Industry | 2009.03.15
So who will emulate Mick and co at Glastonbury 2049?
Whether it\'s the lines in Jagger\'s cheeks or Tina Turner\'s gold lamé leggings, rock\'s veterans still have the true X factor
This week the readers of British newspapers were asked to examine a previously unseen cache of photographs depicting members of the Rolling Stones and the Beatles during their first triumphant tours of the United States in the mid-60s: sunbathing by a hotel pool, cutting each other\'s hair in a backstage dressing room and relaxing in recording studios and hotel suites, bathed in a kind of prelapsarian aura of youth and optimism. The subtext was an invitation to compare the unworn, unlined face of the 21-year-old Mick Jagger with the marvellously ravined version of his contemporary counterpart, still demonstrating a leering, prancing potency at 65.
In other news, the imperishably voluptuous Tina Turner could be seen cavorting on a London stage in skin-tight gold lamé leggings, attracting the awe of this newspaper\'s reviewer. "It is hard to believe," he wrote, "that a woman in her 70th year can wear a succession of micro-skirts and diaphanous gowns slashed to the navel while dancing backwards in vertiginous heels with such provocative panache."
On Thursday we learnt that this summer\'s Isle of Wight festival - once a carnival of youthful self-expression, from hippie pacifism to situationist insurrection - will be headlined by Neil Young, the great Canadian singer-songwriter. Young is 63, as is Van Morrison, the temperamentally unpredictable Irishman who next month will reinterpret Astral Weeks, his classic 1968 album, at the Royal Albert Hall in London - tickets went on sale this week at an eye-watering £200.
Both these men seem mere novices in comparison with the 74-year-old Leonard Cohen, whose concerts last year attracted adoring multitudes to some of the country\'s biggest auditoriums. A year or two earlier the hot ticket was for concerts by Brian Wilson, the former leader of the Beach Boys, now approaching his 67th birthday. One can only imagine the size of the audiences to which Dusty Springfield, who would have turned 70 next month, might be playing had she not died 10 years ago this week, before the phenomenon took wing.
By comparison, Thursday\'s appearance by Michael Jackson at a press conference to announce his season of shows at the O2 arena in London\'s Docklands was a testament of youth, albeit surgically enhanced. The former lead singer of the Jackson 5 is a mere 50 years old, although the fact that he enjoyed his first hit record at the age of 11 makes him seem much older - very nearly, in terms of exposure to the public gaze, the contemporary of Jagger, Turner, Young, Morrison and even Cohen.
How effortlessly these figures from the past continue to upstage and outgross (in the financial sense) their putative successors. Counting the proceeds from their latest tours, they watch the likes of Leona Lewis and Alexandra Burke - the latter belting out Cohen\'s Hallelujah - emerge from the new world of The X Factor and Pop Idol, tied to contracts with a record label owned by Simon Cowell, the impresario of these televised talent contests. Even as their success flares, Lewis and Burke seem to be enjoying no more autonomous control over their careers than was granted to the girl groups of the Phil Spector era, many of whose members ended up back in the sort of modest circumstances from which they had arisen.
So is this apparently infinite parade of veteran performers - to which might be added the name of Bruce Springsteen, scheduled to headline this summer\'s Glastonbury festival, a few weeks before his 60th birthday - nothing more than at best a festival of nostalgia, at worst a kind of freak show? Is it a desire on the part of younger audiences to bear witness to the legendary figures of the sacred 60s, or the expression of a deeper yearning for authenticity - embodied in the lines on Jagger\'s cheeks, the strain in Wilson\'s eyes as he struggles to remember where he is, or the cantankerous outbursts that punctuate Morrison\'s recitals - in reaction against the complex commercial strategies through which today\'s generation of rock stars make their living, following the collapse of the music industry?
"I\'ve seen all the people I want to see," Van Morrison says in the current issue of the New Yorker. "Ray Charles loads of times, James Brown loads of times, Mose Allison, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Howlin\' Wolf. Why do I need to keep finding new bands when I have the originals?" Luckily for him, he commands an audience to whom he and his contemporaries are the originals.
But no one can know if the retro pop-soul of Amy Winehouse and Duffy, the anthems of Chris Martin or the provocative constructions of Thom Yorke will allow them to survive their moment and achieve a similar status in the eyes of audiences as yet unborn. More chance, perhaps, of some performer, barely glimpsed today, biding his or her time before making the Cohen-style acquisition of a mass audience some time in 2049. And by then one of today\'s young stars might even be emulating the 61-year-old Iggy Pop, long a contender for rock\'s most debauched figure, now to be seen on television, torso bare and eyes ablaze, selling insurance.
richard.williams@guardian.co.uk
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