Signs you are a glamfather, too
As new grandad Simon Le Bon asks to be called a ‘glamfather’, Chris Harvey checks out the difference
I’m not ready for that rocking chair, let alone a Werther’s Original
When pop star Simon Le Bon decided to announce the birth of his first grandchild, a baby boy called Taro, it was clear that one salient fact had just struck him. The 59-year-old Duran Duran singer was now to be referred to as, he tweeted, “THE GLAMFATHER!”
This was a smart move. Le Bon is by no means the first rock ’n’ roller to reach this milestone – Keith Richards and Mick Jagger both have five grandchildren, Jagger even has a great-grandchild, but both just keep on rocking; Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant has five, too, while Black Sabbath’s Ozzy Osbourne has eight. Yet Le Bon was making an early bid to rebrand society’s view of Old Pa, immortalised in the song
Grandad by Dad’s Army’s Clive Dunn in 1970, which ch had him sitting in a rocking chair, ir, lamenting “Now my days are gone, memories linger on…”
In fact, anyone who has ever suggested they can’t face the prospect of a third Amstel because they need to be up early for work, only to be met with the epithet “All right, Granddad” knows how it stings. I know the feeling more than most, as I became one at 44 to Lyra, now nine, and Teddy, six. It’s totally brilliant – but I still gulp slightly when people tell me I “don’t look old enough” to be a granddad.
OK, I don’t purport to be full-on glam – I’ve never worn a feather boa, or appeared in a pop video. But I am cool, honestly, I am. I mean, I like Aphex Twin, I’ve danced to
The Black Madonna, I walk home from parties at 6am (promise). I’m not ready for that rocking chair, let alone a Werther’s Original. But old age, I hear, has a habit of creeping up on you, so retaining your edge in the face of numerous children calling you pops (or worse) is a must. Here are eight telltale signs you’re more glamps than gramps.
When you start choosing rap songs on PlayStation karaoke games to stand a chance of winning against your grandchild, because you can at least read the words faster than someone who is six and yet to master The Very
Hungry Caterpillar. And because it makes up for losing 20 times in a row when you’re both singing One Direction’s Live While We’re Young, which frankly seems like a veiled insult before the music even starts playing. Note to Simon: put off that first loss to little Taro singing Hungry
Like the Wolf as long as possible. You may never get over it.
When it’s your football-obsessed grandchild who falls asleep after an hour’s kickabout with you in the park, and you can still send a picture of him to his dad and say: “This boy’s shattered after playing a football match against a top London player.” When one of your grandchildren shouts out “Grandad!” to you loudly for the first time in a public place, and you’re wearing really good threads, but you can see that everyone in the locale is thinking about how old you are, and you have to keep nudging the child, and saying “it’s Glamfather, actually” before finally whispering in their ear: “Just call me Simon?” When you receive a recording from one of the sproglets singing an elaborate rendition of the word “poo” to you on WhatsApp, and you notice the similarity between that and the tune of an obscure Eighties number one, which you promptly send back to them, with the explanation, “Same melody”. They reply, “What the heck?” It cuts you to the core. When your football-obsessed five-year-old grandson tells you he dreamt that the world was full of footballs, and everyone was playing football, and the earth was a big football that had been bicycle-kicked through space, and you think, that’s all very well, but where do rock ’n’ roll and good shoes fit into this vision of the universe? When you find yourself smoking with a Rasta on a Jamaican beach, talking about your grandchildren, and he says, “Oh, you got grands? I got grands, too.” And you look at each other and nod, slowly, quite a few times.
When a grandchild is being cheeky, or farting, or dropping in the latest swear word they picked up at school, but using it wrong, and you just laugh because, honestly, parenting is for parents, and grandparenting is so much more fun. When you take them out for the first time on a pedalo on a lake and you have the impulse to stand at the prow, wearing a pastel suit, and sing “her name is Rio and she dances on the sand”. It’s OK, Simon. Just give in to it.