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| Ten Thousand Motels |
The Sunday Times
June 25, 2006
Scotland
Here they come, the wrinklies of rock’n’roll
The Who, Jethro Tull, the Rolling Stones ... the big gigs this summer prove you’re never too old to rock, says Tom Morton
Lock up your grandmothers. Scotland is set for a summer of bus-pass rock’n’roll, as hordes of ageing rockers creakily ascend stages throughout the land, their defibrillators and nursing staff poised to resuscitate them in the wings.
Billy Joel, now in recovery from alcohol, goatee beards, Christie Brinkley and Uptown Girls of all description, arrives in July. The Who — or what remains of them — will play T in the Park.
It’s not so much Who’s Next but Who’s Left. And the wrinkliest rockers of them all, the Rolling Stones, will also tackle Hampden, assuming nobody else falls out of a tree.
If that isn’t enough to have the fans reaching for their oxygen supplies, there’s more. The slightly younger, if possibly more befuddled, George Michael will be performing in November.
Marti Pellow from Wet Wet Wet will play in a double bill with Chris Difford, formerly of Squeeze, and in the same month the mighty Motorhead swagger into Glasgow. Lemmy! Thou shouldst be living at this hour! Oh. You are. Amazing! How’s the tinnitus? In truth, medical science has a lot to answer for. It’s no longer a case of musicians “living fast, dying young and leaving a good-looking corpse” (actually a line from the pre-rock’n’roll 1949 Nicholas Ray film Knock on Any Door).
Still less is it a case of “Too Old to Rock’n’Roll, Too Young to Die” as Jethro Tull declaimed in 1975 and, remarkably, still do today. For Tull frontman Ian Anderson, that’s not a medical diagnosis.
“It was not, then or now, an autobiographical statement,” says the 58-year-old bon viveur, former fish farmer and flautist.
“It was an album track about cyclical changes of fashion, in culture, pop and rock, and quite a prediction for 1975, given the endless recycling of 1960s and 1970s influences in the pop charts these days.”
Well, quite. He’s not too old to strut his stuff, as Anderson insisted in 1996, just after he’d recovered from a near-fatal deep vein thrombosis, though he concedes “the codpieces are a thing of the past”. Thank goodness for that.
“Who wants to sit at home when you can be travelling the world first class, receiving the adulation of thousands every night,” he added, “drinking fine beer, having a curry and making oodles of cash?” Jethro Tull kicked off their most recent world tour at a sold-out Perth city hall earlier this year and the audience was ecstatic. Anderson triumphantly sent me a Tull T-shirt after the gig proclaiming the event as “brilliant”. His children liked it, too.
For Anderson, one of whose songs is called Living in the Past, it’s not just about nostalgia.
“I am not one for reminiscences and prefer to live in the present and the future. However, some of our audiences obviously like the nostalgia bit and the older material we play is for them, perhaps, a trip down memory lane.
“For us it’s not about playing a song that could be 30 years old. It’s about playing something 24 hours old, since that’s when we probably last played it on stage. Our style of music is, I hope, a little bit timeless and not rooted in a particular music fashion.”
There is an active, huge audience out there of people who grew up with the rock dinosaurs and who have the time, money and energy to want to see them — just about — live.
And while the thousands of visitors to the Apollo Memories website have starry-eyed recollections of that massive, mouldering rock venue in Glasgow’s Renfield Street, the comforts of the Clyde Auditorium are kinder to their current sciatica and arthritis.
For Scott McArthur, founder of Apollo Memories, nostalgia is a potent force.
“It’s pretty normal to reminisce about your youth — and when you were brought up in the central belt of industrial Scotland in the 1970s and 1980s, there were only a few ways of escaping from normal, everyday life.
“Music became an obsession for many and the spiritual home of live music was the Apollo.”
One of the Apollo gigs most frequently recalled is the infamously shambling Neil Young appearance in November 1973, when a grief- stricken and disorientated Young was barracked by an unforgiving audience and a young country rock support act called the Eagles was lauded to the heavens.
Earlier this month the Eagles appeared at Hampden on the nostalgia circuit, while Young is recovering from major surgery and enthusiastically spitting venom at the Bush administration via his new album, Living With War.
Anderson, businessman and country squire, is perhaps more conservative in his approach, if not his choice of trousers. “Nothing really changes: nothing is really new,” he says. “But each new generation of young musicians rediscovers the wheel, the Beatles, sunglasses and stretch limousines. As long as they and their fans think it is new, why disappoint them? Give the kids a pot of paint and they will repaint their house. Same old bricks underneath.”
How long, though, can anyone go on bricklaying? “As long as it remains a challenge and my health permits. One year, 10 years — who knows? Which will go first: the eyes, ears or the hands? Fear of boredom in old age is my greatest concern.”
[Edited by Ten Thousand Motels] |
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| jb |
Maybe they should do a remake of 99 luft balloons by that hot German chick, no??? |
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