Barely Alive

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RICHARD COOK gets the heeBee-Geebees over the comeback of the Seventies siblings

There's nothing wrong with being a long-serving artiste. but it helps if you still have something useful to contribute. The blight on rock, as it enters its sixth decade. is that so many of its youthful butterflies have persisted into spidery middle age, refusing to take early retirement, in a way that would have shamed Methuselah.

Making full of the Rolling Stones, who have cheerfully betrayed Mick Jagger's once solemn promise to knock it on the head when he reached 30, is one thing, but at least the old Twickenham blues boys have a certain raddled majesty, a cloak to sling around their shoulders. Far worse are the performers whom the American rock critic Bob Christgau recently grouped under the canny rubric "Everything Rocks and Nothing Ever Dies". There's no reason for these groups or individuals to carry on, beyond paying a few bills: in the words of the Four Tops, they just can't help themselves.

The Bee Gees don' t even have the excuse of needing a bob or two. As far back …