Every time I read (or watch) Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, I wonder a little more about this question.  When troubled by a customer asking to be sold a copy of Stevie Wonder’s I Just Called to Say I Love You, record shop assistant Barry asks of protagonist Rob:

“Is it fair to criticise a formerly great artist for his latter day sins?  Is it better to burn out than to fade away?”

It is a direct reference to the line “it’s better to burn out than to fade away” in Neil Young’s Hey, Hey, My, My (Into the Black), quoted in Kurt Cobain’s suicide note: a lyric which has sparked much debate and criticism in the music world for decades since.

A few years before his own tragic demise, John Lennon criticised Young for penning the lyric in an interview for Playboy, saying:

“I hate it. It’s better to fade away like an old soldier than to burn out. If he was talking about burning out like Sid Vicious, forget it. I don’t appreciate the worship of dead Sid Vicious or of dead James Dean or dead John Wayne […]  I worship the people who survive…”

Young responded:

“The rock’n’roll spirit is not survival. Of course the people who play rock’n’roll should survive. But the essence of the rock’n’roll spirit to me, is that it’s better to burn out really bright than to sort of decay off into infinity.”

It is therefore cruelly ironic that we are forced to suffer Neil Young’s aged prattling on, over half a century into his music career, whilst fans continue to worship the late John Lennon in their millions.  And, incidentally, I don’t believe either one was right.

It is tragic that the music world has lost so many young, talented artists before their time: Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, Jeff Buckley, Bob Marley, Sid Vicious, Tupac, Biggie, Kirsty MacColl and countless more; but it’s also pretty tragic that we put our artists on such pedestals, treat them like gods, and give them a taste of something they can never quite shake off, never give up.

A couple of years before he died, I saw James Brown supporting the Red Hot Chili Peppers at Hyde Park.  The James Brown… ‘The Godfather of Soul’… Supporting?!  He just couldn’t say goodbye to performing.  We gave him a name and a reputation he could never live up to forever, but felt he must, and at seventy-something years old, he was being draped in capes while we screamed for him to “Get On Up!” It was awful: I felt embarrassed to see this aging legend reduced to little more than the star of a puppet show, creaking aimlessly across the stage like an Alzheimer’s patient heading off to buy sausages halfway through putting on his pyjamas at bed time, and shrieking “Oh Yeah!” without any awareness of the eighty thousand onlookers.  I knew, in my heart, that he should have given it up years ago.

On the other hand, Aerosmith are now all in their 60s, and as I write this they are top of the US Rock Charts with a brand new single, and are selling out stadium tours.  They are the best-selling American rock band of all time.  They’ve absolutely still got it.

Bruce Springsteen is much the same, bursting with energy, still headlining festivals, still putting out records that sell in their millions, still attracting new fans.

The question is… how long can it last?  Should artists quit whilst they’re ahead, or wait until, like James Brown, Paul McCartney and a host of others, they just lose their touch, growing old disgracefully and embarrassing themselves on a monumental scale until they finally meet their maker?

Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of The Rolling Stones’ debut performance at London’s Marquee Club, and they’re talking about performing again.  It is a huge credit to the band and a testament to their incredible career that they can even entertain the idea, and I’ve no doubt that they could sell out huge venues, even charging their usual stellar prices for tickets… but is it a good idea?  I’m not sure, though I’d be inclined to say “probably not”.

So what’s the alternative?

If burning out is sometimes selfish and always tragic, and carrying on well past your best is generally ill-advised, then the only remaining option is disbanding.  Packing it in.  Just put the sodding guitar down already, and call it a day!  R.E.M did it.  Rage Against The Machine did it.  Heck, even the Beatles did it!

The thing is… it’s not quite that straightforward.  There’s something about people loving you, crying for more (even when they know in their hearts it won’t be as good the next time), the desperate clinging on of needy fans, and above all, something purely cathartic in writing and performing music that like nicotine, sugar and smack, really isn’t that easy to give up!  It’s an addiction.  Musicians crave it, and the rest of us enable their addiction by paying to go and watch them, buying their second-rate singles and cheering loudly for auld lang syne.  Rage came back, most of the Beatles went solo, and R.E.M… well, give them a couple of years…

And there is something that goes even deeper than all of this, too…

Music evolves, and sometimes (just sometimes), brilliant things can happen when great artists stick at it for long enough.  Sometimes, life on the road for decades on end is what leads to truly great music.  If Frank Sinatra had given up, we never would have heard My Way.  If Johnny Cash had given up, we never would have heard his version of Hurt. Would it have been worth not having these gems if we could erase Sinatra’s Life’s a Trippy Thing or JC’s Red Velvet from history?

Well, maybe… but even if the answer is yes, at what point does one say “enough’s enough”?  For example, I think that the Red Hot Chili Peppers were at their very best when they released Californication, whilst many of my friends believe that they never put out a good record after Blood Sugar Sex Magik, some eight years earlier.  And in spite of what any of us think, the Chilis are still going strong, several albums later and well over a decade on.

So is there ever a good time to stop putting out music?  Will we ever settle these arguments?  I very much doubt it…