Children, Grandchildren, Music and Pop Music

My youngest granddaughter always seems to pick musicians as boyfriends. I don't think it's deliberate; it just turns out that way. She went out with one in a band called The Metros. Then another one. Now it's a young man called Johnny in a band whose name I can't recall.

I had a meal with her and her older sister in Wetherspoons in Guildford last night. The girls came down from London just for a few hours to chat over a meal. (Six pounds for a  meal and a drink in the Guildford Wetherspoons seems like a good deal to me.)

One arrived from her job on a magazine called Stylist, which I've never seen, and the younger one arrived from her Anthropology course at UCL.

So who are you going out with now? I inquired.(Her elder sister is getting married in 2010 so I know who she's going out with.)

Oh, she raved, it was still Johnny. Really liked him. Some complications.

She told me the name of his band but I've forgotten it. She showed me a photo on her mobile of a dark-haired young man wearing a sort of jacket open to show his chest.

Very nice, I said neutrally. To be honest, since my sight is failing I didn't really get a good look at him.

'He's Suggs' godson' she said. 'You know, nana, that band Madness?'

(The girls and their brother, my grandson, call me nana because it's not quite so awful as Granny or Gran or Granma. As soon as they could speak I encouraged them not to go the 'Gran' route.)

Anyway - Suggs in Madness doesn't mean anything to me and both my granddaughters laughed when I said the last pop group I could really picture was the Rolling Stones.

Their mother and their aunt, my two daughters in other words, used to sit rapt, gawping at the television screen when Mick Jagger and Keith Richards came on in the late sixties I suppose it was, and early seventies.

The drummer sat completely impassively as far as I could see, apart from whirling his arms around - and Bill Wyman was equally unmoving. I suppose they had to keep still though to contrast with Mick Jagger, leaping about and flailing his arms around. My generation thought they were pretty revolting at the time. We were mystified at our teenage daughters being so enthralled by this ugly, vulgar, loudmouthed louts. Then there was the whole black cloud cast by the death or murder of Brian Jones.

I remember telling my girls that this lot were nothing like real musicians and singers - Elvis, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald.

'They'll be here today, gone tomorrow', I said. 'The Rolling Stones won't last two minutes.'

I have a feeling I said the same about David Bowie.

Of course, over the years I got used to the Rolling Stones, and Bowie too, and I had to admit they were talented and made some good music even if it's not my sort of music. Strange how many of these rebels and youth icons move from the very edge of society right into the middle eventually. Isn't Mick Jagger a Sir? That would have been unthinkable in the early days when my teenaged daughters were so entranced by him.

Funnily enough, when I went to meet my granddauthers at Guildford Station last night, I had a quick look in the WH Smiths there and noticed an autobigraphy by Keith Richards, which I think he'd called "Life." A sign next to the books said Buy One Get One Half Price.

I can't really say why but it seemed odd to me somehow that such an old rock music rebel as Keith Richards would have his life story on a shelf in WH Smiths next to a sign saying Buy One Get One Half Price. I suppose it's because he burst on the music scene in Britain as a sort of uncontrollabe rebel and here he was in the shops, all these years later, appearing as a special offer.