Wrinkly rockers won’t bite the dust
ANEAT 75th birthday present for Brian May last week: news that Queen’s original Greatest Hits album, released in 1981 and still selling like blistering buns, is now the UK’S most successful album in history. Outstripping the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, ABBA’S Gold and other masterpieces, a copy of the collection featuring We Will Rock You and Another One Bites The Dust resides in one in four British homes.
It is a staggering achievement. Especially as their star, Freddie Mercury, has been gone for almost 31 years.
It got me thinking.as did the words “Allo, Grandad”, as I crossed the VIP bar at the London Palladium last weekend, following the tour finale by the Who’s Roger Daltrey.
The dude who moments earlier had dominated the stage with the verve of a 20-something reached up to peck the cheek of his Gothic granddaughter. He hoped he’d die before he got old. He is pushing 80.
Still out there. Still doing it.
There’s a reason why wrinkly rockers – the Stones, Mccartney, Springsteen and the rest – are still touring, scoring, flooring Millennials and Gen Zs alongside fans who have followed them since the start.
It’s because we don’t make ’em any more. There being no modern equivalent, and because no one has ever emerged to eclipse them, geriatric rock gods remain the yardstick. Don’t give me Ed Sheeran or Adele.
We’ll be bleating, “Whatever happened to..?” in 20 years’ time. Our modern tendency to live in the future affords us the educated guess. We know already who will still be big and who will be dust.
Millions of kids revere classic rock songs as historical artefacts.
Which they are, given that many inherit the record collections of their parents and grandparents.
Immune to terrestrial radio – unlike we who followed DJS John Peel, Kid Jensen and their successors as our primary sources of knowledge about new bands – the young find and consume music in other ways.
Tiktok, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube and Facebook dominate.
No one needs a record deal any more. Kids in bedrooms make albums, create radio stations and build playlists without help from the “professionals”.
The result is drive-thru music: pull up, order, pay, scoff, dispose.
Now that fans can select specific songs to stream or download, and no longer have to invest in whole albums, they are less likely to become part of a band’s tribe.there is so much music today, it’s impossible to keep up with it all anyway.
The 1960s, 70s and 80s were a cosier realm.there was a defined soundtrack.
Time has conferred upon those decades an indelible cultural significance.
We had negligible technology. Music itself was our internet. It was where we found solace, answers and our own internal voices. Turned on by its raw, carnal energy, we worshipped its creators.
But modern fandom is about music, not rock stars and hedonistic lifestyles.
If Drake, Taylor Swift or Billie Eilish trashed a hotel room, chucked a TV through a window or drove a Roller into a pool, their fans would not revere them for it. They would be more inclined to ridicule them and move on. It boils down to authenticity. You don’t get more authentic than the originals.thus, those left acquire sacred status.
They are the dinosaurs in the zoo. Creatures who defy biology, gravity and category. As such, they are the ultimate paradox: extinct, yet rocking on.
When Keith Richards breathes his last on stage, as he has long threatened to do, I want to be there. I know that Freddie Mercury would approve.