Donald Clarke: Why won’t old bands leave us alone?

Literature swells with considerations of unrecoverable youth. You know the sort of thing. AE Housman drones on about the “happy highways” that cannot come again. Marcel Proust’s alter ego ponders vanished light passing through vibrantly recalled stained-glass windows. Rudyard Kipling tells us about the “the old lost road through the woods”. Letting go of the past is painful, but it is an inevitable part of the ageing process.

Well, that used to be the case anyway. People die. We move away from childhood homes. Hair clogs up the plughole. But the current generation of old bores is able to repel modernity by wrapping itself in the insulating popular culture of its distant youth.

Blur are back in what’s left of the charts. Glastonbury has just announced that The Who will be playing this year’s festival. An even less likely story tells me that Sweet and Mud will – despite the deaths of both bands’ lead singers – soon be playing in Dublin’s Vicar Street.

Why won’t bands go away any more? Leave us alone. We’ve bought houses, given birth and developed an interest in gardening. Stop trying to suck us back into the uncertain foolishness of adolescence. Popular musicians were, at one stage, defined by their youthfulness.

Remember (well you probably don’t, but never mind) how the punks used to refer to the likes of Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger as “boring old farts”? Clapton was just 32 in 1977. Jagger was 34. Even then that didn’t really count as properly middle-aged.

The Who’s longevity

In an upcoming documentary on Chris Stamp and Kit Lambert, the men who managed The Who, guitarist Pete Townshend addresses this issue with a wry smile. He notes they all felt The Who would be lucky to last more than a few months. “I didn’t expect to be in the band until I was 61,” he laughs. Pete will be 70 next week.

Obviously, those of us who grew up with rock music of one sort or another regard this as some sort of victory. Parents stared grimly at, say, Sweet and, after proudly announcing their inability to identify the musicians’ gender, remarked that they’d be forgotten in a month or two. Such predictions seemed, at first, to be accurate enough. Only Cliff Richard proved sufficiently watery to weather the changes and score hits in countless successive decades.

Heritage circuit

This has not stopped bands reforming for the grim business that is the heritage circuit. It’s not just Clarkson Rock acts such as The Eagles – whose “Hell Freezes Over” tour referenced an earlier denial of reformation – that have creaked their way back on stage.

The once-unspeakably fashionable Pixies came together with qualified success. The New York Dolls, John the Baptists of punk, rose from the ashes 30 years after their high period.

From time to time, these groups will foolishly attempt new material. The new record may even receive rave reviews before being dispatched to an unvisited Narnia while the 1974 classic continues to play on endless repeat. Forget it. What the fans want is reassurance that the happy highways are still at hand and the old lost road remains accessible. Playing the ancient records goes someway towards pumping up that illusion. Hearing the band actually play the music in person offers considerably more forceful imitations of immortality.

Okay, the winner of a Dutch talent show is singing the songs that the old lead singer, surprised by death, is now unable to get his lips around. True, the half-deaf drummer must perform in a Perspex box. Indeed, the current incarnation of Weasel Fog reminds us of that old philosophical puzzle concerning the building that ceased to be itself. If I replace the walls, retile the roof, put in new windows and replace the foundations can I still call this structure my house?

You can do what you like. You can watch nothing but reruns of ancient game shows and situation comedies on Gold. Popular culture, once made alive by the speed of its transformations, now allows the middle-aged to soak all limbs in a nostalgic balm that turns the passing of time into an optional inconvenience.

It’s a strange, strange business. Cultural entities exist as they are for a few brief years and then spend decades being what they once used to be.