We should take Robbie Williams more seriously

Oh, nostalgia – so much better than it used to be! You’d never have guessed pop music was once the preserve of teenagers had you been visiting the Greenwich peninsula last week – not from the crowds, or from the artists. Here were Roxy Music, whose four core members boast a combined age of 295, playing what might be their last ever show. Here were the Tops and the Temps, bands each with just one original member left – 86-year-old Duke Fakir of the Tops, 80-year-old Otis Williams of the Temps. And here was the absolute youngster of the lot, Robbie Williams, a stripling of 48, but 32 years into his pop career. Blimey, I know we keep being told retirement at 65 is a thing of the past, but this was ridiculous.

The oddity was that it seemed as though Roxy had the oldest crowd of all. Odd because Roxy’s influence has echoed down the decades in so many new pop movements. Every couple of years there’s a hot new band trying to be early Roxy, all archness and glitter and mixing skronk and melody, while one of alternative music’s most prevalent current trends is a sonic devotion to the sound Bryan Ferry and co were making on their Avalon and Manifesto albums, a kind of distanced, uncertain, anxious sophistication. Young people still want to be Roxy, they just don’t want to see them (or, possibly, they can’t afford to see them).

Truth be told, Roxy didn’t have quite the magic of the Bryan Ferry solo show I reviewed in these pages just as the first lockdown struck. Perhaps that show gained some extra edge from the knowledge that cataclysm was just around the corner, whereas this was much less emotionally complex.