The pensioner Intifada
Since age confers a harmlessness on everyone, it was rather sweet to see them again, enjoying one last stab at rebellion before marching off to that Great Student Demo in the Sky. And yet when I was growing up, these 'rebels' were the very people we rebelled against. Musically, we couldn't bear their Pink Floyd, their early Genesis and those heavy slabs of prog rock inspired by the Hobbit-y tosh of Tolkien.
No wonder we embraced the rhythm of reggae, the joy of disco and (initially at least) the rebellion of punk. Punk was very much the middle-class, minority interest successor to prog. It started well, but it was almost instantly colonised and gentrified by the hippies themselves. Long hair sheared, they quickly replaced the Sex Pistols with the Clash, who were more aligned with their values.
The Clash's third LP was a triple album and was so pompous and overblown it made Pink Floyd sound like Paul McCartney. Sandinista! was dedicated to the Sandinistas, whose cause in Nicaragua was viewed not dissimilarly from the cause of the Palestinians in Gaza. They would have done well to remember John Lydon snarling: 'You're too old and your hair's too long.'
That was exactly how we felt about hippy teachers who tried too hard to be groovy. I'll always remember one flared-trousered example asking us to 'Call me Tony'. As soon as he said this, that vital wall between pupils and teachers – the one that separates respect from ridicule – started to crumble. It's only in recent years that the wall has been re-pointed. You may be aware of the resurgence of school uniforms in state schools. Apparently this is the result of the Call Me Tonys, who'd always decried them, finally shuffling off into retirement.
And now, with generous public sector pensions providing free time and disposable income, they're back. And what could be more fun than taking up a cause and a placard? Trouble is, it's invariably the same sort of cause, isn't it?
Whether they realise it or not, much of their worldview is still rooted in The Authoritarian Personality, a political and philosophical treatise written in the aftermath of the second world war. Its central tenet was that, because the Nazis were evil and were also right-wing, then everything right-wing is bad and everything left-wing is good.
This may explain why our OAP protestors turned a blind eye to mass murder in China and the Soviet Union to embrace the shaky shibboleths of Marx and Mao. And it's why they now condemn the mass slaughter of Palestinians but remain shamefully silent on the mass slaughter of Israelis.
The Boring Old Hippies have mostly been a bit quiet since the miners' strike and the end of the Greenham Common protests. I imagine those vintage 'Nuclear Power? No Thanks' badges now fetch quite a price on eBay.
Those who wore them vanished from view around 1997, when Tony Blair moved into No. 10. What was there to protest against? His new government may have been nominally Labour, but when Peter Mandelson declared that he was 'intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich', the hippies had the permission they needed to become breadheads.
And now, money made and mortgages paid, they can afford a bit of geriatric insurrection. They haven't had a cause like this for years. Extinction Rebellion was a bit fanatical; the People's March a bit 'Waitrose' – but Palestine is perfect. It must have been lovely for them to once again feel the insurgent thrill of being 'busted by the fuzz'. So let them have their fun. They won't be doing this for much longer.
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If it is taken seriously, it should have consequences, but I imagine an irritatingly large number of people will still say they find it brave, authentic and challenging – while ignoring the elements of it which are truly courageous, sincere and difficult. McGarvey writes with a combination of well-earned pride about his achievements and a degree of bitterness about how uninterested people are when he tries to escape his genre. 'Any time I've ever floated the idea of producing a piece of work that was not about my poverty, addiction, or some adjacent topic, it's been met with resistance or disinterest,' he says. 'I find myself continually drawn back to the same story. My audience, in many ways, won't let me move on from it. Or, at least, that's how it feels sometimes. Any work I produce which is not anchored in my own suffering in some way draws tangibly less interest from both audiences and, in some cases, commissioners – a problem when your whole career is based on you being the product. 'Without it,' he frets, 'people may lose interest in anything else I have to say.' But as other creative spirits have discovered, killing off the character who made them famous often has the consequence that people aren't interested in you at all any more. McGarvey is clearly conscious of this risk. And there's the big anxious, unanswered question underpinning this book. Without Loki, without the misery memoir appeal and the no-mean-city reminiscences, does anyone care what Darren McGarvey has to say? 'Will I ever just be accepted as a professional in my own right, like everyone else?' Time will tell, I suppose.
