Jeremy Clarkson: Rock is dead, long live rock'n'roll

Every Sunday evening 56m people in Britain find something better to do than watch Top Gear. So, statistically speaking, you almost certainly don’t know we’re currently staging a vote to find the country’s best driving song.
I assumed, because I know that the programme is watched by many children, that the list of nominations would be full of bands I’d never heard of and music that, if it came on my radio, would make me want to get out of the car.

But no. The top 10, as it stands at the moment, features AC/DC, Motörhead, Steppenwolf, Queen, Kenny Loggins, Golden Earring, and rather disturbingly, at number one, Meat Loaf’s appallingly pretentious Bat Out of Hell. In the whole of the top 20, there are only three acts from the 21st century.

This brings me on to Radio 2. We’re told the new-found popularity of Auntie’s Light Programme is because all the presenters are different, but that’s not it at all. It’s because the new music being played on Radio 1 is always irritating and can sometimes be harmful to your wellbeing. If the nanny puts Radio 1 on in the kitchen when I’m trying to write, I am often overwhelmed with a sudden and sometimes uncontrollable need to hit her over the head with a bag full of snooker balls.

Do you see where I’m going here? There’s much talk, especially as the festival season begins in earnest, about which of the new bands are any good. Even The Daily Telegraph devotes half a page to the relative merits of Coldplay. But the fact of the matter is that the pearls, and they are few, are drowned in an ocean of absolute rubbish.

I know I have something of a reputation for being a rock dinosaur but you should see my daughter’s record collection. Of course, it isn’t a record collection as such; it’s an assembly of ones and noughts on her computer, but anyway, being 10, she likes Maroon Five and Avril Somethingorother, but mostly her binary ballads are from Led Zep, which she thinks are so cool, and Bad Company.

This means, of course, she doesn’t mind at all when Mummy and Daddy go out at night to see artists you thought had gone west in a puddle of vomit and chemicals some time in 1976. In the past couple of years we’ve seen Roger Waters, Blondie, Yes, the Who (half of whom have actually gone west in a puddle of vomit and chemicals) and then last week, Roxy Music.

Bryan Ferry is a remarkable human specimen. He is a man for whom the ageing process has had no meaning. He may now be a hundred and twenty-twelve but there are no man breasts, no spread and no sign of a hair hole. And you should see him move. Be assured, his rebellious pro-hunting son Otis can never say to a mate: “Hey, you dance like my dad.” Because no one, no matter how athletic they be, is that good.

The man redefines anyone’s concept of cool. He even makes whistling cool, which is technically impossible. And what’s more, it’s rumoured he once ticked off a younger son for swearing while their hijacked jet was in the process of nose-diving. And this iciness comes through on stage as his band of real, proper, clever and talented musicians run through a set of songs that would leave any modern band open-mouthed in astonishment.

The best thing, though, is that the audience was also far cooler than anything you’ll find at a teenage rave. There were no football shirts, no spots and none of that awful greased-down hair that is so popular with tyre fitters. There were one or two rather strange-looking creatures whose barnet had been styled in 1974 and then left to thin out all by itself. I may have also seen some black T-shirts tucked into jeans, which also dated from the early Seventies. But for the most part it was bright-eyed, middle-aged people for whom time has been kind.

There was no unduly long queue for the lavatory cubicles, nobody was flogging bags of expensive aspirins, and in the ballads, instead of waving cigarette lighters around, everyone held up their mobile phones so their kids could hear the tunes too. Best of all, nobody was beaten up and murdered on the way out. Everyone just piled into their Range Rovers and went for something to eat.

Now, compare this with sharing a tent, in a field, having spent the day listening to a bunch of teenagers in spectacularly baggy trousers banging bits of garden furniture together. It doesn’t even get close.

Rock’n’roll, I’m beginning to suspect, is not a going concern. It’s not, as we have always thought, simply a means by which teenagers can annoy their parents but rather a one-off 30-year moment in the development of music. Like baroque and skiffle and oratorio.

Every attempt to change the original formula, be it hip-hop, garage, techno or rap, certainly grates with those older than 12, but that’s its only purpose. It’s not music to annoy the old. It’s just a noise to annoy the old. Which means that when its fans become old, it will not survive.

I can absolutely guarantee that 30 years from now, nobody will be going all the way to London to see P Diddly, or whatever he’s called this week. Whereas, my wife and I will be availing ourselves of cheap-rate rail fares and heading to Camden, again, to see Bryan Ferry, again. And you know what: he still won’t have any man breasts and he’ll still be dancing like a hard-bodied ballerina