Young@Heart

It shouldn't really work, a horde of septuagenarian singers wheezing out Joy Division and Radiohead, yet somehow it does - brilliantly. Here they come, about 20 of them, drifting onstage into a celestial bar, some flamboyant in vintage evening wear, others spectral and slow-moving, others like Saturday shoppers looking to take the weight off their feet. A nurse in white glides among them like a prim reaper. The singers (all from Massachusetts) run through some older numbers - "Don't Get Around Much Anymore", "Gonna Get Along Without Ya Now" - though this is never about nostalgia, more a glimpse of the quickening present. Bon Jovi's "It's My Life" has never meant so much as when sung by a wizened gent with a feather in his fedora and biker handlebars on his Zimmer. Another highlight is 84-year-old Dora Morrow, who turns a southern-style Creedence Clearwater Revival rocker into a negro spiritual. But it's their surging power as a group that astounds - storming upstage for the Buzzcocks' "What Do I Get?", later peering from beneath white cowls, an effulgent choir of ancients showing us how to live. Not so much staring into the abyss as partying at its crumbling edge.