The golden oldies

Look­ing through this month’s guide to some of the music fes­ti­vals and cul­tural events tak­ing place in Cat­alo­nia this sum­mer (pages 20-35), I got to think­ing about the 27 Club. That is that group of artists who all died aged 27, such as Jimi Hen­drix, Jim Mor­ri­son, Kurt Cobain and Amy Wine­house, and the list goes on. While re­search has shown there is sta­tis­ti­cally no basis to the per­ceived trend of young rock­ers pop­ping their clogs all at the same age, it nev­er­the­less strikes one as an amaz­ing co­in­ci­dence.

For all I know, there is prob­a­bly no truth ei­ther to the sug­ges­tion that by dying young (and often in tragic cir­cum­stances) their mu­si­cal achieve­ments have been overblown. If he had lived, what would Hen­drix have gone on to achieve with his gui­tar, or had he al­ready given us every­thing he had to give? What about that friend of mine who trea­sures the mem­ory of see­ing Hen­drix live on the Isle of Wight in 1970? Has the fact that he was one of the few to ac­tu­ally see the rock ge­nius per­form­ing on stage dis­torted his mem­ory of how good the per­for­mance was? Per­haps, but of course there is ab­solutely no way of know­ing at this point.

At the other end of the spec­trum, we have those artists who seem to go on for­ever. Look no fur­ther than some of the fes­ti­vals in the pages of this mag­a­zine to see such fa­mil­iar names as Human League, Su­per­tramp’s Roger Hodg­son, and New Order. Human League were set up (not born, formed) in 1977, Su­per­tramp go back even fur­ther to 1969, and can New Order any longer call them­selves ’new’ see­ing as they got to­gether in 1980? Elton John is cur­rently on his huge re­tire­ment tour, which takes in 300 dates, but the likes of Sting (aged 67) and Mick Jag­ger (75) are still going strong.

The first thing that comes to my mind when I think about these ’golden oldies’ is why they haven’t re­tired yet, as most of them have made a for­tune dur­ing their long suc­cess­ful ca­reers. While the an­swer from some of them would no doubt be that being rich costs a lot of money, and short of sell­ing up and mov­ing to a bun­ga­low, they have to keep work­ing to pay for their ex­trav­a­gant lifestyles.

How­ever, per­haps a more gen­er­ous ex­pla­na­tion might just be that they are ex­tremely cre­ative peo­ple with a wealth of ex­pe­ri­ence who still feel they have some­thing to offer. And per­haps they do, per­haps it’s not just a case of cash­ing in. Well, there’s only one way to find out – by book­ing a ticket for one of the many music fes­ti­vals fea­tur­ing the vet­er­ans of the music world this sum­mer.