Meet the Zimmers
Anyone who's seen the Who perform in recent years knows exactly how much weight the "My Generation" line "hope I die before I get old" has acquired over the decades. And watching ninety-year-old singer Alfie Carretta snarl it in this amazing video of his band the Zimmers ups the irony behind pop music's most overused, yet eternally renewable, epitaph even further.
Assembled for an upcoming BBC documentary, according to England's Daily Mail, the Zimmers consist of forty senior citizens with a combined age of, well, 3,000 years. Their average age of "the oldest gigging band in the world," though, is seventy-eight. "My Generation" was recorded in Abbey Road studio two, where the Beatles used to work, by producer Mike Hedges, who has worked with U2. With its smashed instruments and sloganeering (handheld signs state "I'm bored in old people's homes" and "I've not left my flat in three years"), the video is obviously more a political than a musical statement. And why not? The original may have been, too.
The Zimmers' MySpace page includes biographies of such Zimmers as ninety-nine-year-old Winifred Warburton, who "wrote a few ladybird books on how to crochet," and sixty-nine-year-old Gillian Davies, who "has been campaigning about quality of life for elderly people ever since her friend was badly treated in a care home."
The Zimmers will be touring Europe in October. Please don't try to put them down just because they get around.