There’s a moment – if you’re lucky – when you realise getting older doesn’t mean fading out
Maybe it’s seeing Debbie Harry owning a festival stage in her 70s. Maybe it’s watching Nick Cave spit poetry like his soul’s still on fire.
Or maybe it’s Shirley Manson, flipping off the tabloids and reminding everyone that growing older in music shouldn’t be a radical act – but somehow still is.
This week, Garbage’s frontwoman did what she’s always done best: called bullshit. After a Daily Mail headline declared the band looked “unrecognisable” in promo shots for their latest single There’s No Future In Optimism, Manson took to Instagram with a scathing – and wildly refreshing – response.
“Quite a header from the ‘Daily Mail’ yesterday,” she wrote. “What is THIS supposed to mean?!? The Druids look almost exactly the same as they have always done for thirty years so I can’t help thinking this is directed at me.”
And let’s be real: it probably was.
“I’m nearly sixty years old. Of course I’m not going to look anything like my late twenties self?!? Quite honestly, I think it would be a bit creepy if I did,” Manson continued. “Either way – this kind of language is weaponised to put a woman like me in my place.”
She’s not wrong. In an industry obsessed with “the next big thing,” where youth is currency and ageing is treated like a scandal, even icons get dragged for simply existing outside of a Photoshopped timeline. The pressure to stay frozen in time — or disappear completely – isn’t just insulting. It’s exhausting.
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Manson’s fiery rejection of this idea is the kind of no-filter honesty that cuts through the noise. “I shall continue to age as I am,” she wrote. “I will continue to wrinkle and flub… but I will still look cute in my pyjamas with bed head and no make up on and I will always – no matter what I look like – no matter what they say about me – I will always – and forever – rock HARDER than most.”
It’s a sentiment echoed lately by Lady Gaga and Millie Bobby Brown, both of whom have pushed back against toxic scrutiny. But Manson’s defiance feels different — a middle finger from the other side of the youth-worshipping wall.
This isn’t about vanity or nostalgia. It’s about dignity. And the right to keep doing what you love, to keep creating, to keep rocking, without being reduced to a before-and-after headline.
Because we all lean a little too hard on the myth that music belongs to the young. That if someone’s been at it for decades, they must be chasing relevance rather than leading it. But anyone who’s seen Shirley Manson command a stage knows better.
And maybe, just maybe, that’s what the critics are really afraid of.
So here’s to getting older, louder, freer. Here’s to doing what you love and looking like yourself while doing it. Here’s to still rocking — harder than most.
