More the A1307 than Route 66

They say you know you’re getting old when you start feeling out of touch with modern music and talking about the glory days of the music of your youth. In that case I must be well into triple figures.

Barely a day goes by at the moment when I don’t start shouting at the latest pop celebrity trying to slim Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes down to ten whilst still earning multi-millions on download sales to 12 year olds. I bring it on myself. It’s got to the point now where Sarah is going to start burying the remote control in the shrubbery if I start flicking through the music channels on tv. I have to work hard not to throw anything heavy at the screen whilst shouting at the latest shiny, bryl-creemed starlet with whitened teeth whose life Hendrix would have lived in an hour and still had time to do four rounds of angel dust before going on stage.

They just don’t make music icons like they used to. They used to live fast die even faster in blazing car wrecks. They used to wear sunglasses because it was cool, not because they’d been given a back-hander by a manufacturer to keep the label hanging from the frames in a close-up tv shot. They used to eat animals and have wild post-concert parties, not throw civilised tea parties in aid of orphaned South American Chihuahuas.

There’s a great art of rock pilgrimages to visit those famous sites. When in Seattle I longed to see the Hendrix memorial. There’s something iconic about Battersea Power Station and Pink Floyd’s escapee pig, which no doubt would be shot down like a lost luftwaffe pilot for fear of pig flu were it to break loose over London today. There’s the same sense of history when you drive over the Hammersmith flyover on the A4 and look down on the venue which saw Bowie’s last performance as Ziggy, and the only venue Neil Young ever set fire to with a particularly vigorous rendition of Harvest Moon.

I know the Hammersmith Palais is being demolished and that the Hacienda is now truer to its meaning as a block of flats, but I was looking today at the England Rocks website, which aims to provide a tour of rocks landmarks, and you’d be forgiven for thinking the Labour Party had handed over everything to Barrett Homes.

Keen to see what gems I could claim to live near I was slightly disappointed. I have Aust Services where Richie Edwards parked his car before presumably going on a walk marked on his map by Jeff Buckley. I also have the Oasis Leisure Centre in Swindon, hometown of both Marc Lamaar and Billie Piper, although it is also claimed more plausibly by the Gallaghers that they took the name ‘Oasis’ from a cab company or restaurant in Manchester.

Having decided the Cotswolds are more in tune with men in white sporting bells on their ankles and waving handkerchiefs around, I set my eyes on Cambridge and Suffolk. Syd Barrett’s final home was on the same street that I went to Sixth Form College, but then he also went to school in the same building there in its previous incarnation as a boys school – the band had donated their entire catalogue of cd’s and books to the library. The Who’s Quadrophenia earns Brighton a mention, but the film would have been long consigned to petrol station bargain bins without Phil Daniels riding off Beachy Head at the end, but everyones favourite lemming playground doesn’t get a look-in.

The thing is, what great places are going to be added on the map by today’s Generation X? A plaque in George Michael’s favourite public lavatory? The restaurant where Kate Moss and Pete Doherty first kissed perhaps? Maybe Will Young’s dentist.

Today’s rock stars don’t live fast, they live carefully following strict prescribed diets named after 1970’s sit-com characters like Atkins and Perrin. Caution isn’t thrown to the wind, but everything undergoes a risk-assessment by an advisory body of former HSE workers. Drummers don’t explode in fireballs on stage anymore or dive into empty swimming pools, they drink Earl Grey with Mojo journalists over lunch meetings in vegan restaurants, and as a result I think the youth of tomorrow will be hard-pushed to find anything in Britain’s countryside to get them musically excited or connected. Except maybe some sheep droppings which have a faint likeness to Gareth Gates…