When the Oldie changed ‘leadership’ a few years back I swooped on the new editor, young Harry Mount, like a seagull on a chip.
‘The one thing your great organ is missing is a pop critic!’ I lectured him. The average age of the reader was level-pegging with the pensioners in the rock’n’roll hall of fame: Rod Stewart, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Tina Turner, Stevie Wonder, Bryan Ferry… it was a marriage made in mag heaven.
‘Papa’s not a rolling stone anymore,’ I continued. ‘He’s a grandpa, he’s a great-grandfather’ (Sir Mick became one in 2014). Harry went a bit quiet – he’d had a traumatic experience with a Jimi Hendrix cover that tanked – but bought my compelling demographic argument (his readers are pushing 80 and so are the dinosaurs of rock) and I got the gig gig.
And so it was that the ‘Golden Oldies’ column was born, and last weekend I saw both Elton John and the Stones in Hyde Park.
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