Adam Ant is 70! Years, not kilos. Not only that - he’s going on tour again!
Put some wax on the trax and slide on outta here, hane, hane, hane, hane, hane.
(If you don’t understand that reference, have a word with your TOTPs-watching self from 1981 – they’ll remind you.)
I saw him in concert twice back in the day. He was brilliant! The first time I went with my friend Martin. We left from his house in whatever we thought passed for ‘New Romantic’ attire, heading for the bus to take us to the Apollo in Manchester. It was our first gig. I had the tickets in my pocket. It was unbelievably exciting. I can’t remember how far we got, but one of us looked at the tickets and realised we were a whole 24 hours early.
To this day I blame Martin – because he should have known full well I couldn’t be trusted to actually check the date on the tickets myself. We wandered back to his house rather forlornly and explained to his Mum that frankly, we shouldn’t be allowed out on our own.
We went the next day and it was great. Not as good as it would have been the day before, but, well, speak to Martin – it was his fault entirely.
That was three weeks last Tuesday in my head. And now Mr. Ant is in his 8th decade. That age was sort of abhorrent to my 1981 self, but sort of ‘14 years away’ to my 2025 self. He’s definitely had his problems over the years (who hasn’t) but mostly I just want to say, ‘well done, Adam Ant’, just for making it this far, because not everyone does.
Our 50s are sometimes referred to as Sniper’s Alley. The reason for this is because it’s the decade when, unfortunately, we can expect some of us to start getting picked off by ailments – ‘natural causes’ if you will. Of course, tragedies can happen at any age, and sadly they do, but this is when Mother Nature starts to take her long, elbow length gloves off, finger by finger, hunkers down behind her rifle, closes her eyes and pulls the trigger.
In 1981, male life-expectancy in the UK was 71 years. Now it’s 78.5. (Ladies, over those last 43 years you only get an extra five years, but as you statistically live four years longer than men anyway, you’re still way ahead in the longevity stakes.)
So my life expectancy now is seven and a half more years than it was when Adam and The Ants released, and I bought, the album Prince Charming. Gosh.
Incidentally, Sarah and I have been together for seven and a half years, and put like that, I cannot begin to sum up how magnificent it would be to have those extra years tagged on to the end of my life. But, if you want to know, and I believe you do, in those seven and a half years you could also have listened to that album, Prince Charming, an additional 106,540 times. Well over 100,000 extra listens to track 1 on side B –
I'm the dandy highwayman who you're too scared to mention
I spend my cash on looking flash and grabbing your attention
The devil take your stereo and your record collection (oh-oh)
The way you look you'll qualify for next year's old age pension
And not far off a half million extra listens to the lyric (from the same song):
Qua qua da diddley qua qua da diddley.
The intellectual and philosophical lyrical prowess of Adam & The Ants has never, in my opinion, been given the wider stage it deserves.
Now, unless you were throwing some sort of 1980s torture party, I wouldn’t encourage anyone to listen to Prince Charming a hundred thousand times, but if you did spend the extra seven and a half years listening to the whole album on Spotify, Adam Ant’s royalties would be somewhere between three and four thousand dollars! For a million song streams!!
Anyway, much more valuable than that is the fact Adam’s made it to 70. He’s well beyond Sniper’s Alley. Most of my closest friends and I, however, are hunkered behind rusting old cars, bang in the middle of it. We’re keeping our heads down and occasionally ducking behind post boxes and trees, or knocking over entire fruit stalls (a bottle of Pinot in one hand, a large bag of crisps in the other) desperately trying to get to the bright white light at the end of the alley.
Hang on, not that way, not that light, no, run away from the light, run! Run!!
It’s a stressful decade of life to live in. Unlike all the others which are…yep, in their own way, equally stressful.
Aging as I am, I’m constantly considering the passage of time. Not always in a morose or melancholy way, but I have to admit that the version of me that genuinely thought I’d never die (Fame! I’m gonna live forever, baby remember my name, was mostly to blame) no longer exists.
You know what? At my age a hundred years ago (and forever before that) I would, according to life expectancy, already be dead.
A sobering thought.
I guess that means that 100 years ago society would sniffle (yes, I would have fully expected Olympic levels of sniffling at my 1920s funeral, thank you) and they’d say: ‘56, he had a good innings.’
56!! A good innings!! Do you know how many professional English cricketers have an international average above 56?! Me neither. I’ll check.
14! That’s not even enough to populate The Ants, Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet all at the same time. A good innings?! Dear heavens…
My intention with this blog, no matter how it’s turned out, was not actually to relive my 1980s record collection, but rather to consider age, whilst ducking and diving from the attentions of that sociopath up there in the sniper tower.
So, age…
Let me start by saying, controversially, I’m generally against people hating folk or things – apart from spiders. And heights. But that’s just me. So phobias, essentially – Homophobia, Transphobia, Arachnophobia, Acrophobia.
Can I just reveal that I have discovered I suffer from Bathophobia, which, upon seeing the word for the first time, made me laugh, assuming as I did, that it must be a fear of being clean, hahahaha. Except it isn’t…
Bathophobia – an abnormal and persistent fear of depths.
We live near a canal. The canal goes through a 176 yard tunnel at Woodley. Firstly, it’s still measured in yards, which in itself is sort of scary. And secondly, even though I know a canal is not terribly deep, the still, black water, giving no indication whether it is only shopping trolly deep, or more like something that would make a free diver cry, makes my insides do somersaults and has nearly made me turn back during both of the occasions I was stupid enough to say ‘oh, it’ll be alright’. The only thing that stopped me running out screaming the second time was a child on a bike with stabilisers, who thought the tunnel was so fabulous that she should shout ‘Come on! Come on! Come on!’ behind me for the whole excruciating journey. Had I known the child, I swear I would have thrown them in the water! Because that’s how learning experiences work.
So, yes, phobias = bad.
Hang on a minute, phobias don’t cover everything in this dictionary of unpleasantness I’m inadvertently creating. Racism isn’t Race-a-phobia, is it? It’s an ‘ism’.
So phobias are bad, and so too isms?
Racism, Sexism, Sizeism, Fascism = bad. Er, Feminism = good. Oh.
But they can also be ists: racist = bad. And misogynist = bad. Even Violinist (if it’s me) = bad. Misanthrope = not an ist or an ism or a phobia, but maybe that’s because it’s not really bad – because, well, people are awful, aren’t they?
In this complex world, the overriding certainty is: Language = literally impossible to fathom
Anyway, there are dictionaries you can use to fill in any of the blanks I may have left in this pogo-sticked preamble. I need to move on.
So, I’ve gathered you all here today to talk about a thought I had regarding Ageism. And those who are Ageist.
Because, no matter who you are, what colour you are, what dusty old tome you take instruction from, which toilet door you turn to, what team you bat for (and no matter your average) – these are all inalienable truths. You are who you are, you kneel where you kneel, you kiss who you kiss. Excellent.
OK, fine, yes, granted, there may be a little movement between the choices available, but most of us find ourselves in the same subsets for the whole of their lives.
Not so the elderly.
Because, you know what? They started out (brace yourselves) as not elderly. This is an oft forgotten fact – ask my kids, they think I was born ‘old’. And it’s where everyone, whether they’ve thought about it yet or not, wants to end up. No, not on the receiving end of ageism, but as an ‘older’ person. Think about it, it’s literally the only subset everyone has a chance of being part of.
Younger people are desperate to get started on whatever road they hope to drag their utterly inexperienced carcases down, aren’t they? I understand. I was the same. I went to university with only the barest understanding of how to feed and clothe myself – I literally didn’t know how to use a washing machine.
When I was growing up we had one called ‘Mum’.
And we had a seamless cleaning routine in our house:
1. Leave dirty clothes in washing basket, or at least close to washing basket.
2. Endure short annoyance and vague grinding of teeth from the ‘Mum’, depending on how close those clothes were left to the basket.
3. Marvel at the way clean clothes turn up again, folded and smelling beautiful, at the bottom of the stairs, with the vague notion the ‘Mum’ said something about their onward journey upstairs.
4. Several days later, notice clothes have walked themselves back to hangers and drawers in my room.
5. Repeat as necessary.
This is not how it works in a hall of residence.
Any-hoo, as those personal-hygienely challenged young-uns screech past on e-scooters, we older, more experienced, wise, sage, prudent, washing machine-knowledgeable people are often pushed aside – ‘Get out of the way, Grandad, I’m coming through!’, they say.
Just wait till wash-day, kiddo, we’ll see who’s laughing then!
Except, of course, they’re not really pushing us out of the way, are they? For a start, they’re not even on the same road, in the same country, frankly, as most of us in the Sniper’s Alley.
What they’re doing is simply filling the places left by those who are now wondering if they can still hear their baby breathing through the baby monitor, while they watch Netflix downstairs; and the people who just got tired of demonstrating and making banners. We older types leave the gaps on the front line, and the unwashed, unreading, musically illiterate, take our places. It’s how the world has always worked.
At least that’s how we think about it. But it’s not true. It’s an entirely different world. An entirely different ‘front line’. What we cared about isn’t necessarily what they care about. Topics of concern have never been universal. The places they occupy didn’t even exist when we were their age. There’s most definitely an ‘arrogance of youth’, I remember having it. I also remember replacing it with an arrogance of ‘not quite so youthful’, an arrogance of turning 40, and then an arrogance of being middle aged – which I am still wont, to this day, to dab behind my ears before leaving the house.
But why, oh, why are they, the young, seemingly so systematically pissy about us? We’ve got all the houses, apparently – and quite right, we’re too old to sleep out under the vagrant trees of youth! A bench in a park? With my back?! And apparently we’ve got all the money too – if anyone knows exactly where down the back of my sofa my missing millions are, I’d be terribly grateful.
Because, for all the things we have, there’s an ever-growing reality that we don’t have the jobs. You see, if you’ve ever been a middle-aged person looking for a job, you have probably found it’s akin to trying to find a particular needle in a needle factory, where the needles weren’t collected for 23 years and there’s been an explosion which has resulted in 300 million bits of steel being spread out over ¾ of a square mile. Yes, exactly like that!
Job interview for a middle-aged person:
Interviewee: well, I went to university, have more than 25 years’ experience in myriad arenas and I can whistle, still read books, don’t care what’s trending, have left the cess-pit that is Twitter/X but couldn’t care less about Bluesky, added to that, I also know how to separate colours and whites before popping them in a washing machine I both understand and also quite enjoy.
Employer: By ‘washing machine’ do you mean a collection service I contact via an app, which costs me a fortune but works a lot like my Mum did when I was a kid, basically meaning I don’t really have to take any responsibility for my personal clothes hygiene whatsoever?
Interviewee: No.
Employer: Get out.
That’s literally a factual representation of being a job-seeking, middle aged person.
The weirdest thing of all, is that who we are is exactly who everyone younger than us wants to be. Well maybe not exactly-exactly. My kids, for example, don’t want, yet, to be acquainted with what each section of the washer drawer is for.
But I tell you one thing for absolute certain – they want to make it to 56. They want to be looking around at their cohort, thankful the faces they knew at 12 are still running beside them. Unlike the lass from my primary school who didn’t make it to her 20s; then the wonderful Una, from my secondary school who did, but fell in the alley; and the sound guy from the West End who was picked off a couple of weeks ago. He was only in the run up to the Sniper’s alley, but still fell to a ricochet no one was expecting.
Then there was another dear friend from the theatre who was as strong as an ox, but didn’t make it past a bucket of stuff just before covid.
Chris.
I remember the moment of hearing Chris had died, like it was yesterday. It was a message, while I waited for a breakfast bap on Clapham Common that would have deliciously felled a horse. A friend called Spike just messaged me the honest truth. Chris was gone.
‘Oh, no…’, I said. Because that’s what you say. Sarah was there, so too, my youngest, Jack. They asked. I told. And Jack put his arm round me. And I cried.
For the first time, I knew it was open season in Sniper’s Alley.
I went to two funerals that same year - Chris' and my Mum's.
Mum’s was a church filled with people. Family, friends, neighbours, members of the golf club, people who only knew my Mum as someone who smiled benevolently through mass on a Sunday. There wasn’t a spare seat anywhere in the church. People stood at the back. It was magnificent. I am eternally grateful to each and every one of those people who loved my Mum.
Chris was not a religious person. A couple of dozen of us sat in a crematorium, as far apart from each other as we Brits are famous for. Chris and I had worked in the West End for the best part of 20 years. Him probably more, me a smidge less. I’d only known him for about three of those years. There wasn’t a single other person there I recognised.
Chris was the oldest member of our department in the theatre. I was second, by only three or four years. Chris didn’t make it. I did. And now I’m older than he was when he went.
He made it to ‘older’. He was nowhere near ‘old’.
Every day I hope I’ll get another full day closer to ‘old’. And when hopefully, I arrive, I have every intension of being astonishingly badly behaved.
A little like Jenny Joseph professed in her poem Warning, I shall plan to wear more than purple and pick flowers in other people’s gardens, instead, I shall mingle her prophetic wisdom with that of Dylan Thomas and rage against the dying of the light like an octogenarian riding roughshod over the heads of those that think we should get out of their way.
Failing that, I shall be thankful for every additional day, hour and moment that I avoid the sniper.
Ageism is a definite thing. But it’s the most ironic of all the isms. Because no matter what you want from your life – you want to join us. And thank heavens we’re a ‘welcome all’ group – no matter what sort of toss-pot you’ve been on the way up, we’ll welcome you with open arms.
Because, let’s face it, not getting here has only one other alternative.
And that’s no fun at all.
And if you’re a younger person who just thinks we older people should get out of your way, then you’re an idiot. Fact.
Because we’re cracking on at our own pace, long gone our need to impress. Most days we couldn’t care less what anyone thinks, smug in the knowledge that without us, the album buyers, there’d be no Adam and The Ants! You’re welcome.
Without us, there’d be no…
We will be fine (We will be fine)
Apollo 9 (Apollo 9)
Even though NASA say
Way out of line (Out of line)
Well, whoopsin-a whoopsin (Dress it up)
Jan-jan-jammering (Dress it up, dress it up)
Yabba-yabba-ding-ding (Dress it up)
Delta hey max nine
And you know what’s the saddest thing of all? If you say the above to a ‘young’ person – they look at you like you’re talking gibberish!
Adam Ant – I salute you.
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