They (and to some extent my generation of ageing slackers) never let go. But it was, in fact, the ethnographical soundtrack of their people. When the baby boomers invented teenagers and puberty and rock and roll and self-pity, it was thought, erroneously to be “youth culture”, a stage-of-life thing. The ethnographical soundtrackįair enough.
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“That’s the act, boys, but maybe throw in a garish unitard, codpiece and headband?” a cigar-chomping executive must have said at around this time. He has maintained this look for more than 50 years. And Mick is propelled from behind by Charlie Watts, who even then looked as though he was pining for an allotment and post-war cradle-to-grave social services. Mick is flanked on the other side by Faces émigré and “good-at-art” Worzel Gummidge impersonator Ronnie Wood. He is flanked on one side by Spitting Image puppet and drug-storage unit Keith Richards, who wields his guitar haphazardly, like he’s repeatedly falling asleep then waking up jerkily to his own opiate-assisted guitar clangs. Wiry Mick, dressed in a skintight T-shirt and baggy pants, prances and pouts like a particularly sexy chicken (not just a routinely sexy chicken). So, lets forget for a moment the brilliance of Paint it Black or Get off of my Cloud and let’s instead marvel at Mick Jagger in the video to 1980s classic Start Me Up. For the record, I also liked Paul McCartney’s Pipes of Peace album better than Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely-Hearts Club Band and, for the record, I still do. As an impressionable infant Rick-Astley-lookalike, I was under the illusion that the best Sixties bands had perfected their oeuvres in the 1980s, when they added synthesisers, digital reverb, shoulder pads and divorce to the mix. I, however, came upon them significantly later than this, when they had become a vaudevillian travelling revue. Yes, they were the diabolical drug-fuelled bad boys of the 1960s, Dennis the Menace (Mick) and Gnasher (Keith) to The Beatles’ Walter (Ringo) and the Softies (the rest). Select for slide 1 Select for slide 2 Select for slide 3 Select for slide 4 It means that something has gone terribly wrong with culture. The Rolling Stones being one of the biggest touring acts in the world in 2018 is the equivalent of the slapstick stylings of Guy Visser and his Singing Duck (trust me, he was huge in the 1920s) being considered dynamic stadium-filling fare in 1968. If you like, you can choose to see this as a sort of post-Garth Brooks peace and reconciliation commission, although some of the locals view it as a resumption of hostilities and, predictably, want the concert cancelled. Many of their contemporaries, Count John McCormack, Rod Hull and Emu, Lord Byron and O’Carolan the blind harpist, are gone, but this doesn’t stop Mick and his vassals from ignoring the advice of most gerontologists and bringing their nostalgic money-printing machine to Croke Park. They’ve been cosplaying as teenagers, wearing their big fibreglass Macnas heads, attempting to reclaim their lost humanity while craving the sweet release of death, or at least a bit of a nap, for over five decades now. The Rolling Stones are coming to Ireland on May 17th with their harpsichords, hunting horns, bone-flutes, lutes and an entourage of serfs and retainers and lute technicians. I know I like to break new comedic ground in this column.
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This is a joke about how long The Rolling Stones have been around. So I’m going to go out on a limb and assume it was left there by Keith Richards on an early Rolling Stones tour. However, I am bad at retaining documentary-delivered facts.
![ages of the rolling stones ages of the rolling stones](https://www.thesun.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/NINTCHDBPICT000468322232-e1550463299630.jpg)
This week I watched a similar instrument being played for an appreciative Simon Schama in a cave daubed with prehistoric ochre paintings on BBC1’s excellent Civilisations. The oldest musical instrument in the world is a 42,000-year-old bone flute found in southwestern Germany.