99 News Reporter

Glastonbury: the sporty ageism aimed at at the continuing Stones is actually weak

He's got the moves … Mick Jagger. snap: Rex Features

So it seems that there was some little event last weekend calledGlastonbury? With some band called the Rolling Stones? Maybe you saw some articles in some newspapers about it?

For an assortment of reasons I took a break from Glastonbury this year – in many ways, my brain is still in mending from the last time around – meaning that I actually read the coverage of the festival and was both boggled and impressed by the tenacity of some of the misconceptions people hold about an event that has happened nearly every year for nearly half a century in this country. The griping has become as much of a tradition as Glastonbury itself and for the sake of brevity, I shall sum up these complaints in list form:

1. "The party is no longer a wild and treacherous counter-cultural hippy haven. It's so communal!"

2. "Oh my God, it's just full of poshos and celebs! What an effing joke!"

3. "Look at all the old people on phase! Gross!"

The react to the first cry is something along the lines of "No shit, Sherlock". Complaining that Glastonbury has become corporate is like complaining that Christmas is all about commercialism. Truly, is there are anything more tedious than someone adopting a world-weary pose about how everything was so much more bohemian in their day when bands would play spontaneous free concerts on milk floats in Carnaby Street while Robert Plant and Jimi Hendrix smoked acid in the audience? There is not. So in order to save us all this ridiculous rigmarole next year, let me say once and for all nobody – NOBODY – goes to Glastonbury for a counter-cultural experience. People go to see some music, eat posh burgers and lie about in a field, and it has been thus for years. And you know what? That's not a flipping crime.

Second, the celebs and poshos. No, the festival is not "full of them", although there are a lot of them. The reason it seems as if the festival is full of them to people who have never gone is because newspaper picture editors are more interested in them than they are in the non-posh, non-famous folk. Next!

Ah, the oldies. Now here is a moan I really have no time for at all. Every year people gasp in horror about how many old people are on the bill at Glastonbury, apparently unaware that old people are always on the bill at Glastonbury – so again, NOT NEWS, get over it – for the very simple reason that quite a few old people are in the music business. And why would they not be? Did anyone ever really think Keith Richards would crawl off quietly to Bournemouth on his 65th birthday? If Mick Jagger can survive the embarrassment of the Dancing in the Street video, I think he can surmount the crime – the terrible, terrible crime! – of getting older.

The generally agreed highlights this year came from Nile Rodgers (60), Kenny Rogers (74) and, yes, the Rolling Stones (average age 69), yet despite their astonishing energy and, in the case of Jagger, their even more astonishingly young-looking physique carved out by a reportedly exhausting exercise regime, snarks and jokes about their age began as soon as they appeared on stage. One newspaper found Jagger and Keith Richards' unadulterated oldness so shocking that they splashed closeup photos of them on their front page – STOP THE PRESSES! TWO MEN ARE OVER 65! AND THEY'RE OUT IN PUBLIC! – beneath the headline "Glastonbury's night of the living dead!" That many of this paper's readers, to say nothing of their columnists, are about that age did nothing to qualm that organ's ageism, which now appears to take in men as much as women. This, by the by, is not a step ahead.

People have been making jokes about the Rolling Stones' age since I was born. As the annual groans about Glastonbury's corporatisation prove, clearly some people don't get tired of wheeling out the same old non-complaints, now matter how worn they might be from overuse. Yet it feels worth reiterating that casual ageism isn't "less bad" than any of the other nasty-isms, even if it is, for whatever reason, more accepted. Seeing as we're all going to live a little longer, and have to work a lot longer, it might be time for some people to get over their prejudice against working septuagenarians.

Nymag.com recently investigated how ingrained ageism (coupled with sexism) remains in Hollywood by comparing the ages of leading men and the actresses who play against them, confirming the widely held suspicion that, while men are allowed to age in the movies, women are not. Instead, women are expected to play mothers to actors who are the same age as them.

Hollywood's attitude to women and age is widely and rightly deemed to be ridiculous. But it's no less pathetic to yap on and on about how hilarious it is that some people, somewhere, have grown older. To suggest that musicians should tastefully retire when they hit 35 is about as ridiculous as Hollywood's belief that any woman over 40 is a desiccated crone.

People who have plastic surgery are mocked in the media, yet so are those who dare to leave their wrinkles un-Botoxed. Presumably those who are so grossed out by Jagger's age would like to trap him and put him on an ice floe, but sadly they can't catch him as he's in such good shape and can outrun us all. Oh well, let's just point and make fun of his age then, right? That joke never looks tired. UNLIKE HIM, fnar fnar.

Jagger might be looking older but he's sounding as young as ever. It's the tummy pain about him and Glastonbury itself that are sound really inapt, out of handle and weak these days.