It means that something has gone terribly wrong with culture. The Rolling Stones being one of the biggest touring acts in the world in 2018 is the equivalent of the slapstick stylings of Guy Visser and his Singing Duck (trust me, he was huge in the 1920s) being considered dynamic stadium-filling fare in 1968. If you like, you can choose to see this as a sort of post-Garth Brooks peace and reconciliation commission, although some of the locals view it as a resumption of hostilities and, predictably, want the concert cancelled. Many of their contemporaries, Count John McCormack, Rod Hull and Emu, Lord Byron and O’Carolan the blind harpist, are gone, but this doesn’t stop Mick and his vassals from ignoring the advice of most gerontologists and bringing their nostalgic money-printing machine to Croke Park. They’ve been cosplaying as teenagers, wearing their big fibreglass Macnas heads, attempting to reclaim their lost humanity while craving the sweet release of death, or at least a bit of a nap, for over five decades now. The Rolling Stones are coming to Ireland on May 17th with their harpsichords, hunting horns, bone-flutes, lutes and an entourage of serfs and retainers and lute technicians. I know I like to break new comedic ground in this column. This is a joke about how long The Rolling Stones have been around. So I’m going to go out on a limb and assume it was left there by Keith Richards on an early Rolling Stones tour. However, I am bad at retaining documentary-delivered facts. This week I watched a similar instrument being played for an appreciative Simon Schama in a cave daubed with prehistoric ochre paintings on BBC1’s excellent Civilisations. The oldest musical instrument in the world is a 42,000-year-old bone flute found in southwestern Germany.
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