writing hard
By Andrew Pemberton

Do you still take drugs?” I asked the Prodigy recently as we enjoyed a drink (beer for me, champagne for them) backstage at Amsterdam’s Melkweg music venue. It was after a show to promote their new No 1 album, Invaders Must Die. They hemmed and hawed, and avoided eye contact. Finally, the man who, that evening, had danced on stage to a song called Smack My Bitch Up explained his reluctance to answer. “It’s different when you have kids,” said Keef Flint, the band’s premier Firestarter, now a happily married, teetotal 39-year-old.

Indeed it is. Traditionally, rock’n’roll is viewed as an arena where the responsibilities and obligations associated with fatherhood are best left at home. Or, better still, ignored completely. Even the Beatles had to toe the line. John Lennon was under strict instructions not to tell the world about his wife, Cynthia, and poor Julian rarely got to see his famous rock-star dad. When Paul McCartney went solo, he took his family on the road and was roundly mocked for it.

Nobody knows all this better than me. Two years ago, I was as rock’n’roll as it gets without actually being in a band. I was living in the East Village, in New York, editing a music magazine. I interviewed Chris Martin, the Libertines, John Cale and the Darkness. I met Christina Aguilera, the Strokes, Kirsten Dunst and Johnny Knoxville. I got drunk with Ryan Adams in a local bar, and with Jon Bon Jovi on his private jet (we drank white wine with ice, his favourite tipple).

I introduced Jewel and the Charlatans on stage. I had power lunches with the Imagine producer Brian Grazer and the Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner. When I read Toby Young’s New York publishing grumble, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, I couldn’t understand what his problem was. The Devil Wears Prada? If she did, I didn’t notice. I was too busy being cool. Then my wife gave birth to twins. We already had a son, so these were Kids B and C. My expensive New York apartment and my shrinking New York salary started looking dangerously inadequate. So I made the tough choice, came home and got a steady job.

At first, it was hard to adapt. The birth of my twin daughters had been like a bomb going off, and all that was left in the rubble of my adult life, it seemed, was babies, babies, babies. There has been a rash of novels and memoirs about what it’s like for blokes becoming fathers. I read them and laughed mirthlessly. Try twins, mate, I found myself saying after every page.

Two years on, my wife and I were coming up for air, and for the first time seemed to have time to do other things outside parenting. I wanted my rock’n’roll back. But how could I do it? Could I take my kids to shows? Could I take them with me to Glastonbury? Could I breathe new meaning into the phrase “dad rock”? I canvassed some advice from the real experts.

“You mean, how do you do something that is associated with being young and out of control, and still be a dad?” asked Fountains of Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger, 42. He has two girls, aged six and two. “It’s not easy. I once went on tour for so long that my kids didn’t recognise me when I got back. Now I wear a name badge that says ‘Dad’.”

Taylor Hanson, who is in a new band, Tinted Windows, with Schlesinger, has four children, all under the age of seven. Perhaps he had an answer. “There aren’t enough hours in the day,” the 27-year-old said. “And it gets harder when they start noticing you are gone.”

What if I took my children with me? They could share my tepee at Glastonbury. They like camping. “My kids come on tour at weekends, and for the odd week,” Hanson said in his laid-back surfer drawl. “Being on the road is a bit like being a big family: complicated travel arrangements and 25 different things happening simultaneously. It kind of makes sense.”

But what about the sex and the drugs? Until recently, they had been two of my favourite parts of the rock’n’roll trifecta. “You have to keep yourself in check, bro,” Hanson said. “Rock’n’roll is also about meeting new, cosmopolitan people. It’s great for kids to be around that kind of insanity in a non-sterile environment.”

Gossip’s guitarist, Brace Paine, told me that when you have a child, your creativity dies. “Having children makes it harder to write songs,” Schlesinger agreed. “The songs are no longer my ‘babies’. My babies are my babies.” Graham Gouldman, chief songwriter with 10cc and a father of four, says it’s all about re-adjusting to mundanity when you come home. “After playing in front of thousands of people, I go home and do the washing, load the dishwasher, put the garbage out,” said the man who wrote Dreadlock Holiday and I’m Not in Love. “If you love what you do, you’ll manage. You’ll find a balance,” the 62-year-old added reassuringly.

In the end, I realised I wasn’t quite the same person I was when the girls were born. Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker said pop music was all about the self, and I wasn’t that narcissistic Young Turk any more. So, this year, I skipped Glastonbury and took my kids camping in Dorset, instead. A week before, though, we made it to a Blur gig at Brixton Academy. Halfway through, Damon Albarn got on his knees and performed Tender to his daughter, who was in the front row with some friends from school.

It was the highlight of a terrific show. Even if it did start at four o’clock in the afternoon.

By Andrew Pemberton, Sunday Times 26 July