My teenage crush on the Rolling Stones won't fade away

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/26/teenage-crush-rolling-stones

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I hope nobody's moaning about the Rolling Stones being too old to play. I still love them, and I don't hear any moaning about BB King, Buddy Guy, Chuck Berry and Bruce Springsteen being past it, and they're still at it. Age hasn't really withered any of them. It may look as if it has, but it hasn't, and it hasn't withered us, their contemporaries, either. Our tastes don't change just because we're in our late 60s or 70s. If you've always had a crush on the groovy Stones, you don't suddenly turn to Frank Ifield, Petula Clarke and cardigans six decades later, and say "mother was right all along".

All right, the O2 tickets cost an arm and a leg, but you can always watch the Stones on telly, which is what I did, straight after The Killing on Saturday. There were all the old BBC appearances – same heavenly music, same clothes, same pouting and dancing. I had a little dance along with it. My friend Munch and I can still dance like Mick. And how cool is Charlie Watts?! So bored, so laid-back, so groovy. My friend Ian Whitwham's favourite was, and still is, Keith. He is eternally grateful to the Stones. "They've been getting ugly men laid since 1964," says he rather crudely, but gratefully (he pinched that quote from a beer advert). It came as a bit of a shock when he first went to hear them. He'd never realised you could have such pleasure. A bespectacled swot at the time, the experience transformed him. He burst out, grew his hair, pouted and danced rather badly, and practised his moves – Keith's not Mick's – in front of the bathroom mirror. His mother thought the Stones were women, or a comedy act, but it only made him love them all the more.

You don't get over these events. I remember them all: Buddy Holly and the Crickets live in Hammersmith : Buddy hopping across the stage, the screaming, swooning and heat, the thrilling visit backstage for autographs, and of course the music. It was great and it still is. Later I saw Fats Domino in the same venue. What a phenomenon – in a leopard-skin pattern suit, he pushed the grand piano across the stage with his thighs, while playing! Beat that.

It is etched in my heart, and so I worried about him tremendously, lost for three days in Hurricane Katrina. And to me, Elvis is still thrillingly handsome (until he went into the army and the tragic descent began, into crap songs and morbid obesity). We remember him at his best – the songs, that beautiful face and smile, that curled lip, those movements, and our shocked mothers. Later, Munch and I played truant from art school to see Jailhouse Rock on at a cinema just up the road. And that little "uh-huh" in Teddy Bear, always made my heart flip. It still does.

What excitement, after dreary Johnnie Ray, Alma Cogan and Edmundo Ros – my parents' favourites. Our heroes were more thrilling. Everything was changing and coming to life. It got you jumping and it still does. New idols may have come along in the meantime, but the old ones will always be fabulous. I was right then, and I'm right now. They were the best. If he gets drunk enough this Christmas, Whitwham will still be doing air guitar – the Keith Richards forward moving arm routine – at a party near you. And don't sneer. It still makes him feel good.