Victory laps of old hits
Queen are the champions, my friends, and they’ll keep performing until the end.
Not least at the local venues in New Zealand where, to judge by this summer’s lineup, enthusiasm for retiree rock has never run stronger.
The British supergroup has three shows here in which the two remaining members of the original lineup will be joined by American pop singer Adam Lambert.
Even allowing for the relative youth of Lambert (just a slip of a lad of 38) the combined age of these three main people in the lineup is around the same as
New Zealand itself, which spurs the obvious question of why they are not calling themselves Queen Mother?
Other scheduled acts of a similar vintage include 72-yearold George ‘‘Bad to the Rest Home’’ Thorogood, the muchrevered great grandmother of punk, Patti Smith, and Sir Elton John, who sometimes appears to have been knighted in 2017 for services to endless retirement tours.
Let’s also not forget Ole Black Eyes. Alice Cooper, also 72, who touches down at Auckland International Airport in February, is still beseeching fellow school pupils to join him in rebellion against the mean old principal and teachers who would keep all of them chained to their classroom desks over the entire Christmas hols.
Never mind that Cooper is around the same age as the school janitor’s old man.
Summer may be upon us, but for many on the musical road autumn arrived quite a while ago.
Not that the autumn road is necessarily bad.
In academe and in the visual arts, in writing, business management or journalism, the 70s or even the 80s can be remarkably rewarding times.
In music they can be great decades, too, if and when an artist makes a few vital tweaks; a foray into jazz or Broadway tunes, say, a swerve into animated films or soundtracks.
Far from being a moment of creative reconstitution for some singers and musicians, though, it can also be just another excuse for yet another victory lap of the
old hits, replete with youthful attitude that infused the same songs 40, 50 or even more years ago.
In each of his three scheduled New Zealand shows, for instance, Elton John is almost certain to be enjoining fans, as he did in the early 1970s, to fight ‘‘our parents out on the street to find out who’s right and who’s wrong’’.
But Elton John is no Greta Thunberg.
A man in his mid-70s fighting his parents out on the street would need to have parents in their late 90s or early 100s.
What kind of person would do that? Ditto Bruce Springsteen, whom many Kiwi fans will be crossing the ditch in February to see in Sydney.
Springsteen still sings many nights about his ‘‘little girl’’ and how he is oh-oh-oh on fire for her and how he has called because he wants to know if her daddy has been good enough to leave her in the bedroom alone. Actually, Springsteen’s I’m On Fire is still a terrific song.
But the guy singing it also happens to be a 70-year-old man – and really, without a little bit of judicious editing and generous use of the self-deprecating chuckle, it’s virtually impossible to be sing about stuff like this without sounding like a perv, an idiot or a poseur.
Beauty therapists tell us that one of the first things an individual must do as they get older is to accept the inevitable changes they will have to make to their lifestyle and looks and embrace these changes.
In other words, as beauty therapists also say, the quickest road to becoming a laughing stock, is proceeding as if absolutely nothing has changed in the past 40 years.
Depending on who is giving the advice, this is either a highly significant or the most significant key to psychological health, which not only enhances one’s appearance, but improves credibility.
‘‘Hope I die before I get old’’ is an eminently reasonable maxim for somebody in the first flush of life, as the 20-year-old Pete Townsend was when he wrote his immortal My Generation.
Fifty-five years on, however, what was immortal for The Who now looks decidedly mortal, with many of those of Townsend’s generation now having done just as he feared, and with Townsend himself having survived to a riper age than most.
As the English author Tony Tyler once pointed out, the problem in continuing to perform chronologically or sexually outdated lines and themes can be likened to winning a prize for Best Essay in high school and then being required to read it aloud to crowds every night for the rest of your life.
Yes, it’s a hefty price to pay. Almost as hefty as some of the ticket prices in New Zealand over the coming months.
It’s virtually impossible to be sing about stuff like this without sounding like a perv, an idiot or a poseur.