When the Rolling Stones play Slane later this summer, it would be nice if - within reason, anyway - they were allowed to act their age. The revised set might therefore include songs about some of the problems associated with advanced male maturity: back pain, aggressive nasal-hair growth, the horrors of the digital prostate examination, and so on, writes Frank McNally
More likely, though, they will be forced by popular demand to reprise all their early stuff, hits such as Let's Spend the Night Together, Satisfaction,and Jumpin' Jack Flash.Their contemporaries in the audience will be reclining comfortably on seats that the promoters have wisely provided for the expected demographic. But, like hamsters trapped inside the wheel of eternal adolescence, the band will be expected to roll back the years and pretend it's still 1964.
The cult of everlasting youthfulness is normally blamed on rock 'n' roll, and rightly so. "Hope I die before I get old" is still the defining lyric of the genre. And yet arguably the most articulate musical expression of age denial is on - of all things - a Frank Sinatra standard: It was a Very Good Year.
The song was written in 1961, which may partly explain it, although it really belongs to an earlier time. At any rate it is justly regarded as a classic. It is still widely used as a soundtrack for moments of bittersweet nostalgia on television, from The Sopranos to the episode of the The Simpsons in which Homer recalls his first drinking escapade with a version of the ballad entitled: "It was a Very Good Beer".
Ervin Drake's limpid lyrics, matched perfectly by Sinatra's voice and offset with lush orchestration, use wine as a metaphor for a life recalled in a series of "vintage" years. As a sub-theme, the writer also remembers the different kinds of "girls" he knew along the way. Thus, it begins with him aged 17: ". . a very good year/ For small-town girls and soft summer nights/ We'd hide from the lights/ On the village green/ When I was 17." So far, so good.
In the second verse, the singer has come of age: "It was a very good year/ For city girls who lived up the stair/ With all that perfumed hair/ And it came undone/ When I was 21." Lovely. And so, fast-forward to verse three, where our hero is in his 30s and has obviously fallen in with money. "It was a very good year/ For blue-blooded girls of independent means/ We'd ride in limousines/ Their chauffeurs would drive/ When I was 35." Our interest is piqued now. We want to know what happened in his 40s and 50s: if he got married; how he adjusted to retirement; and so on. Unfortunately, this is a three-minute song. So instead, in the fourth and final verse, suddenly, the singer is on his last legs.
He doesn't even specify his age, except to say that it is "autumn" and that his days "grow short": "Now I think of my life/ As vintage wine from fine old kegs/ From the brim to the dregs/ It poured sweet and clear/ It was a very good year." And there it is. The message is that once you turn 35, it's all over, except for the dregs. No rock 'n' roll song has ever put it quite so bluntly.
Despite its depressing subtext, A Very Good Year is still vastly superior to the nostalgia piece for which Frank Sinatra is best known, My Way. An anthem for the terminally smug, My Way also looks back on a life well lived, but without the lightness of Drake's lyrics. No offence to Sinatra's performance, but I prefer the 1978 version in which the song was justifiably massacred by Sid Vicious.
Vicious would have been 50 today, and it is intriguing to think what he might be doing had he lived. It's fair to say that, his rendition of My Way aside, he was no great loss to music. The Sex Pistols reputedly hired him for his comic-scary appearance rather than his ability to play bass. Although the band was short of virtuosi generally, it is said that his amplifier was left unplugged during some concerts to spare the audience.
Even so, he might have cobbled together enough of a musical career by now to be a guest on I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. Or perhaps the sensitive nature that those close to him always insisted he had would have found another outlet, such as painting. Maybe he would have retired from public life altogether, to run an antiques shop in the Cotswolds. We'll never know.
His stage name was apparently borrowed from a bad-tempered hamster (owned by Johnny Rotten), but the two-legged Sid fell off his wheel early. He and Nancy Spungen were hapless as individuals. Together they were a car-crash: their lives and deaths a bad punk version of Romeo and Juliet.
Sid Vicious was probably one of the last victims of an era in which rock stars were expected to die young. There have been sporadic cases since then, it's true - most famously Kurt Cobain. But it used to be almost part of the job description. Rock stars were modern gladiators, living short, violent lives for the entertainment of the masses before succumbing, heroically or otherwise.
Now it's respectable for rockers to live into their 60s and - livers permitting - beyond, just so long as they don't write songs about the process. Unfortunately there were very few positive role models around in Sid Vicious's time. So without even the excuse of being a tortured genius, he followed the then traditional career path for a popular musician, becoming yet another sacrifice on the overcrowded altar of the cult of youth.