I feel really sorry for Carl Palmer who has lost three of his closest associates in under a year - Keith Emerson & Greg Lake from ELP in 2016 and now John Wetton from Asia.

Yes the sadness of age is affecting all my generation; when people moaned about 2016 and all the deaths I thought it will, logically, get worse. My dear friend and mentor Sir Edward Lewis (who offered to give me Decca when he died; I now regret not accepting or at least taking the EMI job; the music industry and Great Britain would be very different places) said to me the worst thing about getting old was not getting ready to die but watching all your friends and even some of your enemies pass away.