I always said I’d retire when I got to 50,” chuckles Rick Wakeman, who didn’t do any such thing. Instead – after realising that far from being left adrift by pop’s ever-changing styles, people were still interested in what he had to offer – he recorded another 37 albums (taking his total to more than 100), penned two bestselling autobiographies and a film score and carried on performing shows. Then last year he announced that he’d stop touring when he reaches 77, but he’ll be 76 this May and his packed live schedule doesn’t suggest a performer saying his last goodbyes.
“There was a time when I thought, maybe it’s time to gracefully bow out,” the prog keyboard caped crusader explains, before his latest gig in Bradford. “But unfortunately I can’t. Music is the world to me. It’s just become blatantly obvious that I’m going to keep doing it until they put an epitaph on my gravestone reading: ‘It’s not fair. I’m not finished yet.’”
Elkie Brooks knows exactly how he feels. The “Queen of British blues” (whose hits include Pearl’s a Singer and Lilac Wine) has had 13 Top 75 albums in total and is on the road again at 80, having performed a “farewell tour” when she was 40. “The promoter thought it might be a nice idea,” she chuckles. “I’ve been saying ‘farewell’ ever since.”
The pair are not alone in rocking way past pensionable age. When rock’n’roll was considered a young person’s game, the young Mick Jagger once said: “I don’t wanna be singing Satisfaction when I’m 30,” but he still tours with the Rolling Stones at 81, while other venerable rockers treading the boards include Bob Dylan (83), Paul McCartney (82), Bruce Springsteen (75) and Mavis Staples (85). Folk legend Peggy Seeger is even touring this year aged 89. “It’s like a drug,” Wakeman explains. “Once it’s inside you, you can’t do without it.”
The top stars don’t need the money but perform because it is rooted in their psyche and the demand is there. For Graham Nash, the Blackpool-born co-founder of the Hollies and supergroup Crosby, Stills and Nash, it’s about “the passion of music, and the energy I get from performing a new song to an audience. And when it’s a song I’ve sung a million times, I’m going to sing it with the same passion I had when I wrote it.”
Seventy-five-year-old, California-born roots singer Bonnie Raitt has spent 54 years on the road and says she can’t think of anything more fun. “When I started out, my heroes were the jazz, blues and classical people who played well into their 70s and 80s. But touring is like a travelling summer camp. Then every night I get to have a party with the audience.”
Stars get hooked young. Wakeman first performed in childhood and Salford-born Brooks got the bug through singing in her uncle’s wedding band. Raitt watched audiences going “nuts” when her father sang in musicals such as Oklahoma! “None of us could believe this was his job,” she remembers. “So once I took to it and got to open for James Taylor and Muddy Waters there was no turning back.”
Nash was a teenager when he entered a talent contest at Manchester Hippodrome with his pal Allan Clarke. “On that show were myself and Allan, who later formed the Hollies, Freddie Garrity, who became Freddie and the Dreamers, Ron Wycherley, who became Billy Fury, and Johnny and the Moondogs, who became the Beatles.” John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison had dashed for the last bus back to Liverpool by the time Nash and Clarke were declared the winners, but Nash says “2,000 people going crazy was the moment I knew I loved singing for people”.
In the Hollies, he experienced the archetypal touring life: “Five of us in the back of a Transit, trying to get to sleep on the amps and drum cases. One night the doors flew open and I fell out of the van.” Aged 20, Wakeman lived similarly during his time in the Strawbs. He chuckles. “You couldn’t get my keyboard rig in a Transit now.”
Joining prog rock giants Yes in 1971 took his touring experiences to a very different level. “Staying on Sunset Strip with a whole bathroom and a shag pile carpet. I thought: ‘Bloody hell. I could move in here.’” But for older artists comfort is essential, rather than a luxury. “I wouldn’t want to be running around in a van trying to break into the business, loading the equipment and not getting decent hotels or food,” Raitt says. “The trick is to pace yourself.” She’s been touring for the last four years, and she does five months on the road out of every 12. “Enough to keep my band and crew working with me and to keep it fun.”
In her youth, Brooks hated touring. “Just me in my little Mini with a little suitcase, driving everywhere, finding my own bed and breakfasts. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.” Now she tours the country with long gaps between gigs, pointing out that her vocal warmup, soundcheck and show still add up to more than three hours of exertion. “You wouldn’t ask Mo Farah to run the marathon again the next day, would you?” On show days, she avoids speaking to rest her voice. Raitt concurs: “One of the great gifts has been texting and email to save your voice during the day.”
It also helps to stay fit. Brooks became a black belt in aikido when she was 50. Raitt does yoga and weights, hikes and takes a bike on tour. Wakeman merely walks his dogs. “We recently sold a house and in one of the outbuildings I came across this strange equipment,” he chuckles. “My wife said: ‘That’s the gym you built four years ago.’”
As a member of Yes, he enjoyed excesses such as mocking a studio up like a farmyard, after which his keyboard had to go for repair because it was full of woodlice. “We’d come up with mad suggestions,” he chuckles. “‘Why don’t we travel by camel?!’ It was ridiculous, but it was the 70s.” His own excess stopped at drugs – “I’ve never popped a pill or smoked a joint” – but, he says, too much booze and cigarettes gave him a series of heart attacks by the age of 25, so he quit both. “I try not to think about all that,” he admits, more seriously, “because you ask yourself: ‘Should I still be here?’”
“Honestly, to go on at the Newcastle Fiesta in 1964 or 65 you needed half a bottle of brandy,” argues Brooks, who admits that in Vinegar Joe, the band she formed with Robert Palmer in the 1970s, taking cocaine was like having a cup of coffee. “The thing was, we’d go on in Sheffield at 10pm, then we’d be doing a gig in the London Roundhouse at 3am. Two shows a night. I often wondered why the record company were taking cocaine but we were taking it just to stay bloody awake.” She stopped after meeting Trevor, her sound engineer husband of 47 years, who didn’t touch the stuff. “I wanted him to like me,” she says. She last drank alcohol before a show in 1979, when “a stomach upset meant I couldn’t keep anything down”.
“By your 30s, staying up drinking and doing drugs and not sleeping aren’t wearing so well,” considers Raitt, who had also got “sucked in” to the rock’n’roll lifestyle. “The next thing you know your liver is shot or you’re not recovering from colds or you lose your voice, say stuff you don’t mean or you’re sloppy on stage.” After a 1987 skiing accident, she had to take two months off after surgery so took the opportunity to get sober, go on a diet and lose weight, in preparation for a video shoot with Prince. “The biggest change was not partying all night after the show but it proved serendipitous: I got famous at the same time I got sober. Then I saw other people who’d got sober and they were singing and playing better than ever, so my last excuse was gone.”
In Nash’s autobiography Wild Tales, he describes mind-boggling 70s tours involving helicopters, limousines, coke dealers and five-hour shows that went on past midnight, but life is different now. “I was never really an addict,” he insists, “but I stopped taking cocaine 40 years ago after I went to an aftershow party and saw everybody smiling, but the smiles never reached their eyes. I realised they must be looking at me and seeing the same thing.” He still uses marijuana before shows, but says, “I’m about to turn 83. I don’t have a vocal coach, I do 22 songs a night, 25 shows a tour. Songs such as Military Madness or Immigration Man are still relevant and I’m singing as well as ever.”
Some older stars carry scars from a lifetime on the road. Along with those heart attacks, Wakeman has had “double pleurisy, double pneumonia, arthritis, diabetes” and has to plunge his throbbing arthritic hands into an ice bath after every show. “I had some health problems in America this year and if it wasn’t for the show I’d have been in bed or calling the medics,” he reveals. “But when you go on stage, something takes over – adrenaline or whatever – and you feel great, until you’re back in the dressing room and you feel dreadful.”
Raitt has had to postpone shows in recent years because of laryngitis or “wear and tear” and says her older musician pals joke about “who’s getting their knees done or who’s got tendonitis and so on. But in every city there are parks I love to go to, friends I love to see. And there are people who saw me in the 1970s who still come and see me now.”
Younger fans discover veteran artists through parents, radio, magazines or streaming. It amazes Nash that he can pack a hall at his age and Wakeman appreciates every second in ways he could never have done when he was younger. What would make him stop performing? “If I couldn’t play like I want to. I never want to hear people walk out of a concert and go: ‘He used to be really good.’”
Raitt wants to prove that she’s as “badass” as ever, but insists: “I’m not slowing down and I’m not going to stop until I can’t do it any more.” Brooks jokes that when she can no longer hit the high notes, “they’ll find a place for me in Tesco on the tills”. Nash saw Spanish guitar giant Andrés Segovia play when he was 92. “And he knocked me on my ass with the energy and brilliance of his performance. So I think: ‘Why not me?’”
Perhaps there’s a life lesson here for all of us. As Raitt puts it: “If you find something you love doing, keep doing it.”
Elkie Brooks plays the Lowry, Salford, 16 March, and is touring until 2026; Bonnie Raitt tours the UK from 1 to 17 June, starting at the Usher Hall, Belfast; Graham Nash is touring from 4 to 19 October, starting at the Glasshouse, Gateshead; Rick Wakeman and the English Rock Ensemble tour the UK from 12 to 29 October.
