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”.

Compare and contrast with the anonymous sidemen drafted into other revived knackered old rock bands who take themselves a tad more seriously than this ancient crew.

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.

Watching the Bonzoes’ June gig I was struck by the similarity of the humour. Milligan-style anarchy in the UK. It was a group of mainly old men having a great and silly time, on and off stage. It was only when Roger Ruskin Spear’s explosive robotic device failed to blow up – and he foolhardily but funnily returned to try and fix it - that you saw the link between the post war humour of explosions, National Service and its demise, the Bonzoes and Groovy Old Men. Milligan, Spear and any other post war comedian that coaxed a laugh out of an explosion was relieving his and our post-war tension by laughing at destruction. (A doctor writes.)

Most official histories portray National Service as beneficial and worthy of revival. It licked men into shape. It taught discipline, and in some cases unarmed combat. It will knock some sense into today’s knife-wielding teenage youth. However, I would guess that most men who had to do it thought it a waste of time. The threat of orthodox warfare receded and an even bigger nuclear bang was being perfected in the wings, as they square-bashed, target-practiced and jumped out of aeroplanes. It was a big big bang that would make their service redundant. The irony wasn’t lost on many of these guys. In the later fifties, National Service became a joke, and quite a good one. It also pitched together men of all classes and backgrounds, perfect conditions for sharing the fun. What today’s youth lack is a sense of the absurd. Put ‘em in uniforms and show them how to blow stuff up, that’s what I say.

GROOVY OLD BLOG (GOB)

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!"

Groovy Old Men is a new book charting the rise of an impressive new species of older man,by journalist, broadcaster and producer Nick Baker. It is published in October 2008 by Icon Books

Groovy Old Men still move with the times. They’re still into sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, still work, and see age as no reason to stop having fun. They were present at the birth of youth culture in the 50s, sighing with relief at missing National Service and reeling from the impact of Bill Haley. They’re now part of a new breed of older men who are, as Nick Baker brilliantly argues in this unique, funny and occasionally touching book, on the march.

Groovy Old Men is packed full of interviews with experts and archetypes like designer Sir Paul Smith, radical Tariq Ali, veteran writer Ray Gosling, bioethics expert Professor John Harris and Mark Ellen, former member of Ugly Rumours, the band once led by Tony Blair. And lots of ordinary Groovy Old Men too.

A humorous, entertaining and occasionally provocative commentary on older male life in the noughties, Nick Baker’s book invents then dissects the Groovy Old Men phenomenon, and peers into the glamorous world of Groovy Old Men of the future.

Click here to pre-order your copy at Amazon.co.uk.

Nick Bakerwas born in 1952 and lives in London with his partner and two teenage sons. He has been a teacher, journalist, writer for teenagers, award-winning radio reporter (he’s still a familiar voice on Radio 4) and producer. He runs Testbed, a long established radio and audio independent production company.