Veteran tour promoter Harvey Goldsmith, who promoted Live Aid in 1985 and Live 8 in 2005, is considering the fact that the artists and bands he was working with as a young man in the 1970s, from Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan to the Rolling Stones and the Who, are still performing today – well into their 80s. “I’m amazed,” he says, having just turned 80 himself. “I’m amazed they’re still alive.”
Not only are they performing, many of them are on the road touring scores of cities in a row. In fact, take a glance at this summer’s live music calendar and you might well think it was still the 1970s. Tom Jones, at the tender age of 86, this month set off on his near-40-date world tour; Dylan, at 85, has just begun his 11-city US tour. Next month, 82-year-old Roger Daltrey will tour 20 cities in the United States, while both Alice Cooper (78) and Robert Plant (77) are currently on tour.
The octogenarians are even doing festivals: Gloria Gaynor has just headlined Boogietown festival at 82 and is about to announce a 2027 UK tour, while next month Diana Ross, also 82, is headlining Brighton Pride. From September, Eric Clapton (81) will perform eight dates across America’s Midwest, including his own two-day festival which features a performance from 81-year-old Pete Townshend. Willie Nelson, who is 93, is currently headlining his travelling 12-city Outlaw festival. The Stones, who in 2024 headlined BST Hyde Park to rave reviews following a 20-date tour, have floated going back on the road next year – when both Mick Jagger and Keith Richards will be 83 – to promote their latest album, Foreign Tongues.
“When I was first on the road with the Who or the Stones, I’d be going on to my next gig in the morning and they were only just going to bed,” says Goldsmith. “Then, at some point in the Nineties, a slew of them went vegan, stopped drinking and started bringing their fitness coaches on tour. And now, they’re just getting stronger and stronger. Also, they’re getting offered so much money, they just can’t turn it down.”
Since streaming economics turned artist revenues from recorded music into pennies, touring is where musicians earn a living. It makes sense, then, that artists feel the pressure to stay on the road as long as possible (or come out of retirement to play yet another farewell show) – particularly when there’s such high demand from boomer fans craving nostalgia, or tour promoters who see the increasing value in the last ones standing. It’s why some of these vintage names are playing bigger venues than they ever did in their physical prime (and to audiences now spanning three generations), as well as commanding higher fees. Gaynor’s manager, Stephanie Gold, tells me that the I Will Survive singer is “earning much more” than she was in the 1980s, partly because she’s one of the last few performers of her generation but also because, at 82, “there comes a point at which it’s not worth leaving your home for less”.
So what are the secrets behind these age-defying rock stars? Top of the list is Dr Steven Zeitels, a pioneering laryngologist and cancer surgeon who “saved” Adele’s voice following a benign polyp, added 25 years on to Julie Andrews’s career after four surgeries and has operated on 22 Grammy-winning singers to date. “In the first half of my career, I’d see people in their 90s just once or twice a year,” says Zeitels, who is soon to release his first book, Voice Journeys: A Surgeon’s Story. “Now, it’s routine in my practice for me to see people in their 90s.” Fifteen years ago, Roger Daltrey quipped that Zeitels, who removed precancerous growths on the Who frontman’s vocal cords just five weeks before his 2010 Super Bowl show, “swears that he’ll keep me singing into my 80s”. I ask him how it feels to be watching Daltrey perform at 82. “Well, he’s going to keep singing past that, that’s for sure.”
I ask Zeitels if the focus on restorative vocal surgery fits into society’s current obsession with eternal youth. It is now commonplace for celebrities to pay for a £100,000 facelift that knocks 20 years off their age, so why not have the voice to match? “Of course people want to look young, so they want to sound young too. There was talk of a ‘voice lift’ years ago, but that was a farce, there’s no such thing.” However, Zeitels has spent the past 25 years working on biomaterial gels that could be applied to the vocal cords to restore softness and pliability. The result, says Zeitels, is that “stars would sing like they sang 20 years earlier, or maybe even better”. Increasingly, Zeitels has been asked by musicians to join them on tour. “But I have a Harvard professorship with cancer patients, so that’s never on the cards,” he says.
The vocal coach Gary Catona has worked with Whitney Houston, Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, helping Bennett sing until the astonishing age of 96. He agrees with Zeitels’s scepticism about trendy wellness fads or biohacking experiments being useful in preserving the voice. Ultimately, says Catona, the most important thing is fitness. “The voice is a muscle, and singing is a sport. So a singer has to be fit, like an athlete.”
That’s largely why Mick Jagger – who has one of the most rigorous and longstanding fitness routines of his peers – doesn’t sound a day over 45, and can strut across a stage for three hours a night.
“He’s had a trainer touring with him for the last 30 years,” says Goldsmith, referring to the elusive Norwegian physiotherapist Torje Eike, who has no social-media presence and does no interviews. Jagger, whose father was a PE teacher and taught him how to stay fit and stretch from a young age, has said he trains six times a week, including Pilates, dance, kickboxing, yoga and football.
Similarly, Rod Stewart, still performing at 81, spent 20 years working with personal trainer Gary O’Connor on military-style drills that included underwater swimming using flippers and a rebreather tube to practise recycling or holding his breath, and dragging a metal sledge behind him for leg strength.
“It’s also the reason Roger [Daltrey] sounds so good,” adds Zeitels. Daltrey, who has been playing squash and lifting weights since the 1980s, has said he now goes to the gym twice a week and uses the rowing machine; Iggy Pop, 79, credits his on-stage flexibility to daily qigong (a slow martial art practice similar to tai chi); Jones, who said he had a “12-pack” at 80, credits boxing and inversion therapy (a technique where you hang upside down to use gravity to decompress the spine and relieve back pain); and Gaynor does CrossFit workouts three times a week, despite having had two knee replacements.
To get an idea of how on-the-road health and fitness has changed over the past few years, I speak to Dave Hancock, a doctor of physical therapy, formerly head physio for Chelsea Football Club and the England national team for the 2010 World Cup, who has toured with U2 and Madonna. “Stars are now training like elite athletes,” he says. “I came from sport, thinking music would be a doddle, but it couldn’t have been farther from it. The work ethic is phenomenal.”
For his older clients, key exercises include short bursts of cardio such as spinning [high-intensity indoor cycling] to help with lung stamina when singing, and he’ll make sure to track how much energy they’re burning on stage so that he can inform their on-tour chef about protein requirements. Long gone are the days of stars going out after a show, says Hancock, who even has a bed backstage on which he can tend to his clients during stage breaks. Instead, they spend the car journey back to the hotel with their legs in an ice-compression machine, “then we’re doing an hour of recovery in the hotel room at 1am, while they’re listening back to their gig for any mistakes”. In their dressing rooms, alcohol and drugs have been replaced with portable cryotherapy chambers, steam chambers and IV drips, which stars lug around on their tour bus.
Hancock is sceptical, however, of some of the increasingly popular “longevity science” which includes plasma oxygenisation (which essentially “filters and cleans” the blood) as well as peptide (short chains of amino acids known as “building blocks” of proteins) and stem-cell injections. “It’s very LA, and in my opinion the science isn’t totally there,” he says. “But artists have become very interested in all of that, and some of them swear by peptides, but they’re not Food and Drug Administration-approved in the US. And some of the old guys, if they’ve got arthritis in their knees and shoulders, will inject themselves with stem cells into their joints to help.”
Does he believe that artists’ obsession with wellness will keep increasing the age of headliners? “Oh, absolutely, well into their 80s.” The gruelling physical demands of touring make going past 90 “unlikely”, however, despite medical advancements.
As to how stadium staging has adapted to this new crop of veteran stars, there is no one with better insight than 73-year-old tour production manager Jake Berry, who directed Ozzy Osbourne’s final show in Birmingham last year, just 17 days before he died. To cater to Ozzy’s limited movement, owing to Parkinson’s disease, Berry – who has worked on productions for the Stones and U2 – used the same leather, bat-shaped throne that the Black Sabbath frontman had used for his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2024, and adjusted it for the stage at Villa Park stadium.
“We actually had to strap him into the seat because he wanted to get up all the time, he was always going to give 150 per cent,” says Berry, who had known Ozzy since 1984. His pride also set limits. “After soundcheck he said to me, ‘Jake, don’t you dare take me down [from the stage] in that f---ing lift!’, so we got a special chair for him to sit on to get off the stage, and we had to make lots of ramps.”
Such mobility adjustments were also made for Phil Collins (75) – who performed on stage in a wheelchair – during Genesis’s The Last Domino? Tour in 2021, while Berry says that, generally, productions dealing with older stars try to make sure “to keep where they go between encores at the same level”, while promoters have to make do with fewer shows. “The first band I ever worked for was AC/DC, 50 years ago, and they were performing the other night in America still with the same production: the bell, the cannons, the lights. The only difference is that at 78, Brian [Johnson] needs more time to recuperate, so they don’t do as many shows a week, and they have a month off after eight weeks. That’s how older bands are making it work.” Case in point: the Eagles, helmed by 78-year-old Don Henley, have been performing their The Long Goodbye tour across the past three years, 20 years after their first farewell tour.
Longer breaks between shows have also become crucial to securing an insurance policy, which has become a major factor in whether an artist can afford to go on tour. According to Martin Goebbels, senior director of sport and entertainment at Miller Insurance – which last year insured four of the 10 highest-grossing tours in the world – the policy price usually increases by 10 per cent after an artist reaches 65 years old, and then by at least a further 20 per cent past the age of 75. These policies will request a comprehensive medical history, particularly if a band or artist is doing many shows or has a physically demanding set, and it helps insurers if a doctor or vocal coach is on tour.
A private jet, rather than flying commercial, may also be helpful in lowering the insurance risk through preserving an artist’s energy. When several members of a band are in their 80s, such as with the Stones, you get “triple the risk”, says Goebbels, so “the premiums may be so expensive that they wipe out the profit, so they may decide not to insure”. That said, cancelling a stadium tour may cost a band “several hundreds of millions of pounds” – 80-year-old Dolly Parton will no doubt have been glad of her insurance when she cancelled her Las Vegas residency due to ill health in May. As such, Miller is increasingly insuring superstar artists to play one-off private shows for “staggering amounts of money” that don’t require the exhausting infrastructure of a whole tour.
“What’s funny,” adds Goebbels, “is that in 1979, an insurance company asked me to come and pick up some younger acts, because their books were full of artists who were ‘nearly 30 and so going to be retiring any time soon’. Those acts included the Who, the Rolling Stones and Elton John. And of course, the irony is that I’m actually coming up to retirement now, and they’re still going.”
I wonder whether there’s ever a worry that artists or their entourage may push it too far. Stewart was seen taking puffs from an oxygen tank mid-concert in Utah last month, while Ozzy, the first of whose three farewell gigs took place in 1992, even joked about dying on stage.
“Well, [his wife] Sharon can be ruthless, yes, and as his manager she wanted him to perform, but also she loved him and knew when he couldn’t,” says Berry. Although Goldsmith jokes that it’s usually the “bank manager or the wife” who pushes a star back out on tour, Berry says these musicians are addicted to the road. “Somebody asked me, ‘Why doesn’t Mick [Jagger] stop? He doesn’t need the money’, but Mick doesn’t know what else to do. None of them know what else to do – you come off the road and suddenly you have 12 hours to fill. It’s like giving up heroin.”
Ultimately, it will be up to fans how long a rock star can go. “When they decide an artist can no longer sing, they’ll stop buying the tickets,” says Stuart Galbraith, former managing director of Live Nation and now chief executive of KMJ Entertainment Group. He notes that the top end of the live music sector is experiencing notable growth as a result of “more quality venues of higher capacities” (planning for eight new UK arenas is under way), and that “more people want to go and see live entertainment more than ever before, full stop”. For many music fans in their 50s and 60s, “we’re getting old, and we want to feel young again”, says Zeitels. There’s a little panic in it too, adds Galbraith. “They’re buying tickets to the Stones thinking: ‘This might be their last ever tour. What if I never get to see them again?’” Then again, these days a rocker’s “farewell tour” is very rarely their last.