Middle Age is a Sorry Saga
This comes from Brian Reade’s column on today’s Mirror.
“Every man who hits 40 suffers a mid-life crisis which makes his loved ones wince then hide. Mine resulted in buying a leather coat and a Hyundai coupe and being made to drop my kids off round the corner from their disco/football match in case any of their mates discovered they were the offspring of Lovejoy in a cut-price Batmobile.
But most men get over it with a glance in the mirror. Apart from those who work in the fantabulous world of music or PR. Then life becomes one big male menopause, a tragic battle to kid the world that, age-wise, 50 is the new 20.
Take this week’s Q Awards. In theory it’s a music magazine’s anointing of everything hip. In practice it’s middle-aged music industry people handing out awards to old rockers to make them feel their generation is still at the cutting edge.
A few young groups were recognised but the majority of winners had an average age calculated by taking your grandma’s and multiplying it by the number of her corns. Come on down, Elton John, Roxy Music, Madonna, Shane MacGowan, Human League, Pet Shop Boys and U2 – most still squeezing bloated buttocks into reinforced PVC trousers and croaking at fans with cigarette lighters when they should be taking their grandkids to the swings. Organisers will have been delighted that Elton’s “shocking” outburst made the front pages, but it wasn’t shocking at all. The only thing shocking about the event was imagining the NME in 1976 giving awards to Bill Haley, Tommy Steele and Frankie Vaughan.
Read the entire story by clicking the Full Article link below.
When the Sex Pistols called Bill Grundy a dirty f***er, half the nation punched the screen, the other half punched the air. When Sir Ginger Teletubby in half-mast kecks, 57, used the F-word five times to insult Madonna, 46, a nation yawned. It was like a row over the seating arrangements on a Saga coach. When Bryan Ferry, 59, voiced his support for public schoolboy pranks and fox-hunting, well, it summed up the sadness of Establishment liggers trying to relive a long-lost youth.
They were at it at the Tory conference too, where ageing PR guru Maurice Saatchi persuaded the shadow cabinet to tell us how in tune with the latest vibe they are. Apparently Liam Fox buys Scissor Sisters CDs, David Willetts is into Keane and Nicholas Soames is crazy about Dido (maybe someone told him it was a Greek starter).
These are staid, wooden, Hansard-reading anoraks whose taste in pop music is trapped somewhere between Vera Lynn and The Carpenters. But Saatchi clearly couldn’t dress them up in leather jackets, so he told them to go and have a peep at their kids’ CD collections.
Get real, all you pony-tailed execs and paunchy political daddy-oes. You’re trying to colonise a youth culture that isn’t yours.
And far from making people half your age warm to you it makes them want to hide behind the couch. The way you did when Dr Who first hit the screens in 1963. Not because you look like a dalek, but like William Hartnell.
To paraphrase Sir Syrup, unless you grow up you should be f***ing shot.
Source: The Mirror