If someone was going to put a band together called Fifty is the New Forty, consisting of musicians who were born in 1958, there'd be quite a queue of bassists - Motley Crue's Nikki Sixx would be auditioning alongside REM's Mike Mills, PiL founder Jah Wobble, Japan's Mick Karn and Bad Seed Barry Adamson. The drummer might have to be Sabbath's Vinny Appice, unless you look to Grandmaster Flash or Ice-T for rhythms. Aficionados will rightly lobby for Manu Katche. Gary Numan, Matt 'Max Headroom' Frewer and Thomas Dolby will fight over the mini-Moog.
On guitar, Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore seems a cert, but Echo and the Bunnymen's Will Sergeant and even Sigue Sigue Sputnik's Tony James will have something to say about that. When Fifty is the New Thirty appear on Later, Jools Holland will have a legitimate reason to boogie woogie - he was 50 on 24 January.
But who will the singer be? Depending on how seriously they took punk rock and associated hue and cry, punks can battle for Paul Weller, Toyah or the Dead Kennedys' Jello Biafra. Old romantics might lose sleep having to choose between Simon Le Bon, Martin Fry or David Sylvian.
The real fight, though, to be the singer in Fifty is the New Twenty would be between Prince (born 7 June 1958), Madonna (16 August) and Michael Jackson (29 August), three musicians who reach 50 not in the desperate middle-age ways that Jagger, Townshend or McCartney did, but as entertainers who used MTV and their own neurotic drive to transform themselves into shape-shifting pop fantasists. Their bodies might be decaying, and/or regenerating and/or revolting, their minds might be slipping away from historical reality, but their pure iconic power remains intact.
We've now got used to the once deeply grotesque idea that the rock singer is going to sing songs written when they were young until the day they die, and even that some rock musicians can reinvent themselves without sacrificing dignity, or turning into pitiful creatures of habit. At least, those of us who themselves have turned from pop-loving teenagers into pop-loving middle-agers have got used to the sight and sound of entertainers closing in on death (if not glory) playing music once meant to be only played by the young for the young.
Today's teenagers might vomit at the thought of the sexually active 50-year-old Madonna or Prince still exploiting horny youthful fantasies and presenting themselves as ageless hedonists, but one day they, too, will find out that physical, and metaphysical, desires don't necessarily drain away just because you're a parent or even a grandparent. This might be ugly, but it's fact. You don't stop liking rock when you are 27, or 37, or even 47, because it is not just music about discovery, raging, mating, adolescent change and being young, but music about raging, ageing and the endless drama of being alive. And, for better or worse, because of pop culture and the postmodern fallout, by the time today's teenagers reach 50, it will be the new 10.
It's not entirely far-fetched that the big MTV Three might yet re-imagine themselves in ways that make a post-pop, post-Vegas, even post-human kind of entertainment sense.
On the other hand, Jackson, reduced to a transparent piece of skin and a glove, might just end up in some virtual zoo, licking himself behind the celebrity bars of immortality. Being the singer in Fifty is the New Baby wasn't quite the comeback he thought it would be, as you will be able to see in the film written by Eternal Sunshine's Charlie Kaufman (born 1 November 1958), directed by Tim Burton (25 August) and starring '58ers Sharon Stone as Madonna, Kevin Bacon as Prince and Viggo Mortensen, Holly Hunter, Angela Bassett, Megan Mullally, Prince and Madonna as Michael Jackson.
