If ever there is a clear-cut case of entrepreneurs late in life raging against the dying of the light to make millions – this is it.
The rocking grandparents
This autumn, a bunch of grandparents in their 70s and 80s will be leaping around the stages of the UK and the US belting out hits they wrote more than half a century ago.
Tickets will cost you up to £1,000 and merchandise entrepreneurs will fleece you of a few
hundred quid more on the way out of the stadium.
Sixty years makes a classic
A young longhaired and louche Mick Jagger said 60 years ago that he expected the Rolling Stones to last a couple of years. Think about it, he has been wrong every year since 1964.
Critics hailed the new Stones album Hackney Diamonds – the first without drummer Charlie Watts – as the best since the sublime Some Girls in 1978.
Party like it’s 1964
At the age of 80, Jagger is ready to rock like it is at the Richmond Jazz and Blues Festival in 1964. At his right shoulder will be that skeletal survivor of decades of satisfaction Keith Richards – a youngster aged 79.
The man who once sang he hoped to die before he got old – didn’t.
Instead, Who lead guitarist Pete Townshend, aged 78, is putting the final touches to his third rock opera Lifehouse. Heavens, Townshend thought he was finished when the Sex Pistols came out in the 1970s.
Still a slave to the rhythm
Also up there with him and still belting them out is Who lead singer and former sheet metal worker Roger Daltrey, aged 79, still fit as a flea.
Grace Jones, 75, is still a slave to the rhythm, singing new material.
Elton John, 76, wowed them at Glastonbury this summer.
Poor Bruce is struggling to keep running
The man who was born to run is sadly finding it hard these days.
Bruce Springsteen, a mere 73, filled the Olympic Stadium in Barcelona with 60,000 fans.
A peptic ulcer problem forced Springsteen to cancel the latest leg of his US tour.
But there are many thousands more who will pay good money to see his return.
Follow the money
The marketers call it following the money. You appeal to the nostalgia of older people with healthy retirement funds who will take along their grandchildren to drink in the reckless rock they gloried during their youth.
Then you’ve got the geeks who just follow old music on the internet. Then you have those who got into the old stuff through the playlist at their Zumba class.
Time makes a wine when it comes to musicians, clearly, it also makes them millions too.
