Double Take:A manufactured British rock act with a combined age of more than 3,000 make My Generationsound more subversive than The Who ever did, writes Ann Marie Hourihane
The Zimmers are the new phenomenon at a time when pop desperately needs one. The Zimmers are a rock act comprised of 40 British old-age pensioners. They have a combined age of more than 3,000, a total that, as several unkind people have pointed out, is even greater than that of The Rolling Stones. On Tuesday, The Zimmers appeared on the Tonight Show with Jay Lenoin the United States, singing their new single, My Generation. It's the drugs budget I'm interested in.
Manufactured bands were never meant to be like this - The Zimmers were assembled by a BBC documentary-maker called Tim Samuels in order to highlight how badly old people are treated - but, when you think about it, there is no demographic more suited to the pressures of fame. The Zimmers don't have to worry about the long-term implications of their record deal. They seem to relish the publicity after the time they have spent in the solitary confinement of their tower blocks or their rooms in various old people's homes. They don't have to ask themselves where they go from here - to bingo, if Mecca don't succeed in closing every hall in Britain.
At the same time, My Generation has never sounded so subversive. When Roger Daltrey sang the original, The Who were pushing on an open cultural door, which led the way to the youth revolution and a business world that was just dying to sell to the young. The Zimmers are pushing at a door that has slammed shut behind them. You really do need a 90-year-old lead singer - Alf Canetta - to lend some punch to the hackneyed line "People try to put us down". So what if Alf Canetta has to read the lyrics from a piece of paper?. We've all seen lead singers do that. It's pretending to stutter that really gives Alf problems.
Anyway, the group members themselves are much more interesting than the music. Buster Martin, who steals the video because he is so well dressed, is the oldest employee in the UK. He works cleaning vans for Pimlico Plumbers and refused to take a day off for his 100th birthday. It is Martin who gives the camera the finger at the end of the video, just to surprise the youngsters. It is said that Buster, rather unfashionably, fathered 17 children with - even more unfashionably - his wife.
This version of My Generationis the revenge of The Who's parents. Just as The Who thought themselves miserably misunderstood by their stuffy mums and dads, the stuffy mums and dads, with their forgotten virtues of good manners and reticence, have found themselves shunted off the stage of society and left to rot. Very few of them have the technological confidence of Peter Oakley, also 90, who mesmerised YouTube users with his video diary, "Telling it All". Oakley was trained as a radar operator during the second World War and is a strong supporter of the internet.
Oakley, known as Geriatric1927, is another member of the Zimmers. Carefully chosen blues music introduces each episode of his diary, which met with a stunning response when it started last year. Oakley was almost reduced to tears by the response: "This morning in my e-mails there were 4,700 comments from YouTubers," he told his own camera after his first broadcast. "It has given me a whole new experience." Not for Peter Oakley the isolation of old age.
But in the video for My Generationone woman holds up a sign that reads "I haven't left my flat for three months". Winifred Warburton, 99, has said that the day of the recording - which took place in Abbey Road - was the best of her life. But Warburton is no pushover. In a radio interview she said that, "without wanting to be rude", she thought My Generationwas absolute rubbish as a song with, as my older female relatives might put it, neither shape nor make.
Strangely enough, Warburton's sentiments have been echoed by Jarvis Cocker - late 40s - who came out during the week to say that "the kind of pop I was brought up with is over" and to criticise television talent shows which want to discover "people who show off how many notes they can fit into a 10-second period". Of course, every generation thinks that the music from its own youth is the best. Cocker probably thinks My Generationis a classic, while Warburton will hardly give it house room. But it is Warburton and Oakley who were alive when the popular song was at its best. The hardship and shattering world events of their youth were played out to a soundtrack of shimmering beauty.
Perhaps the music, like soccer, gets thinner as a society gets fatter - and we are now very fat indeed. The Zimmers are in the old pop tradition of the novelty act, and all the better for that. Never has one video contained so much sensible footwear; but then never has it shown so many people having a good time.