retrotalk2023: "reunited and it pays so good"

" Your Fave Band Is Reuniting – But Not For the Reasons You Think" - an attempted marshalling of rationales for the legacy act festival / reunion boom, by Danny Wright at Vice. 

I must say I don't disapprove of this kind of thing nearly as much as I did when I wrote Retromania. "Disapproval" isn't quite the right term, anyway - "distaste" is more like it.  I could empathize with the reasons bands did this kind of thing. What else are they supposed to do with themselves?). Money - you can't blame 'em really, mortgage payments to keep up. Plus there's that resolution of interband conflicts/ friends reconciled / writing a happier end to the story than the probably messy and bitter split-up.  The distaste was more about the idea of me being at one of these events, what it would feel like, and also the sense of being a target demographic. 

But, having gone to a couple of these elder-laden festervals in the last few years, I acquired a teensy bit of taste for this kind of thing (a certain queasiness lingers, though). The events are an intriguing mixture of amusement and bemusement. Simply as a sociological phenomenon, there's stuff to observe and to consider. What happens when a youth culture ages out? How weird does it get when subcultural types valiantly persist with the look, despite the attrition of the years. A mass elegy for one's bygone identifications and intensities. 

There's something salutary about being shoved amidst your own (approximate) kind. Seeing how everybody's grappling with decrepitude. 

Also, occasionally, there'll be some actually entertaining performances. Bands you never quite managed to see in their (and your) prime, but they can still pull it off. They might even be better on some level -  musicianship, having the experience and/or the budget to put on a great show.  

Hey, as I'm about to click post on this, the missus alerts to me an upcoming festerval that is trying to out-Cruel World Cruel World - Darker Waves.  Although the lineup isn't that Gothy in fact. 

I suppose what I wonder about is not the top three ranks of the line-up, but below that.... sub-legends (Clan of Xymox, Chameleons etc).  It can't be that rewarding, financially or in terms of ego, reconnecting with the compact following, having to play in the mid-afternoon. 

Also wonder about the musicians who join legends that have suffered personnel erosion... whose function is prosthetic.  (Like, are they any other original band members in "Psychedelic Furs" now, apart from Butler Rep?). I suppose it's a gig. You get to ply your trade. Maybe you were a fan of the leg in question. 

A Past Gone Mad(der)

One of the things that spurred me to start thinking about the book that became Retromania was coming across a bunch of ads for concerts and tours in the back of Uncut and being struck by the jumble they made of rock history -  each page a checkerboard of  adverts for reformed bands, legacy acts still staggering on, cults who wouldn't quit, tribute groups.... there were also strange line-ups that united unlikely bedfellows from across rock's history.  All this being a byproduct of rock's longevity, the fact that the culling isn't coming (at least not quick enough), the elderly seeing no reason (or simply can't afford) to shuffle off stage in to a life of dignified reclusion, but persist in treading the boards beyond retirement age. 

I blogged about it under the headline "A Past Gone Mad" (the first in a short series of 2006 posts)

Since then the past has only gotten madder

Here are some tour adverts I saw on a recent trip to the motherland, taken variously from Viz magazine (snapped in the WH Smith at the airport) and from the colour culture supplement to one of the Sunday papers (the Times I think).

 

Now is that some grotesque version of The Sweet that doesn't include any original members - like a man who's had so many organs transplanted there's barely anything left of him?

Battle of the Pink Floyds - the fake one versus the real remnant

All yesterday's party-hard rockers

I imagine a battle royale over who got top billing