Old age suits some genres. I'd expect any Nyabingi reggae group worth its salt to be a bunch of old geezers with dreads like frayed boat rope and weather-battered faces. Similarly, you can get away with being grizzled in Irish rebel folk - people don't want to listen to songs about busting out of the Maze from some spotty 18-year old.
I don't think people should play Oi! after 27. Something about XXL Ben Shermans and paunch-concealing baggy jeans doesn't scream 'human hand grenades' to me. The exception to this rule is Millwall Roi Pearce, who looks like he's on the run from some St Clabbert's-style OAP home. I was going to say punk but Crass, Poison Girls and UK Subs all had old gits in them at the time, so I guess that's OK after all. I also kind of admire geriatric crust punks who've managed to hang on to their facial tattoos, ratty dreads and rotting sleeveless Disorder-patch jackets and still live on Merrydown and Evofix (on a park bench in Folkestone).
Obviously, avant-garde/experimental performances attract loads of boring bast...er, academics, so being a decrepit, unfanciable fossil is def. an advantage in this field. Not so for power electronics, unless you're Japanese and have an impressive beard. Last time I saw Ramleh, Gary Mundy was looking very frail, which added some unnecessary melancholia to the proceedings.
I feel sad whenever I see Adam Ant wearing two hats. Makes it more obvious he's a crazy baldhead than if he just left it alone.
Iggy Pop's looking rough these days, but I can't imagine him doing anything else, and wouldn't really want him to.
Really? I'd love him to do some gardening, or sell some more car insurance, or anything but make another record. It's not even his physical state or age - it's the depressing, inevitable canonisation, bestowing of respectability and reverence, etc (see also Nick Cave) that turns me off. Preferred it when he was the mad cunt bouncing around a fridge singing 'Dog Food' - but everyone considered him ancient even then...