From Springsteen to McCartney, ageing rockers are teaching us about something bigger than music | Jonathan Freedland

The legends of a genre made by and for the young are getting old. Some embrace it - and it elevates their art

It's a paper ticket, from before the age of the QR code, and it announces the Rolling Stones at Wembley Stadium on Saturday 26 June 1982. I was 15, but I still remember the buildup to that show - the papers full of jokes about the band needing Zimmer frames to reach the stage and, perhaps, more frequent bathroom breaks. They called them the Strolling Bones". On that day, Mick Jagger was 38 years old.

The joke turned on the notion that rock'n'roll was the music of the young. It had arrived in the mid-1950s in an eruption of hormones and rebellion, its themes teenage lust, longing and a future that stretched ahead, vast and mysterious. For men knocking 40 still to be singing of such things seemed ridiculous. And yet, the Stones were back last summer, Jagger approaching his 80th birthday, playing all the same songs.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist