In 2012, before her first memoir told us the truth about punk, childbirth and what it’s like to nearly die, Viv Albertine released an album called The Vermilion Border. Reviewing it back then, I was struck by how revolutionary it sounded. Here were songs about real life in raw, unvarnished detail, totally sidestepping metaphor, about IVF, being fed up about being a housewife, being desperate to experience more life as you got older. Albertine could get away with doing songs about ageing, I thought, because she was an old punk. Madonna tried that for a while, got less pop as a consequence, then ran away from it. After all, pop stars generally still had to play young.
Fast forward to 2018 and pop’s landscape has shifted. This summer, the 1975’s new single, Give Yourself a Try, began: “You learn a couple of things when you get to my age.” Then Matty Healy discussed grey hairs, and told us about getting “spiritually enlightened at 29”. Florence Welch, 32, was singing about getting over anorexia, and realising love wasn’t in the drugs, in Hunger, and describing how her youthful days in South London Forever had an end (“We’re just children wanting children of our own / I want a space to watch things grow”). Lily Allen, 33, was singing about her three-year-old child missing her, and her own terror at turning into her parents – and doing so, like everyone else, without ditching her established pop sound. Something remarkable seems to be happening: pop’s long-term lease in the realm of eternal youth had finally been given its eviction notice.
In many ways, this is an understandable change. Born long ago, pop is now of pensionable age. Surely chart-pleasing kids should be allowed to get a little older? But pop’s standard currency, until now, was always aspirational fantasy, not nuanced reality. It never really allowed itself to enter the real world before. Or perhaps the suits never really allowed it.
In the booming 1960s, songs about ageing were the preserve of old souls in young bodies who were grappling for bluesy authenticity or windswept singer-songwriter status. Take the young, jobbing songwriter Jackson Browne, writing These Days at 16, mourning all those “things that I forgot to do / And all the times I had the chance to”. Or Nico pouring her Germanic mournfulness into 1967’s Chelsea Girl. Or Mick Jagger and Keith Richard’s first original composition, As Tears Go By, casting a young, melancholic Marianne Faithfull looking at children “doing things they used to do / They think are new”. This song marked their transition from bluesy cover musicians to proper artists. At 71, Faithfull covers it again on this year’s Negative Capability, her 21st album. She also covered Shel Silverstein’s ageing-girl anthem The Ballad of Lucy Jordan, brilliantly, on 1979’s Broken English, but both the original and her cover were attempts to escape the pop world. Delivered in the bright jangle of polished music production of that time, those sentiments wouldn’t have had the same effect.
If any songs about ageing strayed into pop territory, they were delivered with humour. When Paul McCartney actually became 64, he wasn’t “sincerely wasting away” or “knitting sweaters by the fireside” at all – he had recently headlined Glastonbury. But when he was in his 20s, pop was a new thing. Getting old meant turning into your parents, who hadn’t known mass culture without the lived experience of war, rationing or conscription. Youth was fantasy realised in a genuinely new way. It felt never-ending and magical because it had never happened like this before.
By the 80s, songs about ageing had started to gain a gleam of nostalgia for a time when being young was actually fun – because before the 50s, it wasn’t the same kind of fun. Bruce Springsteen’s Glory Days pokes fun at adults having only their golden years in common John Mellencamp’s Cherry Bomb and Bryan Adams’ Summer of 69 have a more bubblegum-coloured, rose-tinted view of the past. Pop records that dealt with more difficult sides of adulthood were few and far between. The Abba singles from The Visitors, released just after both couples’ divorces, One of Us and When All Is Said and Done, and Pet Shop Boys’ extraordinary Being Boring, inspired by the death of Neil Tennant’s friend Chris Dowell of Aids, stood out. But these were exceptions, not guides to new rules.
Until recent years, pop stars weren’t really allowed to grow up into rounded adults unless that transition involved a visceral – and if you were female, visible – sexual transformation. When Justin Timberlake made the jump from baby-faced ‘NSync member to acclaimed pop musician on his 2001 album Justified, what connoted adulthood wasn’t more mature emotion, but sex. “You will know the difference when I touch you,” he said on Like I Love You, before adding, “I used to dream about this when I was a little boy.” (His recent all-grownup album Man of the Woods attempted a different kind of chin-stroking, mature seriousness, but lyrics about “ageing like your favourite wine” on the excruciating Wave, next to boyishly naff sexy lyrics on Sauce, had a rather more detumescent effect.) For Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and Miley Cyrus, their apparent awakening also had to be visualised: Britney in red rubber, Christina in chaps, Miley naked with a ball and chain between her thighs. As they aged, other external influences and family lives existed far away – they probably weren’t sexy enough for the marketing teams, the instant impact or the clicks.
In this decade, ageing has started appearing more in tracks by younger, softer pop stars, where it’s used as a strangely clinical seduction tool. Take Tom Odell’s Grow Old With Me (“Our hands they might age / And our bodies will change”), Ed Sheeran’s Thinking Out Loud (“When your legs don’t work like they used to before / And I can’t sweep you off of your feet”), or Lukas Graham’s 7 Years : “My woman brought children for me / So I can sing them all my songs” – how nice of her. This is age used somewhat cynically, however, again as a marker of thoughtful MOR authenticity. Not that everyone is allowed to use it. It’s interesting that Adele’s When We Were Young was the big moment confronting age on 2015’s 25 (“we were sad of getting old”), especially as she’d admitted on BBC Radio 1 that she’d done another album about motherhood but scrapped it, she says, because it was “boring”. Covering age in a universal big ballad is much more marketable, much more saleable, of course. But in 2018, it feels we’ve moved on from that standpoint.
Perhaps the way social media have shaped our culture of self-expression, and moved it forward, has fundamentally changed pop’s mood. Having initially provided an open platform on which pop stars could speak for themselves, before the trolls tried to stop them speaking, this new appetite for self-expression could not be put back in its box, so it found other, bigger outlets. What’s more, lovers of music – and of other culture – responded to it. Take the shifting success of Albertine, who may not have released another album, but her memoirs sold brilliantly, and other books and music featuring more honest, free perspectives have followed in its wake.
What’s most exciting today, to my mind, is the number of older pop artists increasingly singing about their experiences through the medium of pop (at their age!). Take 2018 alone: we’ve had Tracey Thorn’s Record, full of turbo-charged disco about contraception and conception, and being on a dancefloor, at 55, “with some drinks inside of me”. Robyn’s Honey, clearly made by a woman struggling with grief and the need for human connection at 39, but siphoning the glittery power of salsoul. And Broken Politics by Neneh Cherry, 54: full of reflections on the modern world’s darkness and depression, born of age and experience, but driven by sharp electronic pop.
It all suggests a bright future – and next year, Madonna has a new album out. Wouldn’t it be great to hear one of the greatest pop stars of them all, at 60, telling us about getting older through her greatest, most glittery medium? It’s an idea that would have seemed impossible five years ago. Now, finally, gloriously, it feels right on time.
• An earlier version of this article attributed The Ballad of Lucy Jordan to Bob Dylan. It was written by Shel Silverstein. This has been corrected.
