Left so cold, I’d rather play in the US of A

I’m not an overly fussy person, but let’s get two things straight – I like my latte with a vanilla twist, and I like my rock stars to live fast and die in a massive fireball.

This week one of rocks biggest name caused a stir. Did they throw a tv set out of a hotel window? Pitch up a tent in reception having driven their limo into the swimming pool, in the basement? Did they arrive at a 5 Michelin-starred restaurant after taking a coctail of antihistamines, scotch and enough Valium to subdue a cow for a week?

No they walked out of an interview. A Radio 4 interview. Arguably one of the biggest stars of the moment, Chris Martin stormed out of an interview presumably tucked away in the schedules between Womans’ Hour and some Sandy Toksvig panel show. I say ‘stormed out’, but what he actually did was ask politely if he could leave, because he was bored.

Don’t get me wrong, but in a haunting echo of my reaction to hearing their songs I was found remarking, ‘hasn’t somebody done this before?’. The world was gripped as Sid Vicious and pals descended into a musket of four-letter words on the Bill Grundy show. Even the BeeGees managed to walk out of an inteview without needing to ask permission first.

The thing is, whilst rock stars may have sauntered gently into middle-class seating my view of the US hasn’t.

I still want to live there, but because of everything rock music has put in my head. I want to experience the quiet sleepy town with only a garage and a gun shop. Bruce Springsteen has put it in my head that the US is a nation of ‘Nam Vets being turned down at Oil refineries but overcoming the odds to become ‘rocking daddies’.

Music can be a powerful thing. Whilst men in flat caps try to create the next concorde, whilst men in shiny-white lab coats watch StarTrek reruns to get tips on teleporters, music already has the power to take us across the Atlantic. I’ve been listening to Matchbox Twenty on pretty much a continuous loop since last months’ gig whilst I’m in the car, and the problem is that my car probably now counts as American territory.

I spent 3 months living there, and experienced a traditional summer camp. I’m not sure how much of it is a genuine desire to be there, right now, rather than just hankering after a simpler time. A time when I’d just left university (we held a mock-graduation on the camp’s lawn) and you could travel to America without having to take your eyeballs out of their sockets, fingerprint them and create a papier-mache model just for the records. I want to drive the Route 66 in a big gas-gussling convertible, but 8 years on that’s a) expensive, and 2) sixty polar bears will die and then their polluted carcasses will cause Wales to be submerged under rising sea-levels.

It’s not just the sun and the culture though. It was a time of hard-working bands like Dave Matthews. The world was still feeling the ripples of the Seattle implosion. And, according to the Coldplay Timeline, Chris Martin and Co. were only big enough to headline the Pilton Village Fete, and in their own words, ‘were not too shit’.