Mothballed Boomers dance away the years before Monday’s chill returns

Consider the rock star, one arm raised, leaping shirtless and slick in the ecstasy and affirmation of a berserk crowd, backlit with green light making his hair an emerald supernova as the guitars, drums and horns wail and pop, fusing into Street Fighting Man, The Stones regular finisher, its recurring riff a loop that leads to the edge of some gorgeous abyss and back, again and again, a loop no one in this room wants to escape.

Eight musicians up on stage, each bringing their vital piece of the song, hunched over like physicists adding their particular contrivance to the engine of a moonshot rocket, and each of them so immersed in this incandescent moment of its insertion that the rest of life – the council rates, the failing mother, the dodgy carburettor – has fallen away to nothing, pallid, petty, forgotten.

And we, the afternoon crowd, buying liquor with our watches and boogying with our partners in this artificial night. A wink of conspiracy runs through the room, we have struck a deal to allow this moment to subsume all other moments and for this torrid now to become a peak, either side of which nothing exists. We have shucked off our grandmotherly concerns, our knowledge of accountancy, and our tendency to civility, and become whooping primitives, hooting primates, monkey men and women, given over to the primeval abstraction in a rock song played live, played loud. Epiphany rattling our friable bones as we stand stomping in a resurrected 1970s on this winter’s Sunday in The Bandroom at The Corner Hotel in Richmond in July 2025.

The crowd might be made of thick-set, silver-haired folk in black T-shirts and loose chiffon, but a pact of happiness runs through it end-to-end. In the darkness of the big room, we mimic ancient nights of near glory. Enough of maturity – we are joyously callow once more, hollering… “I’ll shout and scream, I’ll kill the king, I’ll rail at all his servants”.

People say it’s unsafe to live in the past – but what if you could edit it until only its sweetest ecstasies, romances and victories remained? That’s what a live Stones act is, I suppose – a flawlessly filtered reminiscence.

How I envy the musicians – able to conjure this. Tim Rogers with his self-deprecating stage banter. His voice as worn as a Civil War Colt, likely to jam or explode – but a venerable thing that might once have felled a plantation owner.

And you know he still believes. Rich Cohen wrote of Keith Richards (when Mick had been given a knighthood and become Sir Mick and Keith, disapproving mightily, said, “I wouldn’t let that family near me with a sword”) that he was the guy who would never let you forget the promise you made under the bridge. Tim Rogers is similarly unwilling to forget the promises made for music. Something honorable and brave in that.

Over there on the stage by the mixing desk stands James “The Hound Dog” Young in a cherry red suit and white Stetson, looking like a superannuated ZZ Top making get-by money as a Texas Santa – paternal, dutiful, presiding over this delivery of gifts to his frayed Stones-freak flock.

This is a perfectly spent afternoon. The whole gig bending towards a kind of heedless joy. But I wonder, as blue notes blow off the mirror ball and a venerable groupie spins on her heels, about tomorrow, about Monday, about all the Mondays of musicians’ lives. The sudden, unsettling anonymity suffered tomorrow by these feted musicians for whom retirees are leaping and cheering, as they rise in bedsits to a blank day. When is the next gig? The next payday? What is the revenue stream here? How do these aces make the rent?

Musicians in Australia must live in a confusing stew of adulation and penury. Gigs are small and few, and middlemen are legion. There is not the US, where a troubadour could play in a different bar every night of the week, month, and year.

So where do our musicians go when they’re not on stage? I see Tim Rogers, his long limbs being carefully folded by Geppetto, as he’s put away in a silk-lined trunk with a throw of mothballs so his lovely suits aren’t gnawed. In darkness until the next gig. Some too-distant tomorrow when the lid is lifted and light shines in and he wipes the hair from his eyes and clears his throat and smiles, readying for stardom once more.