Rooster

After far too long, I was so much looking forward to seeing the Rambert Dance Company, but I’ve been under the weather with a nasty cough this past week, and decided that Debussy and the Rolling Stones and others didn’t need to be shared in duet with my chest infection.

So we had dinner together in Oxford – Sophie, who used to work with Rambert, and Dora, who loves her dance (this being her introduction at eleven, nearly twelve, to the professional contemporary variety) and me – and I left them at the theatre and caught the train back to a quiet, dark home in King’s Sutton.

Rooster. That was the headline name of Rambert’s show. It’s a series of eight classic Stones songs, opening with the great blues from 1964, “Little Red Rooster”, all wailing slide guitar and harmonica, choreographed in 1991 by Rambert’s artistic director at that time, Christopher Bruce, and a popular favourite for the company ever since.

Sad to miss it in the flesh, I played it on YouTube when I got home. Such an elegant transformation of the song. Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bTW8tPL6qY

Then I played the Stones version of the same song with the sublime guitar-playing of an unannounced Eric Clapton. Simply amazing music-making: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Blfy4XV1kRQ

Sorry you’re missing them in Australia and New Zealand.

Entrepreneurship and age

Interesting and provocative article by “Schumpeter” in The Economist* turning on its head the idea that entrepreneurs are predominantly the young.

Among the examples he cites of creativity stretching well into “Third Age” are The Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney and Leonard Cohen.

Then, digging into recent research, Schumpeter says that in the USA “twice as many successful founders [of start-ups] are over 50 as under 25, and twice as many over 60 as under 20.”

And he says that research shows that “the highest rate of entrepreneurial activity [is] among people aged 55 to 64 – and the lowest rate among the Google generation of 20 to 34 year-olds.”

So what might we conclude?

1.That experience coupled with creativity is critically important to successful entrepreneurship, and that

2.Maybe it’s more a generational thing more than an age thing. After all, the examples he quotes all come from the 1960s generation that considered creativity to be of the essence. Talkin' 'bout my generation. Schumpeter doesn’t seem to have considered this possibility.

Time will tell!

* http://www.economist.com/node/21548135