Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale has one of the most recognizable voices in rock music. Funnily enough, the world was actually almost deprived of it. Turns out, Rossdale got the job by “accident,” once quipping, “Why the f*** am I doing this?”
Speaking to Kerrang! journalist Ben Myers in Oct. 1999—the same month Bush released their third studio album The Science of Things—Rossdale reflected on his years as a rock singer. He admitted that it was not something he initially sought out. “It was a complete accident,” he said. “I couldn’t play any instruments, and I couldn’t really sing either.”
Gavin Rossdale played in an 80s band that opened for artists like Big Country and Cyndi Lauper
“It just seemed that the quickest way forward was to be up there at the front,” Rossdale went on to say. Thinking back on his early years playing in bands, he added, “I remember my first gig at the Half Moon pub in Herne Hill, and I just thought, ‘Why the f*** am I doing this? I hate this?!’”
Throughout the 1980s, Rossdale played in bands like Midnight and The Little Dukes. This was before linking up with his Bush bandmates in the early ’90s, as detailed in the book Bush: Twenty-Seventh Letter: The Official History.
“Six months after I’d started, I had a publishing deal, and then I got signed to Epic soon after. But it was all too quick, too 80s, and too disposable,” he explained. “Maybe someone saw some potential lingering in the darker recesses, and I do think we had some really weird and interesting ideas for artwork and photos. But it all went wrong when the label made us do this s***ty photo shoot with a complete tosser where we were made to look perfect. It was just… disgusting.”
How Gavin Rossdale came Into His Own as a Frontman (According to him and others)
Bush bassist Dave Parsons later offered some outside perspective of Rossdale at the time. “I’d known Gavin for a while, just seeing him out and about. I’ve always thought that it’s important to have faith in your frontman,” he chimed in. “They have to have charisma to get away with being the focal point. And if you meet one, you know one. When I met him, I knew he was the right person to work with.”
“Basically, I was too stubborn to actually change,” Rossdale later shared. “I thought it was going to be money, fame, and girls. At the time, I actually had the lifestyle and the girls. But I needed the release of it all. I used to be quite a quiet, mute person, yet music allowed me to rail against things in my life because I’ve always written in the same way.”
“I’ve always had isolationist lyrics, and I’ve always felt that I had a better answer when people had left the room, so songwriting gave me that voice,” he added. “I was always way cooler when I ran things over in my head as opposed to messing up during conversation. Before that, I was a misfit.”
The post ‘Why the F*** Am I Doing This?’: Bush Frontman Gavin Rossdale on How He Landed His Job by Accident appeared first on VICE.
