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Why can't we get over the 60s?

The Stones are coming back ... and The Who, The Likely
Lads and the Marquee.
Even Spider-Man was born in 1963. Why, asks Juliette
Garside, Arts
Correspondent, do we still live in the shadow of a
decade which swung so
briefly?

Pete Townshend is decades beyond the deadline he
imposed on himself when he
wrote My Generation. The immortal line 'Hope I die
before I get old' has
returned to haunt The Who each time the ageing rockers
release a new song
or, as they are preparing to do, set off on another
farewell tour.
The Who are far from the only 1960s hangover to have
hung around from their
g-g-g-generation.The umpteenth Rolling Stones tour,
announced last week and
billed as the biggest yet, begins in the US this
September and will continue
into summer 2003, with dates yet to be announced in
Mexico, Europe,
Australia and perhaps even China. And still they will
Not Fade Away.

The Stones and The Who will not be playing to a
thinning gaggle of
post-midlife-crisis fans. These latest outings, like
all those preceding
them, will be huge. Promoters are whispering greedily
about figures upwards
of #70 million. Tickets will fetch #200 for some
venues, while the top price
for The Who's farewell concert this summer is over
#350.

Then there's Bob Dylan, whose Never Ending Tour
returns to Britain later
this year; Pink Floyd; Neil Young; Paul McCartney,
whose current tour of the
US is his most successful in years ... even that
staple of the swinging
sixties, the Marquee club, is to reopen, only moved to
ultra-fashionable
Islington.

It's not just music. The shadow of the 1960s looms
over film, literature,
television, publishing, photography -- virtually every
aspect of our
culture.

Last year, we had Tim Burton's remake of the 1968 film
Planet of the Apes,
and the first instalment of the Lord of the Rings
trilogy, based on a book
written in the 1950s but popularised by the 1960s
counterculture, made more
money than any other film in 2001. Even this year's
biggest blockbuster,
Spider-Man, is based on a cartoon character invented
-- guess when? -- in
1963.

British television is getting in on the act too. The
Likely Lads (born in
1965) are being revived for a one-off sitcom, this
time with Ant and Dec
replacing James Bolam and Rodney Bewes in the lead
roles.

One of the hottest exhibitions in London this year
will feature the
photographs of Justin de Villeneuve, 1960s
iconographer and husband of
Twiggy, whose portrait of Marsha Hunt, taken for
Vogue, became one of the
visual images that defined the decade.

When Robert Love was ousted in April as managing
editor of Rolling Stone
magazine -- itself yet another icon of the 1960s that
steadfastly refuses to
gather moss -- after five years as editor and 20 in
total on the magazine,
he said the best part of his job had been editing and
publishing writers
such as Hunter S Thompson, P J O'Rourke and Tom Wolfe.
In the 30-odd years
since gonzo journalism was invented, the editor of a
magazine which has
consistently championed America's best new writers
could think of no greater
literary heroes.

Rolling Stone is changing its editorial strategy to
move away from the
political essays on which it forged its reputation and
adapt to the
snappier, shorter content of competitors such as
Blender. And who founded
Blender? Felix Dennis, once part of the team that
produced the legendary
1960s British underground magazine Oz.

The Arpanet, precursor to the internet -- and what
could be more noughtie,
more now than that? -- was switched on in 1969.

Subsequent decades have thrown up their influential
artists and movements,
but none has had an impact as deep or reverberations
as lingering as the
1960s, when the blueprint of popular culture was
drawn. Since then it has
been twisted and tweaked but never reinvented, never
-- not even by the
punks -- torn up and thrown away. It seems we can't
get away from the 1960s;
that we're victims of severe cultural constipation.

Simon Frith -- music critic, academic and chairman of
the Mercury Music
Prize -- prefers to call it a freezing of history.
Frith sees the obsession
with the past as something that particularly plagues
the music industry. And
he blames it on The Who's generational clarion call.

'There is something about that particular rock culture
which is a refusal to
age,'' says Frith. ''You kind of feel that the new
Rolling Stones record is
probably not about having a body you can no longer
control, or what it's
really like to be a father. Or in any case that is not
why people go to see
them.'

Nobody likes the thought of growing old, but no other
generation has been as
embarrassingly determined to prove its youth
credentials. Why is Tony Blair
so keen for us to know of his ability on the electric
guitar? Politicians
have not traditionally felt it necessary to portray
themselves as down with
the kids.

'The whole raison d'etre of the Mercury Music Prize
was attempting to make
grown-up people listen to music that wasn't the
Rolling Stones,' says Frith.
'But it's extremely hard to persuade people to do
that.

'Rock has sustained itself in that the stars who were
big in 1965 to 1975
are still really big. There is so much music out
there, you don't have to go
and see the Stones. But the ind ustry has bec ome so
dependent on its back
catalogue. They're still making money out of it, so
why try to establish
another enduring act that will sell for generations to
come?'

Stuart Cosgrove, former New Musical Express (NME)
media editor and now head
of nations and regions at Channel 4, believes the
introduction of the CD was
responsible for keeping alive the music -- and, by
extension, the culture --
of the 1960s. Record companies aggressively marketed
the golden oldies as a
way of convincing people to replace their record
collections with CDs.

'When they needed to roll out CD as the new format
they did it through bands
that were already universally popular, so they turned
to The Rolling Stones,
The Beatles ...'

Younger people were switching their allegiance from
the traditional guitar
band to a new brand of music star -- the DJs who
dominated the dance scene.
Far from falling out of use during the 1990s, vinyl
enjoyed a revival
because DJs needed it to mix their music. So the bands
chosen to market CDs
had to appeal to an older generation.

Cosgrove believes that today's more diverse and
fragmented music market
militates against another boom that could galvanise an
entire generation.