Forty-nine years ago today the Rolling Stones recorded their first single for Decca. If you go back forty-nine years before that Gavrilo Princip was probably acquiring the revolver he was to use a couple of months later to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand and begin the series of events that led to the First World War. 
When the Stones were making that record the producers were putting the finishing touches to the historical series The Great War, which came out the following year and set the template for TV documentaries. This contained interviews with men who didn't seem old enough to be called "veterans". Most of them were in their late sixties, much like the Stones are now.Makes you think. I'm never sure precisely what, but it makes you think.
I thought about that a couple of years ago when it was the 40th anniversary of the Beatles breaking up. 40 years previous o that, or thereabouts, Paul Whiteman's Rhythm Boys broke up, but as far as I recall noone in 1970 still remembered them..
ReplyDeleteI think about those intervals all the time. How we're as far now from the Pistols as the Pistols were from the start of WWII. How, in the mid 70s (my own year zero), the likes of the Doors, Creedence and even the Beatles seemed to be coming from another era entirely whereas now five years in pop is no time at all...
ReplyDeleteThe generation born around 1900 had two Wars and a Great Depression to contend with.
ReplyDeleteMakes our obsession with celebrity, phone hacking and pensions sound a bit pathetic....