My friend Mitch rings up. ‘Guess what my album of the year is?’ He is trying to fool me into suggesting Donald Fagen’s Morph the Cat, for Mitch and I are both Steely Danoraks of long standing. But I know he was a little disappointed by the album, and he knows I wasn’t. I can’t give him the satisfaction. ‘Don’t know,’ I say. ‘What is your album of the year?’ ‘The Lily Allen album.’ I am dumbfounded. Mitch is staring down the barrel of 50. Lily Allen could be his daughter or, at the very least, the louche older girlfriend of one of his sons. Which, of course, is the explanation. Lily Allen is what his teenage sons are listening to, and, in a reverse of ancient custom, father is rifling through his sons’ record collections and, to his surprise, rather liking what he hears.
How much more complicated can things get? When I was growing up fathers were distant, rather furious creatures who would no more rifle through your record collection than go to work naked. In their spare time they did the gardening and wore appalling baggy sweaters that spoke of a life lived without recourse to rock ’n’ roll. Now, of course, fathers (which is to say people like me and Mitch) are the people who find it hardest to live without rock ’n’ roll: we buy the most music, think we can still dance, pay ridiculous amounts to go and see our favourite acts play live (on the not unreasonable grounds that they will soon be dead). And our poor children ingest pop music with their mother’s milk, barely able to walk or talk before they know how to put on a CD.
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