Shops come and go in Milltown. They open up like spring flowers, to meet our real or imaginary needs for organic cheeses, ethnic handicrafts and occult paraphernalia. Some of them disappear even before we realise they’ve opened. When people decide to "do without advertising and just see how it goes", we know their trading days are numbered. The record for sinking without trace is currently held by a second-hand shop selling Indian clothes. Whose Sari Now? opened on a Friday and had closed by the Monday, without even adding to the £20 float.

But still they come: retailing greenhorns with exotic ideas, family windfalls and the optimism of the damned, ready to give retailing a whirl. With the proliferation of out-of-town supermarkets, it might be more profitable to target the old, the infirm and those who've had their cars repossessed: the kind of people who have to shop locally. Offer ‘Everything for a Quid’, with some appropriate background music ('Buddy, can you spare a dime?'... 'Nobody loves you when you're down and out'), and just wait for the money to roll in. The entrepreneurs of Milltown tend to have more exotic ideas, however, spotting niche markets so small that they’re almost invisible to the naked eye. One short-lived shop made a brief speciality out of impractical jokes, but who - outside the small and shadowy world of S & M - buys exploding suppositaries?

Like some tragic hero on the operatic stage, other shops are a long time dying. Their closing down sales stretch out to weeks, months, even years. Sometimes those ‘Sale Must End On Saturday’ posters get so tatty they have to be replaced with new ones. And perhaps someone could explain to us why a florist needs to have a closing down sale at all.

So we’re watching with interest as yet another emporium prepares to open up. Who knows, maybe someone will finally get their sums right. Jude reads the name over the door. Zimmer Man. It seems vaguely familar. He presses his nose up against the window pane, to find a disconcerting display of stuff for old folk. Nothing they might actually want (like cream sherry, shortbread biscuits and Werthers Original) but what they apparently need. Stannah stairlifts, artfully disguised commodes, telescopic walking sticks, reclining chairs, adjustable beds, zimmer frames and electric shopping buggies. These are the tools of the trade for ageing hippies: polished chrome and leatherette, with some flesh-coloured plastic thrown in for good measure.

It’s all quite a shock to the system: an unwelcome reminder of his own mortality. It’s way too late for Jude to die young and pretty, and - despite what he thought at seventeen - he isn’t going to live forever. At seventeen life stretched out ahead, like a mirage: a tantalising dream of endless promise. Nothing seemed impossible. It all seems so very long ago. Michael Jackson was black, the trains ran on time, and when we had a war the other side fought back; yes, that’s how long ago it was. The first storm clouds gathered over the Summer of Love, to usher in the Autumn of Disillusionment. One-man buses, televised snooker, one-day cricket, Vesta packet meals... what was the world coming to?

But now Jude’s in his fifties - an indeterminate time of life with very little to recommend it. He can’t even use his age as one of his lottery numbers any more. People talk about being ‘only thirty’ as in "I’m only thirty... still plenty of time to start a family". And "I’m only forty... still plenty of time for a change of career’. But what follows ‘only fifty’? "I’m only fifty... still time to book an appointment with the proctologist"? "Still time to become a storm-trooper for Age Concern"? "Still time to take up crown green bowling"? Fifty? Fuck it...

Jude has to face the prospect of old age, however unpleasant it may be. As the tail-lights of the twentieth century retreat into the gloom, Jude has a glimpse of the future; it doesn’t look good. Meals on wheels. Sitting in a rocking chair, but too tired to get it going. Huddling over a one-bar electric fire, indulging in an orgy of bitterness, recrimination and regret. Watching snuff movies that have snuff in them. Trying to roll a joint with arthritic fingers, then having to wait for the District Nurse to call round and put the roach in. And, worst of all, the prospect of spending his declining years in the old folks’ home (Sunset House: ‘Serving the decrepid and incontinent since 1985’). Jude gives an involuntary shudder. He doesn’t want to end his days like his grandad: just sitting around all day, waiting for TV to be invented.

Yes, if the superannuated hippies of Milltown had known they were going to live this long, they might have taken better care of themselves. Jude might been a little more selective about his drug intake. And, at the summer festivals, he might not have stood quite so close to the sound system. There’s a constant, angry buzzing in his head these day, like a wasp in a jar. As he’s now painfully aware, dancing around a muddy field, with flowers in his hair, did not make him immune to the twin terrors of age and gravity. "Hope I die before I get old" Roger Daltrey sang way back in 1965, but you don’t hear him singing that any more. Oh no. It’s all trout farms now and American Express. Bastard.

Sunset House was purpose-built as a ‘drive-thru’ establishment - allowing successful people with busy lives to abandon their elderly hippy relatives with a minimum of fuss, paperwork or sentiment. There’s a ‘no questions asked’ policy about new arrivals, so residents are often woken in the middle of the night by a familiar scenario. A car draws up quietly to the front door; the passenger door opens, followed by a dull thud, perhaps a yelp of pain and the car door slamming shut. The driver guns the car through the gears - spinning tyres, scattering gravel - and away down the road like a bat out of hell.

Next morning the residents find their number increased by one: some disorientated old duffer, with nothing except the clothes he’s standing in, a Crackerjack pen & pencil set and a scrunched-up note in his fist that reads: ‘My name is Jack. Blood type O. Tea, not coffee. Honey Nut Loops. I talk to myself. Thank you’.

One by one, the old hippies of Milltown are winding up at Sunset House. Some go willingly enough, won over by promises of E-numbers and that heady Horlicks rush. The staff do their best to keep the residents’ minds active, ("Let’s try it again, Mr Skynyrd. Look: arse... elbow... No, no... Arse... elbow...") but it’s not easy.

Others get an offer they can’t refuse: a one-way trip on a Sixties-bound Tardis. Set the controls for the Summer of Love. Whizz straight past the Seventies, the decade that taste forgot... but be careful to stop before the Fifties, a gloomy time of rationing and Brylcreem when we lived our lives in black & white.

Ah, yes, the Sixties... that golden age when men were fermenting revolution and women were making coffee. Simpler times when we had farthings, florins, farenheit and fuzzy felt. Antirhinums, antimacassars and avoidupois. Dubbin, dolly blue and wooden clothes-pegs. Green Shield Stamps, tiger nuts, spanish, coltsfoot rock, barley sugar twists, temperance hotels, sarsaparilla, lemon curd, lead soldiers, penny plain and tuppence coloured.

We could leave our front doors unlocked back then, without any bother. We’d keep the doors wide open, all through the night. When we went on holiday we even left notes for the burglars - telling them the house would be empty for a fortnight, and where they could find the money. But did we ever get burgled? Did we buggery...

Ah, the Sixties... that semi-mythical time when unicorns roamed the earth, Concorde was the future of travel, and, thanks to Neil Armstrong’s "Giant step for Mankind" on the moon, we got to use non-stick frying pans and pens that could write upside-down. Tell that to anyone who says the space race was a waste of money.

People knew their neighbours back then; people knew their place; the summers were warm, the winters were cold, like seasons should be; kids respected their elders; you got a fair day’s pay for a fair days work; beer was 4d a pint; you could walk the streets without getting mugged for your mobile, and AIDS was an ineffectual slimming product rather than a terrifying global plague. Yes, if the past is, indeed, another country, the old folk of Milltown would have few complaints at being repatriated.

There are some old hippies, though, who have no need to go back to the Sixties... for the simple reason that they never really left. After a lifetime of half-arsed anarchy and solvent abuse, these grizzled old graybeards have no intention of going gentle into that good night... or into the claustrophobic confines of Sunset House either. They’ve managed thus far to avoid the Poll Tax, meaningful labour and the preoccupations of the petit bourgoisie, so it’s going to take more than a packet of Old English Spangles to persuade them to sit in an easy chair, staring catatonically at the point where the wall meets the ceiling.

They take some rounding up, these old guys. It’s all in the timing. Best catch them when their defences are down, after a few pipefuls of home-grown. In the throes of a major snack-attack, they can often be tempted to follow a trail of Pringles into the only council-operated man-trap in the county. Once inside, even the wildest child of the Sixties can be sedated with a dose of Incredible String Band. Not the difficult third album, of course, which can enrage them even further. The last resort - and one that Sunset House is loathe to advertise - is to call a local vet out. As defiant as these old guys may sound ("You’ll never take me alive... I can remember when this was all fields") they’re no match for a well-aimed tranquiliser dart.

***

Jude arrived in Milltown at the spliff-end of the Sixties, with a guitar slung over his shoulder and a repertoire of protest songs. He came here for all the usual reasons: to escape from his creditors, keep his head down and find a ready supply of recreational drugs. Back then he was a pillar of the anti-establishment. He laughed in the face of convention; he spat in the eye of normality. Like everyone else at the time, he wanted to overthrown capitalism, fight for the rights of the working man, and get laid (but not necessarily in that order). He manned barricades, shouted slogans and broke innumerable by-laws.

One year he stood for the council, on an Anarcho-Syndicalist platform. Jude urged his supporters, such as they were, to boycott the election. It was an "imperialist sham", he insisted. So convincing was his rhetoric, and so right was his cause, that he gathered no votes at all (having been too busy on polling day to vote himself). It was merely the first of a long list of pointless gestures. He went on hunger strike to protest about the violation of human rights in the third world - only to change his mind when he fully comprehended what happens to people who don’t eat. On another occasion he was tricked into giving up a silent vigil, when a policeman handed him his walkie-talkie and said "It’s for you, Che Guevara".

The Beatles split up, which had a disorientating effect on Jude, and prevented him making plans further ahead than lunchtime. That year marked the beginning of his withdrawal from reality, and into a kind of fantasy world of his own invention. Fortunately, a lot of Milltown folk were already living there too, so he was seldom short of company. Is cannabis addictive? Jude never stopped smoking long enough to find out. Drink and drugs were an everyday aspect of Milltown life; even the invitations to children's parties read 'Bring a Bottle'.

There followed a period about which Jude has no recollection at all - mostly due to ingesting enough class A drugs to fell a herd of elephants. He’d convinced himself that being drugged up to the eyeballs was a job only half done. When he wasn’t able to work, it was "because of the drink and the drugs". While some misguided souls might see this as a ringing endorsement of drink and drugs, Jude now wonders what he might have achieved in life if he hadn’t taken a stoned lemming as his role model. He staggered through the Doors of Perception - in search of new and interesting addictions - only to get hopelessly lost in the Vestibule of Tedium and the Inner Sanctum of Utter Incomprehensibility. The doors of perception proved to be revolving doors. For three whole years Jude thought he was a satsuma.

His life in freefall, Jude felt powerless to change. He saw the world in the most simplistic terms: just big shapes and loud noises. To anyone who has had to cope with the wiles and ways of an addict, the scenario will be depressingly familiar: the dabbling, the bluster, the bravado, the impotence, the pain, the self-loathing, the descent into hell, the resolutions, the good intentions, the false starts, the stark realisation, the long road to recovery, the convalescence, the sheer mind-numbing boredom, the ‘addict in recovery’ gibbering (which could clear a crowded lift in seconds). "I am a member of a drug survival programme" Jude would mumble at every opportunity, "and I would like to read you a poem".

It wasn’t the love of a good woman that finally pulled Jude through. Yes, there had been a few women in his life, some of them good-hearted, but none of them had wanted to dedicate their lives selflessly to a loser like Jude. At some point in the relationship they would give him an ultimatum - "You’re going to have to choose: it’s either the drugs or me" - and that would be that.

Two incidents helped to bring Jude to his senses. Firstly, he got busted for dealing. Not for dealing dope per se, but, bizarrely, for flouting the new weights and measures legislation by using imperial instead of metric. For that - and selling cannabis without the government’s new seal of approval, the ‘high as a kite’ mark - he got three months at Her Majesty’s pleasure.

Secondly, he got back into his music. The date of his release is etched into Jude’s memory: it was the same day, coincidentally, that John Denver’s head came up for auction. Intoxicated by freedom, Jude called up four of his old buddies. It started off as nothing more than a jam session, but by the time they’d harmonised some songs and sunk a few beers, they’d become a band: The Uncles.

Success didn’t come easily. Or, indeed, at all. At first the Uncles were so bad that they could play in pubs that don’t even have an entertainment licence. Nevertheless, by dint of endless touring - as far afield as, oh, Mytholmroyd and Bacup - they went on to became the premier soft-rock outfit in the valley. You remember them, of course you do: the duelling kazoos, those five-part harmonies and the extended drum solos that sounded like two dozen dustbins being thrown down a spiral staircase.

Instead of the mundane realities of life in a small, South Pennine milltown, their music reflected a romantic affinity for Americana. The Uncles didn’t get their kicks on the A646 (a road that was noteworthy only for being dug up every few weeks) but on Route 66. When they went down to the crossroads, they’re weren’t thinking about the one in Milltown, where old biddies in carpet slippers would wander absent-mindedly into the traffic.

All things must pass, however, and The Uncles split up in the middle of the annual farewell reunion concert: an event that was in any case suffering from the law of diminishing returns. The official line was ‘musical differences’, a tactful way of saying that for most of the time they were playing different songs. But, in truth, the guys in the band were ready to leave the moment they first heard Jude refer to them as "the guys in the band". He seemed to think he was the one indispensible member of the band, just because he owned the van. The last straw came when an ageing groupie wrinkled up her nose at Jude, and put her blouse back on. "I'll do anything for love" , she said, "but I won't do that" - proving not merely that the band’s appeal was waning, but also that there are few moments in life that can’t be summed up succinctly by a Meatloaf lyric.

Jude was tired of cranking out the same old songs, to a small and increasingly apathetic audience, while tribute bands were pulling in the crowds. Why bother creating new music, when it was easier just to hang onto the coat-tails of the famous? Yes, you could see a different tribute band just about every night of the week in Milltown. Poxy Music: a creditable attempt to resuscitate the ailing Spandex industry. Punk Floyd: giving a novel, thrash-metal twist to the back catalogue of the ponderous pomp-rockers. The Global Village People: hard to categorise, impossible to listen to. The Litter Band: trying to kick-start a glam-rock revival in the face of almost universal revulsion.

***

In the good old days our rock star heroes had the good sense to die of drink and drugs, allowing us to remember them as they were in their prime. Jimi Hendrix isn’t touring the scampi ‘n’ chips supper-club circuit, thank God, with a ‘Hits of the Sixties’ nostalgia package. No, Jimi’s star never faded. He lives on in our memories - still lighting up the night sky at Woodstock with his incandescent licks.

John Lennon’s still sitting at that famous white piano. "Imagine no possessions", he sings plaintively, "I wonder if you can". He can’t, to be frank, but maybe you can. Everyone remembers where they were when John Lennon was shot. Jude was watching TV at the time, unless he was out shopping. He’s on firmer ground about where he was when Liberace got shot. He was... er... Actually, his memory’s not so hot any more. He can vaguely remember that one of the lasses in Abba had a nice bum, but which one was it?

Sid Vicious is still doing to My Way what the Japanese did to Pearl Harbour, and sharing life, love and dirty needles at the Chelsea Hotel with the charming Nancy. If we feel sorry for anyone in their sorry tale of rock excess, it’s those who are left behind. Respect, then, to Mr and Mrs Vicious in their sad loss and, indeed, the whole Vicious family.

Janis Joplin never got the chance to be a Peace Ambassador for the United Nations and embarrass herself all over Africa ("I can understand how these famine victims must feel", she never got around to saying. "I skip lunch too. You have to if you want to keep your figure and stay on top in the music business"). Janice crawled into a bottle, instead, and never came out.

Elvis had the right idea, except his timing was out by about ten years. Instead of hitting the Las Vegas come-back trail, to become the first of a million Elvis Presley impersonators, he should have quit while he was ahead. We could remember him as he was in 1963, not as the fatso who, during a session of colonic irrigation to dislodge almost two stone of impacted faeces from his lower bowel, exploded with a bang that could be heard all over Memphis.

Despite all the odds, and their best efforts to kill themselves, some stars have survived. Keith Richards, for example, has been road-testing pharmaceutical products on behalf of a grateful nation - like a beagle who buys its own fags - yet he’s still around. Chris de Burgh hasn’t been shot by a crazed fan, though we haven’t given up hope altogether. And then there’s Ringo. He wasn’t the best drummer in the world. He wasn't even the best drummer in the Beatles. But, by golly, he could pick his friends. What’s next for the once-legendary percussionist and Thomas the Tank Engine narrator: Dictionary Corner on Countdown, perhaps, exchanging doomed pleasantries with Richard Whiteley and accepting his appearance fee in groceries ("Not the drinks department, though. Sorry, Mr Starr").

Gary Glitter elevated self-parody to an artform, but now his features look course and raddled - the wig a sad mockery, the arched eyebrows not quizzical but cynical. He’s been airbrushed out of musical history, thank goodness, like Stalin from the Politburo. There’ll be no more comebacks for the comeback king.

Even before his downfall, Jonathan King was a benchmark for all that was tawdry and trivial in popular music. "You can’t send me to prison. I’m a celebrity. I’ve been on TV, for God’s sake, I’ve had my own show". Jim Morrison wrote ‘Strange Days’ and died in a hot bath; Jonathan King wrote ‘Leap up and down and wave your knickers in the air’, and will probably live to be a hundred. There’s no justice.

***

Jude is fifty four, exactly twice the age that Jim, Janis and Jimi were when they died. Spooky. By the age of twenty seven, Alexander the Great had conquered the known world. By the age of twenty seven Jude had mastered the first few chords of Stairway to Heaven. It’s always hard to realise that it’s probably too late to make much of a stir in this world. The great work may remain undone, the expansive gesture left unmade. But Jude’s not ready to hang up his rock ‘n’ roll shoes just yet. He’s not going to sit down in an easy chair and just wait for the boney finger of Old Father Time to come knocking on his door. He knows his hell-raising days are over. Even burning the candle at one end seems beyond him now. And he’s given up the dope too. After all, why would any self-respecting anarchist want to smoke cannabis, now that Tory MPs are pressing for legalisation?

Jude has reformed the band, ten years after they broke up. There were a few ruffled feathers to smooth down, a few egos to massage. It took a reconciliation over a few beers, an all-night jamming session and - vitally - the need to fund three ugly and expensive divorces, to get the band back together again. The easiest thing would have been to live off past glories, knocking out the old favourites (We're All Going on a Saga Holiday... Hit Me With Your Walking Stick... When I Was 64...), but Jude and the boys (boys?) have other plans.

With a novel twist they’ve decided to become their very own tribute band. The Carbuncles are on stage tonight in Milltown. Ten years is a long time to be away; will anyone turn up? Let’s hope there’s a good crowd. After all, everyone needs a bit of luck. Take Elvis’s manager: until Elvis came along, his most marketable act was Colonel Parker's Dancing Chickens.

Jude wangled a 20% discount on his zimmer frame: for giving the shop free publicity, he said. It stops him falling over when he reaches for the mike. "It’s good to be wherever we are", he announces, to the darkened room, "and if we’ve been here before then it’s good to be back"...