My Collection Of Rock Star Encounters
Clockwise: Iggy Pop, Nick Cave, Joshua Homme, Peter Hook, Steve Jones, Chuck D
Meeting rock stars or encounter superstars has to be the best part of my job of music lover, and over the years I got to meet a few of them… and not any rockstar, I mean the best of them! I was lucky enough to meet Iggy Pop, Nick Cave (actually several times!) Sex Pistols’ Steve Jones, Peter Hook, Queens of the Stone Age’s Joshua Homme, and recently Chuck D.
And how do I manage to cross paths with these rockstars? Very often at a book or album signing, or after concerts and special events of course, or even randomly, as it was the case for Nick Cave, who was attending the same concert than me!
I am really not the type of person to take selfies of myself, I never do it, but I make a few exceptions, and when I am in front of Iggy Pop, Chuck D or Nick Cave, how could I resist? But I also have a few regrets: I once met Neil Young during the opening of his daughter’s exhibition, but I didn’t dare to ask him for a selfie, as I was probably a bit intimidated by the man,… who was really nice by the way, since he accepted to pose with his daughter. There was also another missed opportunity when I met Morrissey at one of these Johnny Ramone Tributes. I laughed when I shook his hand and he immediately wondered why, so I thought it was not a good time to ask him for a selfie?
I have to say, I only have excellent memories of these brief meetings. If there is no reason for them not to be nice at a signing, a random encounter could be another story… however each time, it was a case for making the famous ‘you should never meet your idols’, look completely ridiculous: they all were extremely nice and gracious.
Taking a pic of yourself with a star is obviously a very commonplace, everybody wants to do it, and everybody does it if they have the chance. The photo then becomes a shiny trophy making the round on social media, and yeah I am guilty of this over and over. But I hope there will be a few more of these magic encounters in the future, it’s a fun occupation, it freezes a unique moment in time forever, it cultivates the illusion that you are,… were, for a short amount of time, friends with rockstars.
