At last, a reunion of oldies that’s really got me goin’!

BY the time The Rolling Stones did their first Slane gig back in 1982, there was a school of thought that they were already past it. So I had absolutely no interest in seeing them when they appeared at Croke Park recently, although I’ll admit to a few twinges of regret when I saw some of the footage on YouTube afterwards. My general position on these things is

that performers of any stripe should really know when to call it quits.

I’ve said here before that Robert De Niro would be leaving a much more impressive body of work behind him if he’d avoided making films for much of the past 20 years or so.

Exactly the same principle applies to musicians and the recording studio.

Yet I can’t help feeling slightly excited at the news that The Kinks are getting back together after a decades-long hiatus. No group, in my humble opinion, had a greater run of hit singles in the mid-Sixties – and, yes, I’m including The Beatles in that – with the likes of Sunny Afternoon, Autumn Almanac and the majestic Waterloo Sunset.

I’ve been lucky enough to see Ray Davies in concert on three occasions over the past couple of decades. And while I could have done without the bits in the first of those gigs where he read out extracts from his autobiography, the music was never less than brilliant.

So the fact that he is getting back together with brother Dave and original drummer Mick Avory is a cause for celebration. Or, at least, it is so far. Fingers crossed that they don’t tarnish one of the finest legacies in popular music.