Against All Odds - a lament for fat, bald, old rockers

Like many others, I watched Live 8 in July this year, 20 years after I first stayed up in my oversized fluoro nightdress to watch every move made by Sting, U2 and the delectable Duran Duran as an impressionable pre-teen. While watching I realised that there was something seriously lacking… and it wasn’t Pete Doherty’s memorable ‘performance’, which did at least appear to owe something to the rock lizard preening of his 85 forebear Adam Ant. Predictably, Bob and Midge managed to wheel out a few of their compadres from the class of 85 (and many of those were middle-aged even then), but I don’t think we can even blame them for the absence of the true bombast we saw in 85.

Who can forget the sight of the Freddy Mercury practically felating the shared microphone and busting a few minor arteries as he went for the big guns at the climax of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. Who can forget Mick and Tina (clad in a leather dress) doing the Ragamuffin over in Philadelphia – get a room, you old tarts! I certainly couldn’t get all that raunch and extroversion out of my scandalised 11 year old head.









This year we had the temperate, sober, some might say soporific Coldplay, the worthy, modest REM, the bored looking (but very welcome) Richard Ashcroft. It was all a bit sedate really, wasn’t it? All these guys have been to the indie and post-indie school of rock understatement. There’s none of the gleefully daggy, figurative and sometimes literal bald showmanship of, say Phil Collins or Howard Jones. And even though I was moved to tears by the wonderful, re-formed Pink Floyd – they did seem like relics from the Rock Museum. The days of balls-out hoary old rock, of playing the piano with your arse, and of making grandiose (and yes, ultimately empty) gestures to the fans are gone. Quite gone.

It made me think of something rather silly I’d started to write a while back. I was thinking about the lack of variety, of historical anchorage, in modern mainstream pop. And I wondered if I could make a case for the return of….

THE ROCK DINOSAUR.

It’s a spurious and spectacularly ill-conceived premise, but hear me out, dear reader.

I never thought I’d lament the passing of the rock dinosaur. In the 1980s we saw a glut of middle-aged males flooding the teenage pop charts. Most were cashed up former members of the mega bands of the previous two decades, from both sides of the Altlantic, whose bloated egos were lured out of tax exile with the promise of solo success. The carcasses of the Eagles and Genesis proved particularly fertile, spawning two 80s solo monsters apiece. Don Henley and Glen Frey and their British counterparts Phil Collins and Peter Gabriel produced some of the more memorable pompous epics of the decade. Those of us raised on defiantly underground, scowling, posturing acts like Sonic Youth or the Dead Kennedys might shudder at the thought, but we all know the lyrics to ‘Boys of Summer’ and ‘Against all Odds’ – not least because farty-voiced Pop Idol winners and opportunistic dance producers have bludgeoned us with pale copies in the last few years. And while you might shudder in the admission, ex-indie kids, you will be hard pressed to deny that those original tracks make you want to punch the air – or at least, punch something…where the recent covers leave you completely indifferent.

Throughout the 80s, 1970s juggernauts like Steve Miller Band, Boston, Toto and Chicago (it appeared if you could name your band after an American city you were almost guaranteed soft rock gold) were still issuing overproduced LPs with terrible cover art, noisily grinding into the dotage of their careers. Their solo escapees also basked in this baroque twilight of hairy-chested, old-time rock n roll – Robert Plant, Boz Scaggs, Bob Seger, Peter Cetera of Chicago, Lionel Ritchie of the Commodores - all these thinning, pock marked men of middle age had mammoth hits in the 80s. Some became even more famous in their solo iterations. More surprising still, some middle-aged men – Huey Lewis, to name one – had their first success in that decade, without an earlier, sexier incarnation to smooth their way... unlike respected 70s legend Bruce Springsteen, who was forging ahead with ever more commercial, off-road-vehicle-advert friendly output. Here in Australia, Jimmy Barnes had freed himself of the rest of Cold Chisel and was running amok in the charts in his solo incarnation as the 'Working Class man'.

And who could forget the supergroup? When it wasn’t David Bowie and Mick Jagger getting into their pastel golfing best to dance like Dad at your Aunty Pat’s wedding for ‘Dancing in the Street’ it was a band of rock legends (only three out of five of whom are still alive), the Travelling Willburys, croaking out million selling records and scaring the kids with their ugly mugs on MTV.

And it wasn’t just the out of shape geezers who were making comebacks with Grammy nominated 17th albums and armies of session musos plucked from around the globe. The 80s saw a revival of the careers of several great sixties divas. Aretha, Dusty and, spectacularly, Tina Turner were big all over again – and it wasn’t just their hair. The enormous, middle-aged Aretha Franklin was imploring her mystery man with all the subtlety of a drag queen to ‘drop the pedal and go’. There were dykes about in those days too – Melissa Etheridge, The Indigo Girls. And there were women who really looked like they might be – Annie Lennox, Joan Armatrading, Tracey Chapman. And what about Cher? And Heart? Quite a rag-tag collection of shapes, sizes, colours, ages and preferences. And all big, big hit makers.

The point I’m making is that there was once far more variety for the pop-loving, impressionable pre-teen Countdown (or Top of the Pops) viewer, who at least in my case was to morph into the self-conscious Cure or Smiths or Pixies fan a few years later. But before this happened – before I was old enough to blanche at the mere mention of Billy Joel – variety was an important part of my musical youth. It is now almost impossible to imagine a man who looks like Paul Simon making an impact as a solo star in the sleek, choreographed pop world that we know today.

No short baldies in pop. Is that a problem? I hear you ask. Well, yes….it is.

Like Mike and the Mechanics or, understandably, loathe them, they hail from a time when popular music – admittedly overproduced, often cringeworthy and preachy – was more important than the image of popular music. These were days when a hook was still more important than a headline, a riff more important than a tan. These were days when you might not know what a band (let alone a dance act) looked like at all before you bought their CD. I’m not saying they were pretty times. Politically they were pretty barren times. But the thing about them was, even if we graduated to po-faced independent cool and forever disowned the past, those of us who grew up listening to the pop charts were exposed to a healthy, varied diet of novelty pop, last ditch dinosaur rock, the fading embers of wonderful things like punk, the new wave and synth pop and, admittedly, some horrible American-imported MOR balladeering thrown into the mix. The good, the bad and the ugly. It refined our taste reflexes! These days, if you’re 11 and you listen to popular radio, even if you wanted to hear something by a man over 40 – still less a woman of that age – you simply wouldn’t know where to start.