Uninformed people such as "doctors" and "psychologists" tend to claim that there are five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. But it is a truth universally acknowledged (on Fleet Street) that grief is more swiftly abated if it involves a sixth stage: randomly blaming a celebrity. Which brings us to the strange and unlikely saga of the singer Elliott Smith and his role in the death of Peaches Geldof.
Last week, after the results of toxicology tests were revealed at the inquest into Peaches Geldof's death, newspapers were left with something of a puzzle: how could they take this story further? What could, you know, jazz up a depressing story about a 25-year-old mother's probable heroin overdose so that readers could feel, instead of the enervating heaviness of sympathy, that delicious inner glow of prurience and outrage? Sympathy just makes people sit on the sofa moping, doesn't it? Whereas outrage propels people out of the front door and straight to their newsagent, desperate to read yet more about this thing that will outrage them more, more, more! Outrage, you see, is the caffeine of the 21st century, now powering huge swaths of the western world. Who needs a double espresso when instead one can just wake up, look at one's phone and search on the internet for something to feel outraged about? Truly, nothing makes a modern person spring out of his or her bed more quickly than the prospect of updating one's Facebook status with something one has seen on the internet and is angry about.
It took the tabloids a whole day to find the crucial grain of outrage in Geldof's story – but find it they did. The person to blame for this sad death was none other than American singer-songwriter Elliott Smith, writer of some breathtakingly beautiful songs, including Miss Misery, Pictures of Me and, of course, Needle in the Hay.
"Peaches had become increasingly obsessed with the drug-addicted US musician Elliott Smith in the days before her death … Peaches described Smith as her 'kindred spirit,'" heavy-breathed the Daily Mail, so outraged that it didn't bother to explain its habit of referring to female celebrities by their first name and male ones by their surname. The Sunday Mirror took this iron-clad story yet further by splashing on its front page the printing-press-halting story that Geldof was overheard days before she died arguing with her husband "over the number of songs Peaches had on her iPhone by Elliott Smith". As far as I can ascertain from my research, this is the first time that a story about Elliott Smith made a British tabloid front page. Congratulations Elliott!
Quite what Smith – a man who could make Brian Wilson look like a happy-go-lucky kinda guy – would make of being brought into this story one can only imagine, as he, sadly, died more than a decade ago. The tabloids themselves were a bit mystified as to who he was, judging from their little guides to the man: "It was widely though [sic] Smith's depression stemmed from him being a child," opined the Sunday Mirror, which does strike one as bad news for pretty much everyone with a similar history. I have to admit, I never thought I'd see the day when a live performance of Smith performing Needle in the Hay – his song about addiction – would be embedded in a Mail Online story alongside pictures of Rihanna's "underboob", but such is the strange serendipity of life. "Like Peaches, Elliott Smith was a music obsessive," chinstroked the Mail. It seems safe to say at this point that, if Smith were not already dead, that sentence would likely have propelled him under the nearest bus.
Doesn't this all feel delightfully retro, blaming a pop singer for a tragedy? I thought video games were the villains now, but it is hard to keep up in this crazy modern media world. Is this all part of the 90s fashion revival, perhaps? Does anyone know whether Philip Seymour Hoffman was a secret fan of Marilyn Manson? Because that would really explain everything.
There isn't much one can say in defence of coming of age in the 90s. I endured the Britpop years, the combat-trouser era, and I went to a Spice Girls concert. Twice. But one thing I can take away from my shameful youth is the lesson that any time that journalists or public figures attempt to blame pop culture for something, they end up sounding like laughable old coots. When Marilyn Manson was widely blamed for inspiring the Columbine high school massacre in 1999 (even though the killers, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, were later found to have hated Manson's music), he wrote an article in Rolling Stone that made his accusers sound semi-illiterate as well as hysterical. In 1992 President Bush blamed "the tide of incivility and the tide of intolerance" on The Simpsons as opposed to, say, his near-to-total inaction on the American economy. Eminem was pretty much blamed for everything in the 90s.
The result of all this blaming was, of course, precisely nothing, and bad things still happened, and continue to do so. Elliott Smith didn't kill Peaches Geldof any more than my fondness for Mama Cass's music made me have a sandwich for lunch. But then, if we don't find someone or something to be outraged about right now, the whole of Britain and the eastern seaboard of the United States will deflate and sink into the Atlantic. So well done, Elliott Smith. You've kept certain sections of Fleet Street afloat for another week.
