George Hayter: Rock's ageing effect (From Hampshire Chronicle)

George Hayter: Rock's ageing effect

9:27am Friday 21st September 2007 in

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ENJOYING contemporary rock music ended up making me feel old.

When I first liked Led Zeppelin and John Mayall, my taste was a badge of youth.

Only cool young duds like me knew about underground names when they first came on the scene.

Now I find that the only people interested in Zeppelin and Mayall are wrinkly and short of hair.

Far from being a badge of youth, being a fan of 60s heroes is rapidly becoming a sign of senility.

Whatever pop records you buy, they'll soon be out of date.

Which is why I turned to classical music as a more sensible investment.

But anyone trying to get interested in music with lots of violins and hardly any drums will soon find that it can be immensely boring.

There's so much of it, for one thing, and it all sounds the same.

The early stuff is the worst. Those 18th century harpsichord numbers seem to chug along, endlessly going nowhere and invariably signing off with the same tedious trumpet flourish.

Refusing to give up on these centuries-old dirges, complete with screeching sopranos, I uploaded them to my iPod, along with the Beatles and Cream.

A feature of an iPod is its shuffle setting. That plays your tracks in random order, and I was soon getting Bach mixed in with heavy metal.

Eventually the violins sounded less boring and Bach's choral gymnastics began to sound like clear flowing water.

And the thing about classical music is that it never goes out of date.

Either that or it's so out of date already that it can't get any more.