Kitty Empire wrote a review of the Rolling Stones concert in London the other night.
Guardian Stones O2 concert review
There were a lot of unappreciative and blind comments. So I wrote:
What happened in Britain in the sixties (building on the US fifties) was a cultural revolution - and real revolutions generate an energy that smashes the old and galvanizes everything for decades! I mean just take the three big British bands - Beatles, Stones and Who. Original stuff poured out of them like lava! And the Who is being appropriated with a straight face by prime time Hollywood (CSI) for where we are now contemporary feeling.
And the Stones are still filling arenas - not like some Jerry Lee Lewis or Chuck Berry memorial but with a straight face. Overlaid with the historical glory.
This is a great review cos it gets the thrill. The "gimlet-eyed professionalism of the Stones" is noted - and how would they have survived otherwise? - but then the volcano belches and we get "a frisson that goes beyond the enduring thrill of hearing the ancient tablets of the rock law played aloud by their inscribers". Florence gets it, and is alive and quivering with the moment - alive, now.
Revolutionary music (any kind - Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, Little Richard, Velvet Underground, Verdi, Violeta Parra) transfixes you, shoots a spike through you to an eternal present of living fire.
Pseuds' Corner is a graveyard full of broken tombstones to ecstasy. "Here lies ecstasy. RIpppppppp" Fail every time... Kitty E isn't trying to entomb ecstasy. She knows it ;-)
The review acknowledges its presence - and the way the Stones have done their bit to liberate it from convention and petrifaction despite their shitty Tory shtick. Despite the union jacks and the gimlet eyes.
