Too Old to Rock 'n' Roll

I recall watching bands like those of Duke Ellington and Count Basie on tv in the sixties and not thinking it at all unusual that a number of the gentlemen performing looked as if they had been born with the century. Jazz was old men's music, no anomaly there. Similarly watching Allen Toussaint and Elvis Costello, on Later With Jools, perform classic New Orleans numbers was entirely unexceptionable. But David Gilmour's performance sat more awkwardly somehow, and the Paul Simon numbers felt the same. Is this simply because they were more squarely in the rock idiom? So you're watching guys playing instruments that more appropriately fit the hands of twenty-year-olds in a style that would do the same (though the younger bands on the show rarely emulate the classic rock sound) and it doesn't quite gel.

But listening to people like Springsteen, Dylan, Neil Young, Richard Thompson and Van Morrison presents no problems, and nor does watching them. If anything they sound (and look) more relevantly themselves now than they ever did when younger, and the idiom in which they work seems wide enough to accommodate what they are doing. Musicians that grow with time expand the field they work within. A band like the Stones don't seem to have made that leap and all that's left is a kind of embarrassing posturing, but lots of money for their bank accounts. I don't think Gilmour is quite so guilty, and On An Island has an autumnal glow about it that makes it work, but the genre in which he's working remains a kind of MOR version of the early Floyd sound so you can't help but awkwardly impose the image of the older grandfatherly David upon that ultra-cool spaced-out long-haired chap who blew you away all those years ago. Paul Simon has tried to move with the times musically (possibly a touch too hard), but the voice was always that of a young man, and the hesitant, slightly shaky quality it has acquired doesn't sit well with that persona. In contrast the growl of Springsteen on the Live in Dublin set attains a kind of perfection.

Then again, I suppose any kids watching will assume, as I did about those aging jazzers in the sixties, that it's quite natural for these old timers to be making the kind of noise they do, and there's nothing awkward about it as it's all terribly old fashioned anyway.