Rock stars of yesteryear can no longer resist urge to get back

The announcement this week that next year the feuding brothers of Oasis will reunite to play for more people paying more money than would have been possible back in their Britpop pomp is proof, if proof were needed, that in pop music these days, the greatest glory is often bestowed in retrospect and the biggest paydays can arrive a quarter of a century after the last proper hit record. It was not always this way.
When the Beatles were young men they were regularly asked what they would do when Beatlemania was all over. John and Paul spoke of being backroom boys, possibly writing songs for up-and-comers; George imagined going into production, while Ringo, whose fiancée was a hairdresser, envisaged a small chain of salons. Nothing grand of course; this was precisely the kind of gentle slide into eventual anonymity anticipated by professional footballers of the time, who customarily retired and opened sports shops or took on pubs.
In the early Sixties nobody challenged the idea that pop singers had a finite moment and that this moment would pass. At the time there was no precedent to indicate that Ringo in his eighties would be Sir Ringo, his band would still be enjoying a lucrative afterlife thanks to the restorative powers of new media and that he himself would be arguably even more famous than he had been in 1965. Even 20 years after Beatlemania, when Paul McCartney took the stage at Wembley Stadium to close out the UK leg of Live Aid, he was greeted as a venerable senior citizen stepping down from rock’s Mount Rushmore. He was seen as an old man. In fact he was 43 and, as events were to prove, just getting started.
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Next year it will be 40 years since Live Aid ushered in rock’s middle age. Although the prime movers behind the event were bands such as the Boomtown Rats, Ultravox and Spandau Ballet, who had come to the fore in the singles boom of the early Eighties, the acts who remain indelibly fixed in the memories of the massive television audience of the day were the ones who had made their bones in the Seventies and were unaccountably still around: McCartney, Elton John, Tina Turner, Status Quo, the Who and, most tellingly, Queen.
This last lot won the day because they had bothered to prepare a special set of their greatest hits and because Freddie Mercury recognised that a gig of this scale was about using the stadium audience to entertain the television audience. The key miracle of Live Aid was that the sun shone and therefore the pictures of this wholesome and ecumenical crowd holding their hands above their heads to clap along with Radio Ga Ga entered a million living rooms, persuading their occupants that next time there was a big rock show they really should attend. Thus was born the Age of Spectacle, during which time shows became at least as much about what audiences could see as what they could hear, and the £25 they paid for a ticket on that day in 1985 would eventually be just about enough to buy a round of drinks at an enormo-show in 2024.
The tour that changed the economic model of live music was the Rolling Stones’ Steel Wheels tour of 1989. Michael Cohl, a Canadian promoter whose background was in sports, was the first to realise that the audience, which had historically paid less to see someone live than they had paid for their new album, would in future pay more and more and more. By calculating what the event could rake in from merchandise, refreshments and sponsorship he managed to come up with a price for the tour that the Rolling Stones couldn’t refuse, particularly those members of the band who didn’t receive songwriting income, who are always markedly less wealthy than those who do.
To reach this figure the ticket price had to rise and the production values were improved in order to make that ticket seem like good value. This is a calculation that has dominated touring ever since. It explains why people are as likely to come home enthusing about the pyros and the guest stars as they are about a particularly taut middle eight. Where the Stones led, everybody followed towards a future where the audience was no longer confined to the under-40s, where tickets were as likely to be bought on the parental credit card as with cash saved up from a paper round — and would eventually become every bit as pricey as those for grand opera.
The plates shifted further in the Nineties. In 1994, when I introduced the new leader of the Labour Party, Tony Blair, to a music business audience at Q magazine’s annual awards, it was certainly the first time a front-rank politician had felt comfortable enough in this kind of company to drop in an affectionate reference to the lead guitarist of Mountain. The audience he looked down on that day was also different, being made up of legends from the Sixties alongside members of what was becoming known as the Britpop generation. The leading bands of this cohort, Oasis, Blur and Pulp, had come not to bury the past but to praise it and Blair said that one day their records would be in the same pantheon as their elders, which was certainly what they preferred to believe.
Rock’s generation gaps were no longer clear-cut and some youngsters were even beginning to respect their elders, which had never happened before. The next year John Major handed out the first rock knighthood to Cliff Richard. When Blair came to power in 1997, the dubbing followed thick and fast until it was widely understood that the only titans who didn’t have a knighthood were those such as George Harrison and David Bowie who had declined.
Everything seemed to go the oldsters’ way. The internet may have obliterated the old economy based on record royalties, sending even the biggest names out on the road in pursuit of live income, but it was also hugely beneficial for the old acts, making it possible for them to stay in touch with their older followers and engage new ones.
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If you want to know why the guilty pleasure of your teenage years is still playing down the bill at a local festival, thank the internet. In its many-to-many new world, people no longer slipped from public view as soon as Top of the Pops had done with them. The internet wasn’t always given the credit it should have been here. In his last years David Crosby, like many old hippies, regretted that his new records didn’t make the money his old ones had; on the other hand, thanks to the eternal life of the internet, he was still a big name long after that last hit had slipped from the charts.
Digital distribution of music further meant the new no longer displaced the old. When Steely Dan’s album Aja came out in 1977 it would have been perfectly possible to consume all the published information about it in a couple of hours. Almost 50 years later a Google search on that single word “Aja” returns more than a billion results and you can spend weeks watching musicians demonstrating how every note was made.
In the last few years big bets have been made on this music continuing to have a grip on the public even when the people who made it have passed away. The City pages are full of stories of old song catalogues being bought as investments, taking advantage of the fact that the digital revolution has invented a thousand streams along which copyright music may profitably run. All seem sure that the classic pop music of our time will continue to appeal in the future.
This may not be the sure thing they think. If giant figures of pop music past like Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong can slip from our collective affection, it could certainly happen to Bruce Springsteen and Madonna. The only thing we know for certain about the Beatles is that they are the exception to all rules. None of their contemporaries from the Sixties cry out for the sort of treatment they got in Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary series. Similarly, is there another group who lend themselves to the immortality offered by a high-tech spectacle like Voyage the way Abba have done?
Until that day, working musicians will seek their reward in the here and now and will live for the next gig. Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones once explained to me what it was like not to be on the road. It was all well and good, he said, being at home with the family. Good, that is, until about nine o’clock in the evening. It was around nine o’clock, he reflected, that his body felt as though it should be doing something. It’s the thing they have trained for after all.
The thing we value most about rock stars is the chance to look at them, a fact of which they are fully aware. Certainly those big male stars who appeared to be receding 20 years ago have somehow regained the locks which have been their fortune. From a distance, when he’s playing the Höfner violin bass, Macca still looks like Macca. Only in motion do they give their age away. Bob Dylan walks from the piano to centre stage largely to prove he can.
In these pages last year Janice Turner noted the “rigidity in her trunk” which is the one sign of Madonna’s age. Bruce Springsteen has dispensed with the knee pads which made some of his more extravagant moves possible and now claims to depend on diet. Sir Mick Jagger alone seems to have avoided the slowing down. But then he was the first to realise that live performances where the bass player operated in a different postcode than the guitarist would call for powers which were as much aerobic as musical.
But still nobody is announcing their retirement. Whereas Gary Lineker hasn’t kicked a ball since he stopped playing 30 years ago, Wood is a member of the only profession where it’s possible to still access the thrills that were available to you at the age of 25 when closing in on 80. Let’s not pretend we can’t understand it. If we could step on stage at the age of 77, play the opening chords of Honky Tonk Women (Brown Sugar having been retired from their set as a sop to contemporary squeamishness) and feel ourselves bathed in an answering avalanche of love, I fancy we would do it.
Thus any band that can reform tends to do so. With the odd exception, such as Phil Collins, most performers are far more popular as members of the groups that made them than they could ever be on their own. When he walked away from Pink Floyd, Roger Waters thought his bandmates would wind down the old firm. He was wrong. In the present century, when each tour threatens to be the last go-round and it’s more about playing your greatest hits than plugging a new record which nobody is really interested in, the thing that matters most is ownership of the name. A name will always fill a hall.
The ideal time to reappear is in late middle age, when your original fans have gone through their babysitting years and suddenly feel like going out and recapturing their youth. It’s an activity that is less to do with music than symbolism. For a stadium full of such people, the first look at an old gang who once gazed down from their bedroom wall, freshly arrayed with their arms around each other’s shoulders, no matter what level of personal antipathy had to be overcome to make it happen, is almost worth the price of admission alone. Seeing the fantasy friends they acquired when they were 14 once again reunited, they feel as though something in their own lives has been made whole again.
The bands tend to be surprised by the intensity of the affection they attract when they come back. This is a pull and not simply a push. None of this would be happening if we, the public, didn’t wish it to happen. Everybody is aware that when these legends are gone there will be no successors, which lends them a fresh urgency. About 20 years ago my own son began ticking off “the ledges” by making sure he saw the likes of McCartney, Dylan and James Brown. Twenty years later he could take his own sons to see the first two, who are still touring. Willie Nelson is out there at the age of 91, plugging an album called Last Leaf on the Tree.
Some artists seem to suit being senior citizens. Leonard Cohen was more loved and admired in his later years than he had been in his thirties. Johnny Cash had a whole new lease of life in his sixties as an almost Old Testament figure. Few market their tour as the final one, but that feeling of “this could be the last time” sells tickets. Dylan has been singing a song that goes “it’s not dark yet but it’s getting there” for almost 30 years now. Marshall Allen, who leads the Sun Ra Arkestra, recently celebrated his 100th birthday; it can surely be only a matter of time before we rise to applaud the first centurion pop star. One trusts she’s staying fit enough.
All old pop music comes to seem poignant. All past eras acquire a golden hue. It seems there is no more powerful force in pop music than the desire to get back. The interesting thing is that this impulse appears to act every bit as powerfully on the people who weren’t there as the ones who were, as the success of the Beatles documentary of that name made clear.
When Oasis begin their stadium tour they won’t just be looking out at a sea of 60-year-old veterans of Maine Road hiding the grey under superannuated bucket hats. The original faithful will be massively swelled by members of subsequent generations who have caught up with the band through old clips on YouTube and hanker after feeling nostalgic for the same thing.
Time has changed the meaning of pop music. The business moves at a far more measured pace to maximise its profits. Today’s pop sensation Taylor Swift has been plying her trade for 20 years — more than twice as long as the Beatles — and is redrawing the economic map of Europe with a live show that is something of a career retrospective. Everybody, it seems, feels comfortable looking back, possibly because nobody dares look forward.
David Hepworth’s book Hope I Get Old Before I Die is published by Bantam on September 5 (£22)