On the evening of 13 July 1985, when Paul McCartney performed “Let It Be” to close Live Aid at Wembley, he was the all-star lineup’s senior statesman. 

Almost all the pop stars initially assembled by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure for the Band Aid charity single the previous autumn had been in their twenties. For the Live version, they’d allowed in grown-ups like Queen, The Who and Phil Collins. But the most venerable of them all was McCartney — seemingly a grandfather figure. In fact, he had just turned 43.

Half a lifetime later, again in front of both a huge physical and TV audience, when McCartney headlined Glastonbury 2022 — by which time he actually was an old man, having just turned 80 — he scarcely seemed any older. 

This comparison is the launch point for David Hepworth’s compelling examination of the phenomenon of how rock’n’roll went from being a medium aimed at and performed by teenagers to one dominated by men (and, just occasionally, women) in their fifties, sixties, seventies or older, both on stage and in the audience. 

In contrast to the longevity of McCartney and peers, Hepworth recounts the story of John Entwistle, bassist in The Who — the band whose youth anthem “My Generation” gave him his book’s twist-on-it title. 

Entwistle wasn’t to die before he got old, or to get old before he died, but went in late middle age, and in memorable circumstances: in a Las Vegas hotel room having consumed cocaine with a stripper 25 years his junior. 

I recall this happening. It was in 2002 and it then seemed grimly funny — that a man of such advanced years would still have such appetites. I discover now that he was exactly the same age – 57 — at the time of his death that I am now. So perhaps it wasn’t strange or funny after all. 

But it’s not just Entwistle’s death so much as his life leading up to it that makes him the stand-out character in Hepworth’s pantheon of overindulged white, male rockers. A man who, when not on lucrative US stadium tours, finds himself lonely and bored, holed up in a 57-room Cotswolds mansion with nothing to do to relieve the monotony but buy more and more vintage cars. Hepworth’s portrayal recalls the Gary Bloke rockstar character in the long-running Private Eye cartoon, Celeb, recast as tragic hero.

And Entwhistle wasn’t even the most debauched member of The Who—- that was Keith Moon who only made it to 32. 

Moon and Entwistle aside, many of the “My Generation” are still standing, as Elton put it — and if they are still standing, they are almost inevitably still touring too. Bob Dylan’s, which started in 1988 and is still ongoing, has become known as “the never ending tour”. Then there are Macca, Elton, the surviving members of The Who and The Stones — and many, many others, all still filling stadiums, and shifting merch.

Some even feel compelled to keep going when all sense says they should stop. Glen Campbell’s final world tour in 2011 came when he was in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s. He required a video prompter to be able to introduce his band — which included his own children — but could still play the guitar solos on “Wichita Lineman” and the rest faultlessly.

Heritage acts with long histories and well-known back catalogues are particularly easy to market

This phenomenon, Hepworth suggests, is down to an extraordinary shift in the way music acts earn money: record and CD sales which once earned them many millions have now given way to streaming which pays a fraction of the old royalties. Meanwhile concerts, which were once just a means of promoting new albums, have undergone the reverse equation, with ticket prices since Live Aid seeing price rises so enormous that they are comparable to house price inflation. 

This means that big tours can generate astronomical amounts of money. Heritage acts with long histories and well-known back catalogues are particularly easy to market, making septuagenarian stadium fillers now normal. Famously death-defying Keith Richards has a good way to acknowledge this phenomenon, Hepworth relates, greeting the band’s vast crowds with: “It’s good to be here…it’s good to be anywhere”. 

But bands are brands and audiences buy into them on that basis, so The Rolling Stones together could fill Hyde Park two years ago just as easily — if not more so — as they had in 1969. But Mick or Keith alone could not. Hepworth cites the example of Roger Waters as a solo artist, struggling to sell tickets to his 1990 show predicated around the fall of the Berlin Wall when he could have sold out instantly under the Pink Floyd brand name were he and David Gilmour not too consumed by mutual hatred to allow that to happen. 

But for every Floyd there are many more who are persuaded to bury hatchets — by money. See the ongoing frenzy around Noel and Liam Gallagher. Last year they were playing separately at arenas. Next year they will together play four nights at Wembley stadium. My first Glastonbury,1985, cost £17. If/when Oasis headline there next year tickets will cost in the region of £350. And still sell out instantly. 

Some bands are so determined to keep the show on the road that they’ll try to keep going without their main star: see Queen with a stand-in Freddie Mercury or The Sex Pistols’ forthcoming tour with Frank Turner in the “tonight, Matthew, I’m going to be Johnny Rotten” role.

And only the most curmudgeonly rockers — like Rotten/Lydon in 2024 — can afford to miss out or sustain their feuds to the grave. 

The winners in this category are Creedence Clearwater Revival. The band only actually existed for four very successful years — which were followed by four decades of squabbling. Band leader John Fogerty didn’t speak to his bandmate and brother Tom for the 20 years leading up to his death — and they never played together again after that split in 1972. 

Today’s lucrative gig economy is underpinned by fans desperate not to miss out — often dementedly so. My favourite mad fan in Hope I Get Old is the Dylan obsessive who moves to his hero’s hometown, Duluth, Minnesota, to buy up every artefact he can find: Bob’s babyhood high-chair, his high school yearbook, even the two houses he grew up in. When asked what he himself would ask Bob Dylan were he ever granted an audience, his answer is not, say, “what was the meaning of Visions of Johanna?” but — which of the two bedrooms in the first Duluth house did young Bob actually sleep in?

Hepworth is no spring chicken himself (he lost his virginity, we learn, at around the time Penny Lane came out — 1967). He has been a music writer for as long as Elton John, say, has been a pop star, and he certainly knows his stuff — and consequently the book is peppered with pleasing detail. 

I particularly liked this vignette: “He [Paul McCartney] dropped in on the philosopher Bertrand Russell at his Chelsea home. Since the venerable sage was at the time 93 and had been raised by a grandfather who remembered the French Revolution first hand and a great-aunt who danced with Napoleon this was an early indication of the fact that in the fullness of time it would be possible to link anything on earth with the Beatles.” I’m not certain the math here quite works but it’s hard to argue with the sentiment. 

The day that McCartney dropped in on Russell was in June 1966 — the month when he was turning 24. I’m sure the “venerable sage” must have seemed impossibly ancient to him then. But McCartney himself is now a mere 11 years from reaching the same venerable age — and if he does make it that far I don’t doubt he will still be touring.