My my, hey hey, rock ‘n’ roll is here to stay … it’s better to burn out than to fade away … (Neil Young)

Lou Reed said with his usual acid-faced aplomb: ‘If I hadn’t heard rock and roll on the radio, I would have had no idea there was life on this planet.’

And he was right. Is right.

Almost all of us, even in this digital age, hear music for the first time on a car radio or on the air floating from the kitchen. And it became the background wall of noise to our lives as we blundered in to sex, in to love, in to drugs, in to alcohol, in to heartbreak, in to life itself.

Lou died unbelievably almost a decade ago, in 2013.

But 2020, the year of the Covid catastrophe, has continued the cull of those greats who kept on keeping on.

The Covid year has taken some of the greats, John Prine, Bucky Baxter, Peter Green.

Scroll down the landing page to read short separate tributes to these fallen stars and listen to some of their music…

#gerrymarsden #petergreen #johnprine #buckybaxter #rocknroll #2020