When British heavy metal legends Iron Maiden play Auckland’s Spark Arena on September 16, its two founding members – bassist Steve Harris and guitarist Dave Murray – will be 68 and 67 respectively.
Singer Bruce Dickinson will be 66, which means he’s been screaming “your soul’s gonna burn in the lake of fire” from Can I Play With Madness for more than three decades.
And on their way in November are the punk-era Buzzcocks (one original member, 69-year-old Steve Diggle) with other greybeards from that era, Modern English.
Even those mouthy Mancunians, Noel and Liam Gallagher of Oasis, are getting up there: Noel will be 58 when – and perhaps if – the re-formed band start touring next year; younger brother Liam will be only 52, but he’s already passed through that rite of passage for the elderly: the hip operation.
Advanced in years they may be, but these musicians are among many touring artists who defy the attritions of age. And they’re still younger than many.
Jazz legend Herbie Hancock – who arrives in New Zealand next month – will be 84, three years older than Joe Biden.
In May, Bob Dylan turned 83. Perhaps he got a call from 91-year-old well-wisher Willie Nelson reminding him of their upcoming tour together. Paul McCartney – 82 in June – might also have sent best wishes. He’s heading out again after a successful 2023 Got Back tour.
Robert Plant just had a day off mid-tour in America for his 76th birthday but was back out the next morning with Alison Krauss and joining Dylan, Nelson and 72-year-old John Mellencamp on the Outlaw Festival Tour.
Also on that endless highway through the US and Europe are John Fogerty, 79, Bonnie Raitt, 74, Lucinda Williams, 71, who’s coming back after a stroke in 2020, and Bruce Springsteen (74, out with the band until November).
The 78-year-old Neil Young has upcoming US dates. The Stones have just finished a tour: Mick Jagger turned 81 just after their last show and Keith Richards is 80.
In this country recently, we’ve seen Jackson Browne, 75, Graham Nash, 82, and James Taylor, 76, under the spotlight. The still sprightly Neil Finn, 66, has taken out another line-up of Crowded House – which includes his two sons – in support of their new album Gravity Stairs. Bassist Nick Seymour is 65, keyboard player Mitchell Froom turns 71 in late June. Finn’s big brother Tim, 72, took his retrospective show The Lives and Times of Tim Finn around Australasia last year.
So what’s the call of the road for people of this vintage?
Jazzman Hancock says it’s a privilege to play music he has written and reinvent it every night for people. “There’s nothing like it.”
The answer is perhaps simple: it’s what they do, so why stop? Maybe it’s a variation on the philosophical question: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it ….”
If your purpose in life is to entertain people, do you exist in the absence of an audience?
In 2006, Keith Richards told me, “In a way, the band is an engine and the audience is the fuel. You exchange each other’s energy.
“There’s a special thing in working a crowd because of the amount of energy coming at you, so you use it and try and bounce it back.
“There are two shows going on; one is us and the other is what we see in the audience.”
Serj Tankian of System of a Down says in his new memoir Down With the System: “The feeling of being on stage, as most artists will attest to, is unlike any other high you can experience in life. Imagine a whole city laser-focused on sending their loving energy, partying and enjoying themselves. For me, the joy of being up there was also the transcendent bond it created among the band members themselves.”
All those years in practice rooms, the arguments, “musical differences” and road miles to cheap motels pays off in that hour or so in front of an audience.
Sometimes, of course, it is about the money. The late Leonard Cohen had to come out of retirement at 73 when he discovered a manager had embezzled his savings. But the connection with the audience invigorated him; he skipped on stage for concerts which sometimes ran to three hours.
Maybe applause and adulation are addictive?
Dylan’s concerts often present a challenge for those who want to hear him deliver his songs as he did on albums, but his recent Rough and Rowdy Ways tour was widely hailed and Dylan seemed to enjoy it, adding songs by artists from the city he was in.
And in response to a heckler jocularly shouting “play something we know”, he sang his When I Paint My Masterpiece in the manner of Irving Berlin’s whimsical Putting on the Ritz and the Four Lads’ Istanbul.
Most of these acts don’t have much trouble selling out venues, sometimes huge stadia.
Madonna, 66 in August, wound up her 2023-24 Celebration tour at Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana Beach before an estimated 1.6 million people. Yes, it was a free concert, but she could afford it. The tour recouped somewhere north of $75 million.
So few of these artists need the money. McCartney could probably buy half the South Island and carpet it, if he so desired.
Touring is much easier and more professional these days, especially for artists whose first experience was huddling in the back of a cold van going around Britain or the US.
“In the modern era,” writes Chris Stein of Blondie in his new memoir Under a Rock, “touring was a different animal than it was for us in the 1970s and 80s.
“It was industrialised, streamlined and decidedly less frantic … the buses were all equipped with DVD players … I watched probably hundreds of movies while lying on faux-leather benches in rear compartments.”
For the audience there’s always a knot of reasons for buying a ticket to an older act, even though some are eye-wateringly expensive: it’s about seeing legends; nostalgia for music written into their autobiography – which also explains tribute acts – and the sense of occasion.
In a more recent interview, I suggested to Richards that once people came to bask in the Stones’ notoriety, but these days, it’s for the event itself.
“Yes, it’s weird, because no one has been here this long in a rock’n’roll band,” he said. “I think we just carried the generation along with us and some of the younger ones still pick it up.
“You expect to be rejected by the next generation because that’s what they do. But there seems to be some thread in what we do that busts through all that, and thank god it’s a long piece of string.”
For the paying public, there’s also the thought “this could be the last time”, although we’ve been saying that about Dylan, McCartney and Nelson for decades.
The road does take its toll though: Jimmy Barnes was whipped into hospital a few weeks ago after his Dunedin concert for another operation on his hip. The previous hospital appearance for the 68-year-old was last December when he was in for open-heart surgery.
For a man who made his name with screaming in tune, Barnes has been lucky in one regard: he can still sing. Unlike Aerosmith’s Steve Tyler, who announced – coincidentally as Barnes was going into surgery – that the band would be calling it quits immediately because of his ongoing vocal cord issues.
Sometimes artists seem to signal their retirement: Willie Nelson’s 2022 album A Beautiful Time sounded like a farewell note and McCartney’s Memory Almost Full album found him in a reflective mood, in The End of the End, singing, “on the day that I die I’d like jokes to be told …”
But that album came out 17 years ago and Dylan’s Not Dark Yet (“but it’s gettin’ there”) on Time Out of Mind was a decade before that.
Here, we see very few locals – what record companies call “legacy artists” – touring regularly. There are one-off concerts or short tours by the likes of Dragon and Hello Sailor, their line-ups rejigged with ring-ins to take the place of respective frontmen Marc Hunter (died 1998), Graham Brazier (2015) and Dave McArtney (2013). But in this small country, the road and a repeat audience run out quickly. Back to the day job.
Last month, Th’ Dudes played a sold-out show at Auckland’s Powerstation but without guitarist-singer Sir Dave Dobbyn, 67, who will be returning to his usual summer festival duties.
The Jordan Luck Band, playing the songs of the 61-year-old frontman’s Exponents days, start their season of shows at a seafood festival in Whitianga this month. On New Year’s Eve, you can find Luck’s band, Hello Sailor and Dragon playing a festival in Twizel.
While many of our senior artists have retired or died, 77-year-old Shane Hales – a member of The Pleazers in the 1960s, a frequent face on television’s C’mon and behind the 1969 hit St Paul – plays most weekends with his Shazam! Band.
The NZ Highwaymen of Gray Bartlett, Dennis Marsh and Brendan Dugan all celebrated their 70th birthdays some time ago but recently wrapped up a national tour, with Frankie Stevens subbing in for an ailing Eddie Low.
The retirement tour is good business, as Joan Baez, Elton John, Paul Simon and Rod Stewart proved in recent years, although Stewart – 78 when he played here in early 2023 – was lucky the audience sang his hits back to him because his voice was a shadow of what it once was. He seemed incidental to the lights, band and the production.
His energetic opener Cyndi Lauper, 69 at the time and who has announced a short farewell tour starting in October, proved a still-powerful singer, and with her Noo Yawk humour, was entertaining.
And at some level it’s about entertainment.
As Steven Van Zandt of Springsteen’s E Street Band observed, “When people come to the [Springsteen] show, as serious as a lot of our stuff is, by the end you’ll have had quite a range of emotions, one of which is you had fun.
“And that’s increasingly rare. You look around and think, ‘Where’s the fun?’
“We [musicians] really all just got into it at some point because it’s fun.”
Will Noel and Liam Gallagher think it fun being back together after 15 years apart, sniping at each other? Rumour has it they’ll pick up about £50m each (about $105m apiece) for the tour. That’ll ease any pain.
So, fun, money, the applause and the desire for a life less ordinary. Or simply a calling?
In Tangled Up in Blue almost half a century ago, Bob Dylan sang, “All the people we used to know, they’re an illusion to me now. Some are mathematicians, some are carpenter’s wives, I don’t know how it all got started, I don’t what they do with their lives.
“But me, I’m still on the road heading for another joint … "
Still is.
