Last year I had an appointment at my local hospital with the orthopaedic consultant to have a look at my wonky knee. So there I was at the bus stop at the end of the road where I live in South London, leaning on my stick, having accessorised myself from head to toe in suitably oldster gear — cloth cap, tweed jacket, comfy earth-toned trousers with turn-ups, wide-fitting brown brogues and a jumper ventilated by moth holes. I’m just over the half-century hump and have never been confused with a young Mick Jagger.
Also waiting at the bus stop was a fellow, aged around 40, balding, shabbily dressed and bearing a marked resemblance to the late John Belushi. To my considerable surprise, when the bus arrived and I limped upstairs to my favourite seat at the front so my gaze could sweep majestically across the panorama of Tooting Broadway as we proceeded south, the Belushi-alike followed and sat beside me.
It was an almost empty bus.
The fellow haltingly struck up a conversation. He was from Turkmenistan and currently working as a fork-lift truck driver, sharing a flat in Tooting with strangers and he was very homesick. Sadly, his English was too meagre to answer my probing questions on life under the yoke of Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow and so conversation faltered. He shuffled nervously since his stop was in view, mine being the turnaround bus stop half a mile beyond with the hospital on one side of the road and the cemetery handily placed on the other. He muttered something, which I asked him to repeat. “You want blowjob?” he mumbled.
Well! To the best of my recollection I have never been offered that particular treat before by a fork-lift truck driver from Turkmenistan, still less one who so closely resembled a movie legend of my youth. Every fibre of my being was aching to accept with alacrity, but I pre-empted the urgings of carnal temptation by quickly saying no. I had, after all, a hospital appointment. Besides, I doubt my wife would have understood.
He looked wounded, and protested that I had stared at him at the bus stop — gagging for it, obviously; but no, I was a flirt and a prick-tease. I somehow doubted he would understand if I told him I was not staring but double-taking at a chap who was the spitting image of a celluloid celebrity speedball casualty of Albanian extraction. So all I could do was say sorry for misleading him, and he shuffled off the bus while I continued on my way.
I mention all this to illustrate a fact seldom acknowledged by the media: for sheer, irresistible sex appeal, it’s not just in the grooves, it’s in the wrinkles.
Very late in the day indeed, this often overlooked aspect of human nature was addressed by The Observer Music Magazine. In its final issue, this monthly bolt-on to the metrosexual soft-left Sunday paper refrained from saying farewell with a cover shot of Beyoncé or Lily Allen, their default first choices when stuck for star-appeal, but instead chose to portray Jerry Lee Lewis as he is today, aged 74, in all his shark-eyed glory.
I don’t think my fork-lift truck driver from Turkmenistan would have been able to resist him either.
Here he is, a rocker, but old. If we haven’t yet got used to this seeming oxymoron, we’d better get a move on, because, with Ringo turning 70 this year, and Dylan next, even the great generation of ‘60s youth revolutionaries is now long past middle age.
Old bluesmen, of course, have been a cliché of rock imagery since the 1960s, back when those ‘old’ bluesmen weren’t actually very old at all. Had Robert Johnson, for example, lived to reap his ‘60s fame and fortune sown by Cream, the Stones, Fleetwood Mac and so on, he would have been only in his mid-fifties — in other words, the current age of Elvis Costello or Eddie Van Halen.
There are quite a few now really old bluesmen portrayed in this final Observer Music Magazine, the most venerable at 96 being Pinetop Perkins (phwoar!). Two cheers to the OMM for portraying him and his fellow oldsters at all. But a slow handclap for the treatment.
What we have is a photo-essay by Jamie-James Medina, who has a style as indecisive as his name. That he can shoot in saturated colour or sub-Corbijn black-and-white and switch from Rankinesque cold portraiture to unguarded captured moments au naturel shows an admirable versatility. But the different approaches he takes seem almost randomly suited to the subjects. The results are therefore hugely variable, with the Killer and Little Jimmy Scott doing well, while Etta James is rendered with wilful obscurity. Clearly Medina’s ambition was to create new photographic icons of age, embodying artistic ‘late’ style, hard-won wisdom, and deep yet undimmed spirit. I can’t see that ambition realised in these shots. He has a long way to go before the likes of Jim Marshall needs to check the rear view mirror.
Too much Jamie-James Medina, then, and not enough Wanda Jackson, Buddy Guy and so on. But in one respect there wasn’t nearly enough Medina; missing was his voice. Would not his account of meeting, photographing, and occupying the same space as Ornette Coleman or Pete Seeger have told us a bit more about them than potted testimonials, even if from the likes of Billy Bragg, Ray Davies and Charlie Watts?
As a frustratingly missed opportunity, their American Legends issue was all too typical of The Observer Music Magazine in its six-year span. Some good ideas. Some well executed, too. But most of the time, like its parent paper, this was a magazine content to wing it and hope for the best. We’ll probably miss it now it’s gone; that’s how it is with extinct music mags. But it went out like it came in, leaving you wanting more — and not in a good way.