Rachel Johnson

Long live the rock dinosaurs!

Viagra, hair dye, and why boomers still access all areas

Mick Jagger (photo: Getty)

When the Oldie changed ‘leadership’ a few years back I swooped on the new editor, young Harry Mount, like a seagull on a chip.

‘The one thing your great organ is missing is a pop critic!’ I lectured him. The average age of the reader was level-pegging with the pensioners in the rock’n’roll hall of fame: Rod Stewart, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Tina Turner, Stevie Wonder, Bryan Ferry… it was a marriage made in mag heaven.

‘Papa’s not a rolling stone anymore,’ I continued. ‘He’s a grandpa, he’s a great-grandfather’ (Sir Mick became one in 2014). Harry went a bit quiet – he’d had a traumatic experience with a Jimi Hendrix cover that tanked – but bought my compelling demographic argument (his readers are pushing 80 and so are the dinosaurs of rock) and I got the gig gig.

And so it was that the ‘Golden Oldies’ column was born, and last weekend I saw both Elton John and the Stones in Hyde Park. I’m still standing to report back from the sound stages as the curtain falls on Glastonbury and British Summer Time and the Summertime Ball for another year.

And the news is good – great, even – but with one coda we will come to.

Mick Jagger turns 79 in July. So? He’s still got it, and I would

In fact – as Mick said when he exploded onto stage, legs whipping like black ribbons caught in a dust devil – it was ‘amazin’ to be back in London 60 years after the Stones’ first gig at the Marquee (‘thank you for coming back to see us’) but first up for me was Elton’s 232nd show of his delayed farewell tour.

Elton couldn’t wait to get going and started belting ‘Bennie and the Jets’ before we’d got the beers in so I couldn’t answer the only question my Stones companions (four males aged between 56 and 70) asked about the Farewell Yellow Brick Road Tour, which was: ‘Did Elton come on stage in a wheelchair?’

No, but he was more hip operation than hip.

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