Sitting with a cup of tea in the front room of her former council house,
Dolores Murray doesn’t act like a rock goddess storming up the charts.
“Go on, have a nice piece of cake,” she suggests as she settles down to
discuss the sudden fame of her band, the Zimmers. Some pop stars demand
champagne and sushi; here it’s sticky buns and a bit of Battenberg.
But then the Zimmers are no ordinary gig. Dolores, a vocalist, is one of the
young guns of the group. She’s 64. Grace Cook, a wild woman with a guitar,
is 83. As for the lead singer, Alf Caretta, he’s 90.
“Ooh, Alf, he’s lovely,” coos Dolores. They share a passion for bingo. And Alf
has fewer wrinkles than Mick Jagger.
From nowhere they and the other 35-odd members of the Zimmers shot into the
charts last week with a cover version of the Who’s My Generation. Yesterday
the single was close to breaking into the top 20.
A video of their performance has been watched by more than 2.3m people on
YouTube. About 100m people in 50 countries have seen clips of the band on
television.
On Tuesday Alf and several other “senior citizens” of the Zimmers will appear
on the primetime Tonight show in America, hosted by Jay Leno. George Clooney
is also scheduled to appear.
In an industry obsessed by youth, beauty and personal excess, the Zimmers are
one of the strangest phenomenons – and the ultimate rebels. Have they had
any problems with drugs? Grace starts telling me about her arthritis and the
difficulty of controlling the pain.
No, I mean cannabis, skunk, weed, that sort of thing? Sylvia laughs at the
very idea. Okay, what about alcohol? Are they tempted to follow the Amy
Winehouse school of going out on the lash?
“We don’t drink,” says Sylvia, another Zimmer singer and Dolores’s sister.
She’s 65 and a mother of seven.
In fact Dolores has been known to enjoy the occasional vermouth. So surely, if
this is a rock band, hasn’t someone been in rehab or at least been thinking
about it? Nope. Forget celebrity detoxing in the Priory; what concerns the
Zimmers is the more pervasive and important problem of ordinary care and
respect for the elderly.
Some of the band live in old people’s homes or rely on carers to look after
them; they exist in a world all too often overlooked by younger generations.
“This country doesn’t look after the elderly,” says Sylvia. “We’ve got to do
something. It’s not fair.”
Dolores adds: “We got up there to show the country we are still alive and
there are still things we can do. Who would have thought pensioners could
get a record out.”
Inspiring as it is, the Zimmers have done more than that. They have shone a
light on the plight, and the potential, of millions. They have shown how
ageism is rife – some radio stations are still refusing to play the song
because the band are too old – but they have also shown that the elderly can
also have power, purpose and cultural impact in the internet age.
WHEN Pete Townshend wrote My Generation, with its lines “Things they do look
awful c-c-cold / Hope I die before I get old”, he wasn’t referring to winter
fuel allowance. He was expressing his frustration that the old didn’t
understand the young. It was 1965 and the older generation had grown up
before sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. Men could expect barely 10 years of
retirement before they died.
Now the older generation includes those who absorbed the 1950s and 1960s
social revolution. They may look forward to 20 years of retirement, and some
stay fit and active into their seventies or more. Last week a 71-year-old
Japanese man climbed Everest; last year pensioner George Hodgson went “wing
walking” on a plane over Aberdeen and made a parachute jump. He was 83.
More than 9.5m people in the UK are now aged 65 and over, including 4.5m aged
75 or more. More than 1.1m are aged 85 and over.
It’s the old, not the young, who now feel misunderstood and marginalised. So a
BBC journalist called Tim Samuels decided to make a programme about their
plight and among those he alighted upon were Dolores and Sylvia from
Islington, north London. They were up in arms because their local Mecca
bingo club, around which their social life revolved, was closing.
Samuels first took some of the pensioners to the company’s headquarters where
they protested by playing bingo in the foyer. It was a sit-down protest, of
course, because some of them can’t stand for long.
Samuels then had a brain-wave: could his neglected pensioners make a record
and get it into the charts? It was a risky ploy: some of the oldies nearly
died laughing at the idea. When they had recovered, Samuels teamed up with
Neil Reed, co-founder of a record label called X-Phonics, to see if it could
be done.
“When we presented it to the music industry, they all ran a mile,” recalled
Reed. “But we stuck at it.” At the end of February they assembled 40
pensioners in Abbey Road studios where the Beatles recorded many of their
greatest hits.
Some bands spend months closeted in the recording studio; the Zimmers spent
four hours – they were getting tired after that.
Alf, one of Dolores’s bingo group, emerged as the lead singer, letting slip a
grin as he sang “hope I die before I get old”.
He wasn’t the oldest, however. That accolade goes to either Winifred
Warburton, who is 99, or Buster Martin, who looks like an ancestor of ZZ Top
and claims to be 100, though nobody is sure when he was born.
Were there musical differences or clashes of ego? “Oh no, we all got on very
well,” said Grace. “We’re old school.” But also young at heart: Winifred
even stole a kiss from Buster, claiming she had never smooched with a man of
100 before.
However, the brilliance of marrying My Generation with a band of pensioners
was lost on the rest of the music industry. Radio stations just didn’t want
to know.
“There’s huge ageism in the music industry,” said one PR in the business.
“Never mind OAPs, you can be Madonna and still sell out stadiums, but you
won’t get played on the radio.”
Another industry insider described how he recently tried to promote a band of
three talented, attractive women in their thirties only to be told they were
“not visually acceptable”. In other words, they were too old.
The Zimmers, though, knew that modern technology offers other routes to an
audience. Among the members of the band was Peter Oakley, a septuagenarian
from the Peak District, who exemplifies how the old can exploit digital
technology just as much as the young. He already had a worldwide following
from appearing on YouTube (see below).
So the Zimmers posted their video on the site and the hits began to flow in.
On Monday Samuels’s documentary garnered 2m viewers on BBC2. Some of the
Zimmers also appeared on the Graham Norton show, where Grace played up her
rock’n’roll style by trashing the guest room.
It was all staged, of course, but she’s enjoyed every minute of it. “I smashed
a guitar and the telly,” said Grace. “I’m the vandal of the band. I’ve not
stopped laughing.”
The Zimmers’ f(r)ame has rapidly snowballed, but underneath the fun a serious
point remains. Ageism is deeply embedded, but little acknowledged, in
society.
TO HELP the record get into the charts a friend of Dolores rang a well-known
London radio station and asked that the Zimmers’ record be played. She was
allegedly told by a star young DJ that the station wouldn’t play the record
because “old people smell of wee and they’re rubbish”.
Not surprisingly, this upset the Zimmers. “Elderly people should not be
written off as smelly,” fumed Dolores. “How dare they? That’s why we’ve done
this record. We do not smell.”
Sylvia chipped in: “Well, there are some that do, but that’s the carer’s
fault; if they don’t do their job properly [giving them a wash], it’s not
the old people’s fault.”
Olfactory objections aside, stations such as Radio 1 and Capital 95.8 last
week rejected the Zimmers on the grounds of style.
“No, we are not playing the Zimmers,” said a spokeswoman for Capital. “We are
more contemporary, leading-edge music . . . the Killers, the Kooks, Kaiser
Chiefs . . . I don’t think [old people are] our target audience, to be fair.”
A spokeswoman for Radio 1 said: “Our remit is to play the best of new British
music . . . there are no plans for the Zimmers to be played . . .”
Even without airplay, however, the single rose in a matter of days last week
from No 126 on the chart to 25. The record company is already planning an
album of cover songs.
“We have started on the backing tracks for several other songs,” said Reed.
“Lust for Life by Iggy Pop, Firestarter by the Prodigy and Changes by David
Bowie.
“We’ve had the band all checked out by doctors and they won’t say no to
anything. They do get tired, but they are going to have a week’s break after
the Jay Leno show, then we start recording the album in June.”
Whether or not it is commercially successful – and all the profits are going
to charity to help the elderly – the band and Reed are finding the project
unusually rewarding.
“It’s given these people and me a wonderful opportunity,” said Reed. “Alf has
become a national hero. He’s shown that underneath all that wrinkly skin
there are brains that still feel 18 to 21 – as we all do.
“That’s a great message to get across.”
Geriatric Gripes and Grumbles create video star
If anyone shows you’re never too old to master new technology, it is Peter
Oakley. At nearly 80 he has become a digital wizard and internet star.
His success is such that he was recently described as “as one of the five most
famous Englishmen alive” in the US media. His first video on YouTube, the
website that allows people to post vidoes online, is the 10th most viewed
and seventh most discussed in the history of the site’s news and politics
category.
Little more than a year ago Oakley was enjoying a quiet retirement in the Peak
District when he began to take an interest in YouTube.
His initial effort, entitled Geriatric Gripes and Grumbles, shows him talking
to camera dressed in a pullover, wearing large glasses and playing old blues
music in the background.
“It’s a fascinating place to go to see all the videos that you young people
have produced,” he says in the video. “So I thought I’d have a go at doing
one myself.
“Oh yes, I really am as old as I look . . . What I hope I’ll be able to do is
just bitch and grumble about life in general from the perspective of an old
person . . .”
Oakley’s charm struck a chord. His “first try” has been viewed more than 2.5m
times. He has gone on to post more than 70 videos, discussing such topics as
his Aunt Aggie and incidents from local news, including the case of the
vicar reported to the police for kissing a child on the forehead.
His simple storytelling cuts across age barriers. One viewer commented: “I
asked my grandmother how it felt to be old and she told me there is an
18-year-old in here . . . I have never forgotten that. I can see the
18-year-old in you.”
Oakley received so many responses he set up a website (www.askgeriatric.com)
and was interviewed by Time magazine. He was a natural choice as a Zimmers
member.
Most Times online articles provide the video embedded within the article if a youtube video is referenced. Surely this should be the case here as well.
Felicity, Oxford,
Oh please, come off it! Look, it is great that these old folks had a nice day out and a fair bit of excitement since then. It is great that the plight of pensioners has been raised as an issue.
But.... they did not organise themselves to do this, they did not play any of the instruments, they did not book the sound studio, they did nothing but have an away day and a sing along. I'm happy for them, but please stop the over-emotional hyperbole.
I'm glad that the Zimmers have had so much fun from this, I just get fed up with the exaggeration surrounding them.
Pete, Bristol, England