I’ve referred quite a lot recently to David Hepworth’s excellent book Hope I Get Old Before I Die, where he argues that the spectacular 1985 Live Aid charity event represented a “sea change” in rock history, that the idea that rock music was a young man’s game changed forever. Who can forget the sight of the elderly Paul McCartney being wheeled-out at Wembley Stadium to close the show? Except that Macca was all of 43 years-old at the time and, as we now know, he was just getting started. Hepworth’s writing misfires on occasion, but what is unarguable is that these days rock stars seem to go on forever, as the likes of McCartney and the Rolling Stones are carrying on well into their eighties.
A quick dive into a music publication or a scroll through social media and YouTube confirms they are not alone. Any number of heritage acts are still performing, albeit many of them with few, or even no, original members, some touring nothing but the old hits, others still making new music. There’s room for everyone.
Three of the albums I have recently bought are by real veterans. McCartney’s The Boys Of Dungeon Lane is a brilliant piece of work by anyone’s standards. Madonna’s Confessions II sees her back to her magical best. And while the songs on the Stones’ Foreign Tongues are as good as anything Jagger and Richards have come up with in decades, it’s slightly marred only by the overproduction that has rendered it somewhat too polished and not as raw-sounding as you want them to be. But that’s probably me just nit-picking. The music is still of a very high standard.
The proliferation of nostalgia-based radio stations confirms Hepworth’s argument. The growing popularity of stations like Boom, Greatest Hits, Smooth, Absolute and many more cater for a growing audience that finds Radio 2 far too cutting edge, wheeling out the likes of ‘Diddy’ David Hamilton, Ken Bruce, Simon Bates and Simon Mayo to entertain us. And what, you might ask, is wrong with that? Well, I’ll tell you: absolutely nothing. Greatest Hits Radio’s current playlist reads like something from the Ark but it does what it says on the tin. Old hits, more old hits and nothing but old hits. Ken Bruce may be approaching his 76th birthday and Diddy David Hamilton his 88th. I think it’s rather nice that, like musicians, the old DJs seem to go on forever, so long as I don’t have to listen to them!
There’s room for everyone. Two young men, who I may be related to, are off to the Boomtown Festival next month and among the stellar line-up of cutting edge artists are the likes of the Scissor Sisters, Shaggy and, magnificently, Madness who I wager will entertain the crowd as well as anyone. There really is room for everyone.
I too am deeply infected by nostalgia in the best way possible. Indeed, I am more obsessed about The Beatles than I ever was, yet they officially split up over 56 years ago. The discovery, then the modern recording of Now And Then was one of the musical high points of my life, even if, very sadly, it almost certainly represents the last Beatles song. That wasn’t ‘new music’ as such but as Stuart Maconie said: “There’s no such thing as new music. It’s just music you haven’t heard before.”
We now live in the greatest era of music because we have access to all the wonderful new music that comes out every day and all the music that has ever been made. The quality of my life has been improved by stepping out of my comfort zone and listening to different genres of music and in many instances falling in love with it, but that, I suggest, is more to do with me being a music obsessive than a common or garden fan.
I am definitely in the Hope I Get Old Before I Die camp these days, rather than Pete Townshend’s classic Hope I Die Before I get Old, but then, in his 82nd year, still knocking out the Who classics, so is he. And while I firmly believe that The Who haven’t made a decent album since 1971’s Who’s Next? the crowd’s turning up to their shows clearly disagree!
Yesterday once more? Why not?
