It's only rock'n'roll, but the old timers teach us about more than music - Jonathan Freedland

It's a paper ticket, from before the age of the QR code, and it announces the Rolling Stones at Wembley Stadium on Saturday 26 June 1982. I was 15, but I still remember the buildup - the papers full of jokes about the band needing Zimmer frames to reach the stage and, perhaps, more frequent bathroom breaks. They called them "the Strolling Bones". On that day, Mick Jagger was 38 years old.

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The joke turned on the notion that rock'n'roll was the music of the young. It had arrived in the mid-1950s in an eruption of hormones and rebellion, its themes teenage lust, longing and a future that stretched ahead, vast and mysterious. For men knocking 40 still to be singing of such things seemed ridiculous. And yet, the Stones were back last summer, Jagger approaching his 80th birthday, playing all the same songs.

All this struck me last Thursday night, when I stood in a crowd of 65,000 to see Bruce Springsteen, who is 73, play a three-hour set in London's Hyde Park. A similar thought crossed my mind when a record TV audience watched Elton John, 76, perform at Glastonbury, for what he said would be his last UK show. And, again, when I visited the National Portrait Gallery to see a rediscovered collection of photos depicting the earliest years of the Beatles, the pictures taken by Paul McCartney, who is 81. Rock'n'roll has existed for the span of a human life. Its greatest practitioners were once the embodiments, and laureates, of youth - and now they are old.

For some artists, the response has been to seek to defy the years and somehow return, if not to the state of being young, to a simulation of it. Jagger is the exemplar, his 2022 performances "extraordinary in a zoological way" as the writer Sarfraz Manzoor told me, audiences marvelling at the mere fact that a human of his age can look and move like that.