Tom Petty: the rock star who was a music fan as much as a musician

He was the master of mainstream rock songwriting with heart and brains, with a back catalogue that rang through the ages

When Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers first emerged, they cut anomalous, even anachronistic figures in US rock. It was 1976, the year of The Eagles’ Hotel California and Peter Frampton’s Frampton Comes Alive!: not, on the surface, the ideal time to launch a band audibly obsessed with smart, snappy 60s pop, whose big idea appeared to be fusing the 12-string jangle of The Byrds with the tough swagger of the mid-60s Rolling Stones.

Their eponymous debut album more or less sank without trace in America. The best they could hope for seemed to be sort of the cult success afforded the Flamin’ Groovies, another Californian band who cleaved to the then-unfashionable belief that rock had reached a pinnacle between 1965 and 1966: like The Flamin’ Groovies, The Heartbreakers initially attracted more interest in the UK than at home.

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