Monday 24 November 2008
Go Vest, Young Man
Monday 6 October 2008
The Groovy Old Podcast
Thursday 28 August 2008
SING IF YOU'RE GLAD TO BE GREY...
Good old fashioned panic. That’s how almost all the press greeted the latest report from the Office for National Statistics about “greying Britain.”
We’re all doomed! Prepare for a Britain in which pedal-powered ambulances roam the streets with “bring out your old!” sung through a megaphone to the tune of “bring out your dead” by latter-day Baldrick types. Not only will we have run out of oil. We’ll have run out of youth. The number of pensioners already exceeds those under 16. Prepare for the fall out from the explosion of the “population time bomb”.
The Age Concern boss demanded immediate improvement from the NHS in “mental health and foot care.” Imagine hoards of ancient, bewildered bunion-sufferers milling aimlessly in our city centres. Meanwhile young chiropodists – their youth and foot-care expertise prized for their rarity - grow rich on the laws of supply and demand. Elite squads of Para-psycho-feetcarers will be needed, licensed to trim hard-to-reach toenails and offer counselling, but without the credentials to tackle a full on verruca or prescribe valium.
The threat is something we need to deal with now. Old people. These limping crazed crones could destroy life as we know it. According to all the papers they will be forced to work on until their seventies, which means they will take our jobs and…Wait a minute. It’s not them. It’s us. And we’re modern, aren’t we? We grew up with youth culture. Better health care. So why all the fuss? The new old – or a lot of them - will know what they want and won’t be scared to ask for it. A lot will have jobs and a bit of money. And they - sorry we will be in the majority! So lets prepare for a new kind of old age. Ours. (Especially the men, who tended to die before they get old. See book.)
Wednesday 6 August 2008
GROOVY OLD MEN ON THE FRONT PAGE OF THE INDIE
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/groovy-old-men-the-rise-of-the-silver-swingers-1442376.html
....but sad to see that they’ve got the wrong end of the stick about the whole idea. Maybe they should have read it first.
The Indie piece groans with brand names and references to hoity toity new rock bands, as well as the obligatory reference to Mick Jagger at 65. Groovy Old Men isn’t about that. The guys I spoke to over the past year or so are old enough and wise enough not to worry about labels or whether they are as fit as Mick. They may have a passing interest in the Stones but they’re old enough and wise enough not to see them as comparable to real people. Or to worry about brands. The real GOM treats brands and bands in the same way. If they like em, they’ll buy. They don’t give a stuff about what the Indie thinks is Groovy. Or what anyone else thinks, for that matter. Despite what the Indie claims, Groovy Old Men isn’t a “style bible.” It’s a spotter’s guide. Style bibles are so eighties.
Spotter’s guides are rather early-sixties. But unlike the old I-Spy books which encouraged kids like me, sitting in the back of the Ford Popular, to tick the boxes for a police box or a foreign motor car, the idea of Groovy Old Men is to get people to assess the older men they encounter. Treat them as real people with real histories and cultures. Work out how Groovy they are without too much reference to designer pants or name-drop rock.
The Indie also featured the obligatory online vote for the silverest fox, or some such nonsense. Entertaining, space-filling stuff, but nothing to do with Groovy Old Men. Vote for the punkiest punk, the gothiest goth or the rockiest rocker if you want, but the original conception of Groovy Old Men has nothing to do with top tens, lists of brand names, or celebrity haircuts. Groovy Old Men are too old (and too relaxed) to be swayed by upmarket shopping lists. That’s the whole point. For many, it’s a case of “When I am old I will listen to Deep Purple.”
Wednesday 16 July 2008
HAVING SOME RESPECT FOR YOUR GROOVY ELDERS
Lets not forget the Bonzoes’ front-man stand-ins: Phil Jupitus, Ade Edmonson and occasionally Stephen Fry inhabit the role of Viv Stanshall, but make it their own. Younger guys who see it as a privilege to place their own Doughnut in Grandad’s Greenhouse, so to speak. Jupitus also “does” Ian Dury with the Blockheads, and he does it well. There may be a new career for Groovy Old and not so old Men. Taking over the careers of dead stars. But, to quote Dury’s song called This is What We Find: “A sense of humour is required, among the bacon rind”.
GROOVY OLD MEN, NATIONAL SERVICE, THE BONZO DOG DOO DAH BAND AND LOUD EXPLOSIONS
Explosions can be funny. Nerve-wrackingly unpredictable. Once a fuse is lit, and you know it’s going to happen but you don’t know when, the only way successfully to deal with a big bang is to laugh. Even if the bang turns out to be an anticlimactic whimper, it’s funny. Never return to a lit explosive – unless of course you are in the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, whose membership has always involved a certain amount of risk. Its leader, Viv Stanshall, accidentally and unpredictably died in a fire in Muswell Hill in 1995, don’t forget.
The Bonzoes are from the Big Bang era. No, they’re not that old, but they are all of an age when National Service was a predictable part of male growing up. When guns and bombs were still considered educational. Spike Milligan was the first to process his own explosive wartime history into comedy. Hell for him, great for us.
Saturday 12 July 2008
GROOVY OLD BLOG (GOB)
Groovy Old Blog, you might call it, and here’s where you can read about more recent sightings of Groovy Old Men and related matters:
Shorts, tattooed legs, down-the-gym chests, nice tans, lined Golden-Virgina faces, cap sleeved t-shirts, number one headcuts. These two geezers in my local tobacconists look prime examples of a kind of Groovy Old Men not in the book. My guess is they’re former mods – aged twenty in 1965, so early sixties now. It’s a good look. But spoilt by their braying over a red-top headline about teenage stabbing.
“In our fuckin day we knew how to fuckin fight,” one protests. “Now it’s all knives.” The other agrees, aggressively: “Yeah, in our day we knew what a punch up fuckin was.” They’re building a head of steam. “Bloody stabbing – they want to have a good fight, like we did!” The trouble is, they keep agreeing with each other, so there’s nowhere for it to go. And the agreement seems to be getting louder. I get out of the shop before a hoody comes in and the ex-mods vent their agreement on him.
But not before clocking a headline which says that some thin faced Stone has run off with an eighteen year old girl. Now I’m home from the shops I can’t even remember which, without a Google. Here we are. It is Ronnie Wood, hard-drinking bad-painting former Small Face has run off with Russian 18 year old cocktail waitress. You couldn't make it up. (Well maybe you could) It gets worse. The Faces are to reform, according to the NME. And poor old Ronnie failed to sell his self-portrait (with Rod also pictured) on Ebay. “In my day we knew how to flog a self portrait wiv Rod Stewart!" “Yeah we fuckin did…” "And we never had ebay”. "Nah we never!"