WHERE EAGLE DARES

Don Henley bounced back from the messy breakup of his bestselling band to fashion a pop classic. Ed Power on the potent nostalgia of ‘The Boys of Summer’, as it turns 40

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The best song ever written about nostalgia starts with a simple drum pattern, followed by a mournful guitar loop. Then a voice breaks in, rasping with sadness: “Nobody on the road/ Nobody on the beach”. You feel what it means, deep in your bones: the good times are over, never to return. It’s a feeling everyone experiences at some point in their life – yet one all too rarely captured in music. The tune is Don Henley’s autumnal charttopper “The Boys of Summer”, which marks its 40th anniversary on Saturday. This song about growing old has itself grown old.

“The Boys of Summer” – which reached No 12 in the UK charts in 1984 and went top five in the US – has woven itself into the tapestry of popular music. In it, Henley, who had recently split from the Eagles, laments the death of hippy idealism in the flash-pop glare of the go-go 1980s. Today, though, it transcends the immediate context of its release. Listened to in 2024, Henley’s sorrow for the passing of the prime of his life – “I feel it in the air/ The summer’s out of reach” – has a universal quality. It speaks to the chill everyone feels as the years whirr past, steadily at first, then faster and faster.

If careworn at the edges, “The Boys of Summer” has lost none of its bittersweet ache. “The song takes you to a place that reminds you of your youth,” says Jonny Spalding of the Lightning Kids, a London electronica group who covered the tune in 2022. “We were drawn to ‘The Boys of Summer’ initially because of the storytelling and how it fitted into the themes of youth, long-lost teenage summers and underlying nostalgia”.