Lots of music stars in their seventies and eighties and beyond are still playing to massive crowds. Bruce Springsteen is about 90 and continues to pack out venues; Bob Dylan is still travelling the world at the age of 99 and playing to adoring crowds who pay stupid money to see him shuffle around mumbling. Even Sparks are still traversing the planet playing to the biggest audiences of their careers at the relatively sprightly age of 85 or something.

It seems like only yesterday that Jeremy Corbyn stood on the main stage at Glastonbury in front of an adoring crowd the size of a major European city. But while Springsteen is still filling stadia and releasing devastatingly brilliant and relevant songs, Corbyn is reduced to the equivalent of touring indie clubs performing solo acoustic versions of his biggest hits and a couple of new songs that aren’t all that great.

I was among the crowd in Hackney’s Moth Club to see Corbyn in conversation. It is a wonderful little music venue with a really nice atmosphere, notwithstanding the poppy the size of a garden shed affixed to its wall. Oddly enough, the last time I was there it was to see Peter Perrett, a musician of roughly Corbyn’s age who had filled the place to capacity with people keen to hear his new material. Corbyn’s audience was seated and rather sparser, though it was a lot younger than I had anticipated.

One of Corbyn’s most appealing features was his refusal to set himself up as a remote leader figure. On the other hand, one of his most unappealing features was to refuse to show any sort of leadership at all and his perpetual resort to bromides about love, hope and unity. He was never the man to point and say, “there’s the class enemy, let’s get the bastards!” That has been his undoing as anyone remotely familiar with his time as Labour leader or his performance in Your Party knows.

The ostensible purpose of the evening was to show support for independent music venues, clearly something that all right-thinking people can agree on. If there was a political purpose it was lost on me.

Questions were put by a chap called Sam who works for Corbyn’s Peace and Justice Project. Unhelpfully, he appears to be the biggest Corbyn fan in the world and this is not something that makes for a probing conversation. There was a brief glimmer of hope right at the start. Sam said “we need to talk about the elephant in the room. The public disagreements. The arguments that should be had in private.”  In what was a very deliberate way of discussing serious politics he asked a stupid question about the Beckhams and the evening didn’t really improve from there.

We learned that Corbyn used to tape records and that he really liked folk and protest music, in particular Joan Baez. He sang a couple of lines of Soldier Blue by Buffy St. Marie and revealed that his first concert had been the Shepton Mallet  Festival in 1970. Music is important to people, everyone should have access to it etc etc.

Nostalgia act

In much the same way that a local newspaper might run a story about how Bob the plumber once played on the same bill as the Beatles, we were treated to a long description of the Glastonbury moment. Did you know that at major music festivals the performers have to keep to a very strict timetable?

Then there was something about his pantomime and wizards and how community theatre brings people together.

When the moment came for questions from the floor, I had a brief expectation that someone might ask a political question and the man who was once the figurehead for a huge mass movement might offer some strategic direction, giver his views on what Your Party should do next and his opinions on the Greens. That was stupid of me. It was racism is bad, we should be nice to each other, diversity makes us stronger. He was sitting in a bloody room in Hackney with an audience of lefties. This was on the level of telling someone to wash their hands after using the toilet.

Corbyn is a very sincere man who has stuck by his principles for a lifetime. There is much to admire about him, but last night it was obvious that he is now a nostalgia act and that the leadership of the left lies elsewhere.