With the Stone Roses recent announcement of a comeback tour selling out in under 30 minutes, persistent, never-ending cries for an Oasis reunion, and The Rolling Stones scooping up a massive £77million in ticket sales for their 50th anniversary tour, what is it that keeps these old-timers number one on the tick-list of thousands if not millions of music lovers must-see gigs?

Fans in their fifties looking for a night of nostalgia to take them back to their glory days, when The Jam and Pink Floyd were all the go – fair enough. Going to see a band to relive your youth is a different story (except for the members of the crowd who deem it necessary to tell anyone and everyone younger than them that they saw the actual David Gilmour in the actual Pink Floyd in actual 1970 – that is not fair enough).

However, why does it seem that a vast majority of fans from 16-25 find the only way of judging musical talent is by its legacy? Surely music lovers between those ages can hear that Ian Brown hasn’t actually ever hit a musical note in his life. Is current music nowadays really so dreadful that anyone under 30 has to revert to heritage bands to listen to anything meaningful?

When looking across the board at artists which are so often heralded as the “best of all time” or at the astonishing amount of people who’d cut off their arm to see revivals of bands which are long dead and buried, it seems as though the nostalgia and the built up prestige of the artists (which they only seem to be able to obtain from how long they’ve been going), actually does more for them than their (sometimes non-existent) talent.  

Truth be told, there was something that seemed super-cool and totally unpretentious about certain eras from back in the day. For me, the 60s and 90s in particular. The music from the 60s through to 2000 is acclaimed as authentic and meaningful, with the 90s sometimes even being referred to as “the last decade of originality in music”. It’s clear to see why people born after those times are trying to cling on to something they never had. Nostalgia for a world they never knew, paired with the music that came from those times, creates a certain fantasy-filled bubble, filled with culture that younger music fans never got to experience. However, this world probably didn’t exist back then – I know for a fact my 75 year old grandma never went to see The Beatles, and my 30 year old brother never saw Oasis.

Ultimately, no matter how good people herald certain older bands and artists to be, the nostalgia of those times deludes music fans and clouds their ability to judge whether the music is actually good or not, regardless of who the artist is. Because, let’s be real, no matter how good Bob Dylan’s writing was back in the day, people never have, and still don’t want to listen to his singing voice – especially not 50 years on, and especially not for £80 a ticket.

Words by Hannah Leeland