Rock music - no country for old men

"You know what's wrong with this band, don't you? 'Middle-aged-bloke syndrome'." Thus spake Niluccio. Yeah, this was me the other week. Hitting my gig companion over the head with the crushingly obvious. Rather like the group on stage ... It's hardly original, this observation. But still, it's rather amazing how people continue to go to see bands consisting of four or five blokes (usually blokes) in their mid-forties/mid-fifties. Because all they get - nearly always anyway - is some kind of lukewarm rock stodge, with dodgy geezers wheeling their way through an over-long set of over-long songs. Low-wattage, low-energy. Waffle between songs. An air of entitlement. Boring to look at. Get off grandad! As a middle-aged bloke myself (yep, declining every day) I should of course point out that putting down middle-aged/elderly people is er, rather infantile. You may think it cool to bang on about "Dad rock" or how "Yr Uncle dances at a wedding", but I do not. No, middle-aged-bloke syndrome is real, it's not prejudice! They're just not any good when they've been doing it for 20-30 years. There are exceptions. First of all, I think this is really an affliction affecting rock music. Middle-aged-bloke syndrome is really middle-aged-rock syndrome. So jazz and blues musicians can often do great stuff when they're in their seventies. Ditto more experimental types like (by the sounds of it) Klaus Schulze. But rock-and-roll - er, it's a young person's thing, right? I've been seeing this stuff for nearly 40 years (gulp) and I reckon I've encountered about one band who were in their forties and still exciting - the Buff Medways. The core combination of the lively/arch Billy Childish and powerful/intense Wolf Howard meant these were still worth seeing 15-20 years after most of their peers had degenerated into the usual going-through-the-motions merchants. In the interests of accuracy, I should say: all this might be total tosh. Maybe I'm quite wrong. Because - well, I very rarely see any of the older outfits anyway. As my loyal readers will know, I nearly always go to see youngish bands in small venues. They're not always brilliant either, energetic or not, but ... No, being old and wise myself, I think I'm right. I've stumbled into a few of these older groups along the way (mostly ones reforming after their 80s heyday or whatever) and they're nearly always dire. Flat, pedestrian, borderline embarrassing. Even when they've got a few minor "hits" from their younger days, these only serve to remind you that they may once have been worth seeing. If only it was still 1986 ... Meanwhile, with rock music itself now well into its middle-age (if not its gerontocracy), it's all the more likely that a coterie of die-hard rock types will keep hauling themselves back onto those over-large stages. Roger Daltrey may have hoped he'd die before he got old*, but no such luck - he's still plodding around the old rockers' heritage circuit. That's the problem with rock music - it's no country for old men.

(*Interesting point from the late Penny Reel: despite their supposed generational cri de coeur, the Who were themselves too old to be Mods by the mid-60s. Sixties London Mod, says Reel, was "a really young thing, by the time you were 17 you had grown out of it".)