Dear Hugh 5
Wednesday May 11th 2005
DEAR HUGH,
As you know, there is little better than driving through a town with the windows down, playing Springsteen’s Rosalita so loudly that people in the street outside can’t hear themselves talk.
But I’ve noticed that this practice is sadly dying out among chaps of our age. Like the playing of Conkers and Cribbage, the noisy old man is becoming a thing of past and happier days as more and more tune safely instead to the cheap-amphetamine babble that is “Five Live”, the nation’s only radio station seemingly staffed by those on work experience.
Don’t get the wrong idea, I’m not saying the streets are quiet now. Far from it. But unfortunately the monopoly these days is held by teenage drug-dealers glowering along to the ding-a-donga rap booming from their uninsured BMWs. Which is perfectly fine for the deaf and for those who live in perpetual hope that one day a rap song will be written which includes the novelty of a melody. But although I’m up for free noise for everybody, I just wonder when did we middle-agers lose the will to make a din for ourselves?
Keith Richards, my style and health guru, once questioned why rock and roll “should only be the preserve of juveniles and adolescents” and, as he is with most things of a rebellious nature, he was right. Just because we can steer the car with our beer bellies these days, it doesn’t mean that we have to act our age.
As you know, I am forever bemoaning the fact that we baby boomers of the Sixties vintage should not be expected to behave like our fathers and grandfathers did before us, because we were weaned on far too much freedom of thought for us to get “normal” and conservative in our autumn years.
Like it or not, we are what David Bailey called “The New Old”, a generation that is distinct for not been replicas of its parents. We do not dress, vote, think or party like previous generations did at our age. Look at the statistics; 85% of the wealth in the UK is created by the over-45s, 62% of albums are bought by the over-40s, sales of Harley Davidsons are significantly highest to those of our mob, and I’ve yet to meet a menopausal male who does not hanker to own a Fender or a Gibson. Or at least an Epiphone copy. Even our drugs are better quality than our kids’ gear.
And yet popular culture treats us like lepers and because of their indifference we of Our Age feel so insignificant that we have taken to acting like dogs, curled up quietly beneath the table of the banquet of life.
Television, newspapers and especially Radio 1 gives scant regard to the massive disposable income that we collectively possess as they would far rather chase after the attention of the penniless pimple people simply because some drunk from the marketing department has told them that it is more cool to appeal to kids. It may be rubbish economics, but it’s cooler. So that’s alright then.
Of course, the world’s worst offender in this plague of ignoring Our Generation of chaps is ITV. I don’t know who is making the decisions there these days but they really ought to be taken out the back and shot for crimes against common sense.
The schedules are bad enough in the week, when you can’t move for programmes that all seem to need to feature a cleaning lady, but at least we miss most of them because we’re working late. But you’d have thought that there might be someone of CSE intelligence at ITV who could have worked out that there is no point screening programmes for teenagers on weekend nights because, on weekend nights, teenagers are out being teenagers and are therefore not watching. So of course the ratings are falling, idiot, because the target audience is elsewhere and the audience that is in cannot be captivated by the like of the grotesquely-puerile Celebrity Wrestling.
Just as a side-bar, by the way, how do you think the black-suited geniuses at ITV came up with Celebrity Wrestling? I mean, how many years did you have to spend at Cambridge to create that one? Personally I think the whole thing was just the result of somebody at the MIP festival getting hold of Howard Marks’s stash, because if ever there was a four in the morning idea, Celebrity Wrestling is it. As I say, shoot the beggars. But sue them first for conspiracy to destroy intelligence.
Anyway, back to the issue and the point is that unless we start making a noise for ourselves we will be further condemned to the dustbins of inconsequence that are our sheds. So get out in the car, wind down the windows, tune in, turn on and turn it up. I recommend Springsteen’s No Surrender. Or anything by Keef.
GB