Groucho Marx once remarked that he would refuse to join any club that would have him as a member, but when it comes to musicians, tragically some of our finest seem all too ready to join the 27 Club - a morose term that refers to the eerie occurrence of untimely death at that particular age.
Brian Jones, founding member of the Rolling Stones, checked out at 27 in 1969, drowning in a swimming pool barely a month after being asked to leave the band. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards stepped up and Mick Taylor took his place as Jones fell into a drugged-up haze.
Joining him a year later, the incomparable Janis Joplin died of a heroin overdose in Hollywood’s Landmark Motor Hotel, also aged 27.
Tragedy stuck for a third time the following year when Jim Morrison, the same age, was found dead in a bathtub in his Paris apartment, his doctor citing heart failure aggravated by heavy drinking.
Spookily, they are not alone. The 27 Club can also count within its ranks a suicidal Kurt Cobain, devastating 90s grunge fans over two decades later (check out recently released doco Montage of Heck), and then, awfully, by the equally immense talent of Amy Winehouse in 2011.
The latter is the subject of a searingly powerful and deeply heartfelt documentary by Asif Kapadia, Amy, to be released in Australia on July 2. The film is stitched from archival footage of TV appearances, as well as recordings made by friends and family.
Though Brian Wilson pulled back from the brink in the knick of time, director Bill Pohlad’s sweeping biopic Love & Mercy, out now, shows just how close he came to checking out in similarly tragic circumstances.
As we doff our cap and say goodbye once more to the great Amy and her fellow musicians lost far too soon, we take a look through SBS Movies’ On Demand collection to find the doomed musos we’d love to hear sing just one more time.
The Killing of John Lennon (2006) / LennoNYC (2010)
Source: Why you should watch: The Killing of John Lennon
It was a cold winter’s day in New York on December 8, 1980, when former member of The Beatles John Lennon, aged 40, was gunned down by a delusional Mark David Chapman on returning to his Dakota building apartment after a session at Record Plant Studio with Yoko Ono.
It was a dreadful shock that startled the world, a globally renowned singer and activist for peace senselessly executed, leaving a wife and five-year-old son behind. Chapman gruesomely boasted, “I was nobody until I killed the biggest somebody on earth.”
Writer/director Andrew Piddington attempts to unravel this awful event in a pseudo-documentary style, shot on location and using dialogue lifted from court transcripts, interviews and Chapman’s diaries, mostly in a ghostly voiceover that traps us inside his disturbed mind; a mind obsessed with J.D. Salinger’s 'The Catcher in the Rye'.
Source: LennoNYC
The incomparable Marion Cotillard inhabits the soaring, undaunted spirit of legendary French singer Edith Piaf, the Little Sparrow, in Olivier Dahan’s hauntingly non-linear dance through 47 years of hardship, from her mother’s abandonment to the loss of her only child and her famous boxer lover.
In a stunning physical transformation, Cotillard convincingly shrinks into the treasured star’s shoes as Piaf raises herself up through her incredible voice.
The death of her lover, celebrated boxer Marcel Cerdan, in a plane crash after she convinced him to visit her on tour in New York despite his fear of flying, sent Piaf into a spiral of depression, turning to drugs and the bottle. She went on to die of liver cancer at only 47, with her last words record as, “every damn thing you do in this life, you have to pay for.”
Not quite 'Je ne regrette rien,' but we’re so glad we had you, however briefly.
Source: Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll
The singer-songwriter contracted polio at seven-years-old, but objected to any patronising view of physical difference. He penned the darkly humorous ‘Spasticus Autisticus,’ which rails against what he saw as a condescending focus of the International Year of the Disabled. That tune was promptly banned by the BBC.
Suggs cites Dury as one of the key influences on Madness, and they collaborated on the album 'Wonderful' shortly before Dury’s death from cancer in 2000, aged 57. Indeed, the band members of Madness were pallbearers at his intimate but celebrity muso-studded funeral.
Source: Love Marilyn
Though there is archival material here, for the most part we’re given an insight into the artist’s desire to be taken seriously as a performer through a treasure trove of uncovered letters and diaries that are vocalised by a cavalcade of current stars including Glenn Close, Uma Thurman, Elizabeth Banks and Viola Davis.
Though Marilyn is these days considered an icon of the silver screen, she was tragically underrated (and underpaid) during her Hollywood years and was ultimately found in bed at home with a bottle of Nembutal sleeping pills by her side, aged only 36.
Whether or not it was a deliberate suicide is hotly debated, but her legend surely will live on, as no candle in the wind ever will.
Velvet Goldmine (1998)
Source: Velvet Goldmine
Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays Brain Slade AKA Maxwell Demon, an out-there performer who predicts his own death by assassination only to then fake his own slaying, destroying his career once the joke is exposed.
Flash forward and Christian plays stuffy Brit reporter Arthur Stuart, a fan of the Demon in his early days, who’s been tasked with writing a ‘Whatever happened to?’ feature.
This sets him off on a hunt for former lovers and collaborators, including Ewan McGregor’s quite inspired turn as feral American Ziggy-Stardust-alike singer Curt Wild, fond of flashing his bits, and Toni Collette’s hilarious take on a yank doing a slippery English accent.
Capturing an era to perfection, the cheeky nod to Oscar Wilde as the patron saint of glam rock is divine.
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