In a media landscape of wall-to-wall mean, where it is considered normal and proportionate to lose your nut over an imaginary teenager who wants to identify as a cat, or whip yourself into a fury that some stranger, somewhere, doesn’t eat dairy, there is one personal remark that is off-limits: you can’t call anyone too old to do a thing because it’s none of your damn business. Two men in their 70s and 80s, battling it out for the US presidency, one of them potentially from prison? Good on them. Ready to settle down with that one special person (again), at 92? Lovely news. What better time to play Glastonbury than when you’re pushing 80 and your first tour was equidistant, in years, between now and the third battle of Ypres?
It is considered more than rude to mention it – déclassé, suburban. What kind of narrow-minded curtain-twitcher would say anything about Yusuf/Cat Stevens that wasn’t: “Choon!”? The man took a spiritual sabbatical that was way longer than most of the audience has been alive and that’s great. It must have done wonders for his vocal cords, which don’t sound a day older than 52. That’s more than could be said for Axl Rose, whose voice dropped in and out like an apparition. You are allowed to say that, you’re allowed to say maybe it wasn’t his day, but you’re not allowed to say maybe his greatest set is behind him. Maybe step back a bit, give some young bucks a chance. Won’t someone think of the poor 45-year-olds waiting for their big break?
The upshot is not some new age of inclusivity, where everyone is age-blind and life is nicer. It doesn’t have any broader application. Elton John, pootling about on stage looking like a man having a much-needed stretch after a really long sit-down, while everyone politely looks away, isn’t frontier stuff that is going to smash the glass ceiling for a 76-year-old trying to get a job at the supermarket. If anything, this elite cadre of septuagenarians just makes all the others look bad. They fancy a rest. They understood that to be the entire point.
But it does have a ripple effect, whether it is in politics or festivals, the normalisation not even of ordinary nostalgia, but the ersatz Facebook kind. “Remember the blitz, when we knew how to stick up for ourselves? You don’t get that kind of grit from a vegan sausage roll.” Well no, mate, I don’t remember the blitz and neither do you – and, best-case scenario, you’re ventriloquising the secondhand memories of a relative you speak to once a year. Worst-case scenario, you remember it from the History channel. Nope, if you think Liz Truss was anything like Margaret Thatcher, you don’t remember Thatcher either. Whatever buzz this is giving you, it is a bit more complicated than fond recollection.
No one is going to Debbie Harry for new material – even she knows that. They are tuning in for The Tide Is High, then complaining on social media that they can’t really hear her and, to be honest, you couldn’t really hear her even if you were there. But that’s not what the beef is. Blondie’s version of that song is already 43 years old; it was a cute piece of kitsch by the turn of the century. Even I can’t remember hearing it new; my first single was Pass the Dutchie. Today’s audience is taking a trip down their parents’, possibly their grandparents’ memory lane and I wonder what sound quality would ever be good enough to animate what is essentially an emotional hologram.
Certain careers aren’t over until you’re dead and even then, CGI can work miracles. Journalism is no better, I have to admit, having recently attended a conference on investigative reporting in which the cutting-edge voices were Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. You could call this movement, broadly, Things Were Better Before, but in order to make it stick, you have to go back to a “Before” nobody here was there for, and keep out anyone who might disprove it, even by accident, which is to say, everyone under 40. It’s probably the fault of the Rolling Stones – so many things are.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
This article was amended on 28 June 2023. An earlier version said that The Tide is High was 43 years old. In fact, the original song by the Paragons dates back to 1967 so is 56 years old.
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