Virus can trigger a new
industrial revolution
Ed Conway
Page 26contemporary essay which reclaims
the elderly for a vigorous life.
“The old retain their wits quite
well,” he argues, “so long as they
exercise them.”
There is a big subject here and it is
time for our most popular art form to
tackle it. There are twice as many
people aged over 60 as there were in
1980 and there will be twice as many
again by 2050. If the over-50s were a
nation they would be the third largeston earth. Older people have now
achieved what is called “compressed
morbidity”, which sounds like a term
invented to describe Keith Richards.
It means that we live not only longer,
but healthier for longer. And
crucially in the field of composition,
all the studies agree that our
emotional intelligence peaks once we
reach our 60s.
So that is the case for even Genesis
getting back together. Let’s hear
more from Carole King. All power to
Barbra Streisand. I cannot wait to see
Elvis Costello. Love to Joni Mitchell.
I will even stick with Bob Dylan’s
increasingly strained trawl through
the playbook of American blues. He
might yet have a companion piece to
Not Dark Yet in him and it will be a
privilege to witness the finest writer
in the popular tradition burn and
rage at close of day.inspired a notable 2007 parody from
a band of London pensioners called
The Zimmers. It is time someone
wrote Daltrey the soundtrack to his
generation. We await rock and roll,
the social care years.
One of the many delights of John
Carey’s new book, A Little History of
Poetry, is the example set by the
poets in this regard, although there is
not a lot of comfort to be had. “This
is no country for old men” warned
Yeats and when old age arrives it
comes, says Shakespeare, as a
“second childishness and mere
oblivion/ Sans teeth, sans eyes,
sans taste, sans everything”. Yet the
set text for Costello, Springsteen,
Dylan, Simon and all the popular
storytellers should be Cicero’s
On Old Age, written for the 84-year-
old Cato the Elder. It is a remarkablyPhil Collins, Tony Banks and Mike
Rutherford are reforming GenesisRock’s oldies should talk about their generation
If the stars of the 1960s and 1970s are determined to work till they drop, they need to write songs that reflect their age
SAMIR HUSSEIN/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES
strictly chronological sense and with
no real insight.
There have been songs in which
the writer imagines what it might be
like to be old. The best of the kind is
Paul Simon’s Old Friends in which he
asks for our compassion for the two
old men sharing a park bench
quietly: “How terribly strange to be
seventy.” Paul Simon is now 78 and is
probably finding it less strange than
he thought he might.
Then there are songs that feature
old people as their subject. Most
recently Pulp’s Help The Aged is an
account of a younger person’s fear of
ageing: “Help the aged/ One time
they were just like you/ Drinking,
smoking cigs and sniffing glue.”
Jarvis Cocker’s lyric is an update of
Tom Lehrer’s When You Are Old And
Gray: “Your teeth will start to go,
dear/ Your waist will start to spread/
In 20 years or so, dear/ I’ll wish that
you were dead.” It doesn’t sound
much fun.
There are songs which imply that
a grand old age has been achieved
because they implore us not to look
back in anger. The loveliest lyric
about the days dwindling away is
Ervin Drake’s It Was A Very Good
Year, peerlessly interpreted by Frank
Sinatra: “And now I think of my life
as vintage wine/ From fine old kegs/
From the brim to the dregs/ And it
poured sweet and clear/ It was a very
good year.”
Yet for all that looking forward and
imagined looking back, songs that
describe the ageing process as
anything other than the dregs are
rare. There have been few songs,
simply because none of the writers
have been old enough, that describe
the daily regimen and the feelings of
being older. Indeed, the irony of the
76-year-old Roger Daltrey bouncing
around the stage claiming that he
still hopes he dies before he gets oldT
he news that Genesis are
reforming allows me to tell
my only Phil Collins
anecdote. In 2006, when I
worked for the prime
minister, Peter Gabriel visited No 10
to lobby us on performance rights for
musicians. When he said “Hello, I’m
Peter Gabriel” I was able to say,
“Hello, I’m Phil Collins. I’m so glad
we could get back together.” Now
Genesis really are getting back
together, albeit without Peter
Gabriel, and it raises the question of
what such an old band, all three of
them 69 years of age, have to say.
The truth is that a whole new vista
ought to be opening up for the
popular music lyric. If we date
popular music from the release of
Heartbreak Hotel in 1956, the form is
64 years old, which instantly evokes
one of the few songs in the canon
which envisions the possibility of old
age. Paul McCartney wrote When I’m
Sixty-Four in 1958 at the age of 16. It
is a song that uses the age of 64 to
denote impossibly, inconceivably old,
Methuselah and then some. It is a
plea for love to last even until
decrepitude. Nothing roots the lyric
more in 1958 than McCartney’s
touching thought that his
grandchildren would be called Vera,
Chuck and Dave. McCartney himself
was 64 in 2006; he isn’t now far
short of 80 and we do still love him.
Now that its pioneers are coming
to the end of a natural term, popularmusic itself is approaching a full span
of life. Even those veterans who
somehow survived the lifestyle are
starting to drop off. Sir Mick Jagger is
76 and Bob Dylan, the undisputed
champion of the wandering minstrels,
is 78. As Dylan wrote in the best
example of how the popular lyric
should make the journey into old age,
“it’s not dark yet; but it’s getting
there”. Not Dark Yet is a rarity in that
it is an explicit reflection on age and
mortality, from the vantage point of
an interested observer.
There are old songs which reflect
beautifully on ageing — Hoagy
Carmichael’s Rockin’ Chair, Kurt
Weill and Maxwell Anderson’s
September Song and The September of
My Years, the Jimmy van Heusen
and Sammy Cahn song that provided
the title track for Frank Sinatra’s
wonderful album about approaching
middle age. Country music also
abounds in thoughts of age and then
the only end of age. An artist like Iris
DeMent, for example, can scarcelyget through a verse without killing
off one of her parents.
The drive and power of popular
music since Elvis Presley, though, has
always been its youth. It has been a
genre for the young singing largely
about the days of our youth which
are, as Byron said, the days of our
glory. It has relied on a generational
divide in which mothers and fathers
throughout the land should not
criticise what they can’t understand.
On the rare occasions that any writer
did stray into the contemplation of
time to come it was to look forward
to old age, as McCartney did, in aSongs that describe
ageing as anything
but the dregs are rare
Let’s hear more from
Carole King. All power
to Barbra Streisand
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