With three friends - the Academy Award-winning composer Anne Dudley, the Grammy-winning record producer Trevor Horn and the award-winning video director Lol Creme - I have just made a record. I expect that this record will be filed in the "pop" section in record shops, even though if there was a section named "electronic/post pop/dance/avantgarde/instrumental/vocal/serious/what?/funny/soundtrack /etc then it should be filed there.
For reasons that are mostly practical, moderately fascinating, and sort of funny, the four of us are called Art of Noise, and our album, for reasons that are 40 per cent artistic, 40 per cent commercial, five per cent mischievous, and five per cent deadly serious, is called The Seduction Of Claude Debussy. The four of us are spending a lot of time not doing what we usually do - writing soundtracks, producing records, making films or, in my case, writing a book about death which might be published before I die - being the Art of Noise, and selling The Seduction of Claude Debussy. This means that, even though many of the members of the band are old enough to be Britney Spears parents, if not her grandparents, we find ourselves in a pop group. I am someone who retired from writing full-time about pop music when I was 25 because I felt that I was too old. I punkishly told a 35-year-old Mick Jagger to his face, if not his lips, that he should quit because he was too old. So it is, let's say, something of a surprise to find myself, as old as I must be because I remember seeing David Bowie live before he was Ziggy Stardust, I remember Queen as a support group, and I remember seeing U2 play in front of six people, being interviewed, being photographed, being analysed and being made up because I am in a pop group.
It is both the curse and the blessing of pop culture that as we move through our 30s, our 40s, our 50s, our 60s, probably into our 21st-century 100s, we will remain in some lovely, tragic sense young at heart. We will age with a self-consciousness about fashion, style, music, and hipness. All of our years will have a rock and pop soundtrack. At 83, I will be listening to the Velvet Underground, Sonic Youth and Aphex Twin. "My Re-generation," Pete Townsend might well be singing 30 rushed years after he wrote that he hoped he died before he got old. The pop star of the moment, the post modern music hall, millennially middle-of-the-road dynamo Robbie Williams, sings that he hopes he gets old before he dies. Getting old isn't what it used to be; pop culture has cushioned the blows.
There have always been pop groups around that are, shall we say, older than they used to be. Forty years after Presley and long after the baby boomers, with their own special greed and narcissism, have taken over the media as their special baby, pop groups carry on long after their prime, re-running their hits and satisfying the nostalgic hunger of their fans to replay their youth. Freddie and theDreamers just carried on playing; Deep Purple carry on playing; Stiff Little Fingers are still around; ABC, Culture Club and Banarama are heading out on a package tour of the UK later in the year. Some of the most interesting rock- and pop-based artists have grown older to prove that they are as much artists as any painter, film-maker, poet or novelist - John Cale, Randy Newman, Neil Young, Nick Cave constantly produce challenging and contemporary work. Jazz musicians grow old in such a way as to suggest that there is a real way to grow old - becoming more intelligent, more stimulating. My favourite record of the moment is by the 68-year-old Paul Bley, a pianist who made his first record, with Charlie Mingus and Max Roach no less, over 45 years ago. And it's most definitely a very modern record, thick with thought and concentration and sensational alertness, an alertness that is, in some radical sense, pure pop.
For the Art of Noise, the point became; could we, at our ages, make a record that showed we weren't ready for the coastal cabaret clubs, that we weren't just desperately coming back to pay off a tax bill, that wasn't some fashion-chasing embarrassment, but that also wasn't as non-pop, as twisted, as darkly obscure as, say, The Residents or Tortoise. We wanted to make an intelligent record for intelligent listeners that didn't hide the fact that we'd been listening and performing music for a total of over 100 years. A record that ingeniously, yet genially, demonstrated that we were influenced by music from Miles Davis to Underworld, the Beatles to Aphex Twin, and indeed Claude Debussy to the Cocteau Twins. A timeless, ageless record for grown-up people who loved their pop and rock then, yet a record for anyone who loves their rock and pop now - a record of attractive surfaces that also has a lot of mysterious depth.
The legend has it that pop is a young thing, a sex thing, a wild thing, a love thing. It's the soundtrack for people losing their virginity, losing other things, and then eventually losing their freedom, after which they settle down and replay the pop music from their youth, as a way of nostalgically easing the burdens as their life eases or seizes up into family complications and other routines.
The media and the record industry have largely maintained this idea that pop is a simple-minded, fresh thing, based around the notion of the frivolous single, even though the single format is all but dead. But pop and rock was only actually a young thing in the 1960s maybe into the 1970s. Then it got old, it got experienced, it couldn't help but be lumbered with a past. It's still young, it's always young, but now it is also old; it will always be old. Much of the industry and the media clings to the notion that old is just another word for death, and the whole notion of the ageing pop and rock performer has caused considerable embarrassment, but there's no hiding the fact that pop is now in its 40s. It's not just for 15-year-olds discovering the new magic of sex. It can also be for 40-year-olds discovering the new magic of death. The poetic pop greats like Hendrix have always understood the nature of the relationship between sex and death, and driven it deep into their music - Hendrix's music gets better the older you get, which is something else to look forward to.
Pop, ultimately, because it comes from a place where imagination and wit are at their most lively and intense, can stretch forever over everything: it's why you can't stop making it just because you hit a certain age. That's our excuse, anyway.
Most groups in their 40s are treated as if they are stuck in time, as lumbering dinosaurs, or as if they are bopping in bad time like ageing swingers. They're just getting in the way. Most groups in their 40s and 50s deserve this reputation.
We wanted to show that you could still make an exciting, modern and, naturally, decadent pop record without mocking up a beat, battered jingle, repeating dead sounds or simplifying complicated urges. We've made what we like to think of as a beautiful, (God help us) morally positive record, that uses a textured series of metaphors to tell a series of stories about art, music, intoxication, seduction, romance, death, the real and the ideal. Yeah, and you can dance to it; you can dream to it, as well. To further complicate matters, you could have a great dinner party to it - as a group slightly older than the Beastie Boys, we fight for the right to have a dinner party.
Having made such a record, something which is neither one thing or another but which is ultimately pop in the sense that it is a glamorous thing, a compression of some kind of thought into a few minutes of irresistible temperamental expression, we now have to compete for your attention with the barbershop harmony boy bands, the My Favourite Popstar poppets and the numerous manufactured fantasists. This is where it gets both amusing and bemusing.
As varied and as differently eccentric as pop is, it all gets placed as if it is the same thing, and it all has to join the same queue. There is a lot more space than there used to be for pop and rock to sell its wares. But this space has been built on the basis that pop is only a young thing, apart from that niched area that treats older rock as a kind of pipe-and-slippered relaxation, with a new Paul Weller album the modern-day equivalent of a round of golf. Whether you're Hanson or Pavement, Adam Rickitt or Nick Cave, you still have to squeeze through the same space. You're still placed in the same area, as if children's books were being reviewed in the same pages as the latest David Foster Wallace. The industry and the media that directly and indirectly supports it won't, or can't, find the way to adjust to that fact that there is now a world of pop for the young, full of sameness and grinning, and another world of pop, full of otherness and the occasional smile, for the not so young.
The hard, competitive edge of commercialism that there has always been in pop and rock just gets harder edged. The strangeness and exuberant fancy of great pop and rock somehow just keeps coming. The unlikely relationship is building up to a dense fever pitch. One day, all this weird and wonderful tension is going to burst, probably in cyber space, probably quite soon.
Perhaps then you will be able to get to music such as ours, the non-commercial commercial music that is not easily defined, without having the baby clutter getting in the way. For the moment, we as the Art of Noise are saying, don't buy that blast of slick gaiety: buy our brand new brand of kaleidoscopic, melancholic exotic post-pop produced for those of you with thought on your mind. Fun for all the family between eight and 80 - honest.
You're as young as you feel, they say. Well, after a hard day doing interviews, placed between Martine McCutcheon and the Stereophonics, pitching my edgy, greying effervescence against their bubbly, gossiping innocence, I feel 112 - 112 and still in a pop group. You got a problem with that ?
Paul Morley has been the television critic for GQ, a contributing editor of Esquire and a contributor to Arena.
