There are one or two exceptions – Randy Newman, Philip Roth, maybe Emmylou Harris – but, on the whole, the second half of a career is spent reworking, with increasing weariness, the themes explored with incomparably more dynamism and verve in the first half.Comedians tend to get the message, novelists on the wane have difficulty finding a publisher, but old musicians carry on recording and touring as if they were still in their prime. This summer, Dylan, Willie Nelson, Paul Simon, even the poor old Eagles, will be on the road, taking their sagging, wheezy, balding fans back to their pasts.Seeing and hearing them is almost always a melancholy experience and, with a few exceptions like James Taylor, most of the oldsters on stage seem bored, too. Catching Willie Nelson at the Barbican was a grim enough experience, but not as depressing as seeing one of those cash-in-quick supergroups, with Ry Cooder, John Hiatt, Nick Lowe and Jim Keltner, strumming away for an hour before dragging their old bones back to the hotel to count their money.But Ishiguro’s casual remark has had a more serious effect than to remind me that, frontiersmen or not, these veterans have had their day It is the taste problem. Suddenly, my CD rack and album collection have ceased to be a source of pleasure and have begun to seem like some kind of nostalgia museum The music that I used to enjoy has started to bore me I am tired of my own taste. Like those athletes who have their blood replaced before a race, I need a taste transfusion Right now I am ready to try anything.

Opera has been pretty much a closed book to me until now, as has hardcore blues. I am so desperate that I might even give jazz a whirl.But it is difficult acquiring new tastes, I have discovered. Now and then someone new breaks through – most recently, the astonishing country revival singers Gillian Welsh and David Rawlings – but most of my one-night stands with new groups or singers fail to develop into relationships.The problem is that, however brilliant a new, relatively young songwriter or performer may be, he or she is drawing on a different set of values and experiences than my own. It turns out that it is not only talent that one is looking for in music but a sense that the muddle of one’s own existence is being interpreted, shaped and caught in musical form.Worryingly, the same may well be true with fiction.

When Martin Amis said recently that he had reached an age when it was not healthy to read the work of younger writers, his words were taken to be the defensive reaction of a competitive writer to new talent In fact, he may have been articulating a sadder truth. At a certain point in one’s life, one might actually prefer to read something passably good by a contemporary to a work of genius by someone in their twenties.So in the end, one is stuck with the old groaners and growlers, both in the CD rack and on the bookshelf. Trading in one’s old taste for new, it seems, simply does not work It feels undignified, a bit like disowning your own past. Like Ishiguro, I shall have to look to the oldsters, however enfeebled and self-parodying they have become, to keep on playing the songs of my life. On the other hand, I think I’ll stay at home when the Eagles come to town.terblacker aol
More from Terence Blacker.

Tam Dalyell is invariably worth listening to. Yesterday, he spoke for many in his party when he lamented the speed with which the latest reshuffle has propelled two of the newest and youngest MPs – David Miliband and David Lammy – into high-profile ministerial posts, and seen the promotion of some notably young ministers. Those who had “laboured in the parliamentary vineyard for a long time” deserved better consideration; the danger was that MPs in their forties and fifties would lose heart from not being given the chance to show what they could do in government office

Tam Dalyell is invariably worth listening to. He was much more reluctant than he need or should have been, back in 1997, to appoint some of the brightest of the older MPs to ministerial office, particularly since the Government – from the Prime Minister down – was almost wholly lacking in ministerial experience. To take a few random examples, Giles Radice, a proto-Blairite who had been a shadow Education Secretary, would almost certainly have been an excellent first Minister for Europe in the Foreign Office.