Is 69 the new 27, the new “age of rock star death”, when all our most beloved titans of the arts die?
It is not, but in the days following the sad deaths of David Bowie, Alan Rickman and Lemmy (who actually made it to 70, an iconoclast even in death), you might be forgiven for thinking it, judging by the number of times people on the internet are making this same observation. In much the same way that celebrity deaths don’t come in threes, no matter how many sombre conversations you have about it with near-strangers in the office kitchenette, it will still be true that people don’t die in patterns, even if they are tangentially linked by accidents of birth.
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