Look back - and cash in

Here and Now, a tour featuring Belinda Carlisle, Howard Jones and other Eighties stalwarts, is back for a second year. It goes to prove that some music just won't die, laments Steve Jelbert

Next week the second "Here and Now" tour kicks off. Heroically inaccurate in its title, unless you accept its promise that three former members of Spandau Ballet, Belinda Carlisle and Howard Jones will be "here" and "now" on the actual night your local convention centre becomes a giant Christmas office party, it's the latest contribution to the nation's ever-expanding nostalgia mountain. A collection of genuine has-beens finally get to retread the boards of huge venues they haven't been able to fill since President Reagan's first term, if ever. That chronicler of fallen empires Louis Theroux is along for the ride, too, a clear indication that where once history was written by the winning side, now it's recorded by graduates who've scored a place on a BBC producers course.

Though ex-hippies of a certain age might have vague memories of a band called Here and Now, who simply toured endlessly, as it was cheaper to live on the road than under a roof, this event is a sequel to last year's resuscitation of the careers of that always useless Debbie Harry impersonator Kim Wilde, cuddly Paul Young and the once great Heaven 17. (Remember the one that went "I was thirty seven, you were seventeen" – you'd never get away with a line like that in today's hit parade.) Sadly Adam Ant will not be heading the bill as originally announced (though don't torture yourself – I saw him in his pomp and he was anything but slick), but the line-up clearly demonstrates that these days no music ever dies, no matter how dated or insignificant it is.

Just look at the signs. A show featuring the terrifying combination of Ben Elton and the music of Queen is about to kick off in the West End. The tragi-comic story of Factory records, 24 Hour Party People, named after a song by one of the only two decent bands the label ever signed (or didn't, in fact, as such reckless business practices weren't part of their ethos), has just reached the nation's screens. And this month's "All Tomorrow's Parties" festival, held at a holiday camp on the South Coast, features among its predictably listener-unfriendly line-up such old lags as Cheap Trick, Wire and the long defunct (and never very successful) Mission of Burma, who are now cited as a major influence by many of the younger American bands.

MoB will at last play to a festival crowd and one that should be more receptive to their music than they could have imagined 20 years back. Reforming can be good business. A couple of years ago in a Q interview Mark E Smith of the ageless Fall was nonplussed by a fan's suggestion that "a friend in marketing says all you have to do to be more successful is split up for five years then reform". Smith had to point out that, despite a thousand line-up changes, The Fall have never knocked it on the head.

The fan has a point though, as Smith conceded. The Wonder Stuff managed to top up their pension funds with a series of shows quite recently, before demerging once more. And at the back of Mojo there's a veritable dinosaur's graveyard, where large block ads proclaim national tours by artists long thought dead such, as Dean Friedman (last chart hit 1978) and Ricky Ross from Deacon Blue, who you might reasonably have expected to have returned to teaching by now. It's a wonder Richard Stilgoe isn't in there.

Everyone present at Here and Now will have a great time watching Toyah Willcox (aka "Barmy Aunt Boomerang") belting out tunes that seemed horribly contrived even then. Both audience and performers will unite in the realisation that, yep, they're both reliving the time when they were at their best, in a mass celebration of mediocrity. Nostalgia has become inescapable, and stranger still, such big business.

Once popular bass players from forgotten Sixties bands queue up to be insulted half-heartedly on the "identity parade" round of Never Mind The Buzzcocks (itself named after a band that never quite cracked it), simply for the attendant publicity boost of Mark Lamarr's "still performing and writing today" comment as they shuffle off. Entire movies such as Summer of Sam and Whatever Happened to Harold Smith? hinge on the unavoidable Seventies battles between punks and disco-goers, as if it was a moral choice comparable with avoiding the draft, while cultural commentators now talk about the demonisation of dance music, such as the burning of disco records in a Chicago stadium in 1979, as an expression of deep-rooted homophobia and racism. Which it might well have been, but even Homer Simpson, a man who sported a "Disco Sucks" sticker on his car, was once so moved by a country number that he exclaimed, "I haven't felt this way since 'Funky Town'." Eight-fingered and fictional he may be, but such catholic tastes are typical of us all.

Yet according to those who market nostalgia the Eighties can be reduced to a few symbols such as wine bars, red braces and mobile phones the size of bricks. The Seventies were a time when trousers came in two styles – huge flares or with bondage straps – and all footballers had perms and insanely tight shorts. And in the early Nineties grunge freed us from the hegemony of Big Hair bands, who were blown away by hot new acts like, er, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Alice In Chains, at least according to a documentary on MTV the other week.

Come on! The lucrative School Disco compilations could just as easily be relaunched as Wedding Reception to a different generation. Even Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse's creation of Dave Nice and Mike Smash, the quintessential awful disc jockeys, a target so obvious they couldn't believe no one had done it before, had so little effect that we're currently assailed by the timeless inanities of Chris Moyles. It's not just like punk never happened, as old punks used to say. It's like nothing ever happened.

With Ronnie Wood under doctor's orders to lay off the booze in preparation, even the Rolling Stones are promising to drag their raddled old carcasses across the world's stadia one last time. Yet the bands you might want to see will never reform. Abba, The Clash (who've spoken about reuniting when they all reach the age of 77, ho ho) and Talking Heads won't be back again. You might want The Smiths or The Pixies or the original line-up of the Stone Roses, but what you'll end up with is Jesus Jones, Mega City Four or, "The Heroes of Baggy" tour featuring Northside and The High.

Here and Now 2002 begins at Cardiff International Arena on Thursday 18 April