Why do men cling to the music they grew up with?

On a recent, carefully audience-targeted BBC4 music show, I was dismayed to see a chubby fiftysomething Morrissey performing 'Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want' on the garishly lit stage of what looked like a medium-sized US stadium.

His shape, the times, his career, the context, the crowd (lots of American kids) – it all seemed out of joint. The once ironic-pathetic egotism of the song now seemed knowing and cynical, and the singer pathetic in the ordinary way. Millionaire memoirist Mozzer surely got what he wanted, didn’t he?

But the clip hinted at the problematic relationship that exists between midlife and music. Does age matter when it comes to pop? Why do people over, say, 35 – and men, especially – cling fiercely to their pop music memories? Pop stars continue to grow old ungracefully, but what about fans?

When pop music evolved into its current form in the 1950s, it was the cultural preserve of teenagers or very young twentysomethings, rebelling against social conservatism and the tedium of family life, and placing distance between their dreams and recent history. Pop songs then, as now, celebrated the immediate and the youthful, they soundtracked falling in love for the first time and falling out of it.

George Melly wrote, “This living for the present is… what separates pop culture from traditional culture.… It is to be explained by the fact that pop is a young culture, and that young people tend to reject their past as a time before they had independence, and to fear the future, as a time when they will be forced into assuming responsibilities.”

But where does this present-tense culture fit into the life of a 40-something man?

Many of my friends – all in their forties – still listen to the pop music they grew up with. A particularly powerful form of nostalgia comes into play.

”Pop music reminds you of the best time in your life,” says Jon Tregenna, 51, publican, Buzzcocks fan and occasional lead-singer with a non-professional rock band.

“It's like your first kiss. It's from before you became fat, asthmatic, compromised by work and other responsibilities, when you pogo-ed to The Damned and kissed a random girl in the mosh-pit. Is there anything better? Why would you want to forget it?"

Biologist and anthropologist Herbert Spencer argued that singing is a form of emotional speech. The excitable pitch of pop and its stretching and torturing of words mirrors the human voice when someone is elated or ecstatic. Who would want to give that up?

Music also stirs biological urges. Darwin believed that song evolved as a courtship display, serving as an auditory version of the peacock's tail. In some bird species only the males sing.

But musical enjoyment is often notably solipsistic and the lusty beat doesn’t account for the bond men feel not just with music but with the paraphernalia of pop music. Men hoard albums and gig tickets, review their favourite songs again and again, compare collections, and talk about music heroes – from David Bowie to Mark E Smith to Wilko Johnson – with a reverence verging on creepy.

“Men will out-wit, out-list and out-fact each other down the pub,” says Jon. “That's not to say that women don't like lists or facts, but they certainly aren't competitive about who can name the most members of The Fall.”

Pop trivia serves men as a sort of conversational algebra. Where the emotionally stunted might use football, TV or cars as their metaphoric metalanguage, more thoughtful blokes talk music not only to show off but also to show how they feel.

Inevitably the great male lyricists come into play here. “Popular music by young men inevitably conveys the hopes and fears of young men who listen to it,” says Dr Simon Warner, a lecturer in pop music at the University of Leeds. “It's often music fired by testosterone, it's frequently concerned with issues of power, sex and identity. It's sometimes predatory, loud and aggressive and quite threatening unless you are its willing audience.

“But it also has its self-reflective moments and can also be about male insecurities, too.”

We often remain faithful to the record collections of our formative years. These feel utterly personal and yet have the predictive character of one of Amazon’s anticipatory algorithms. There’s the Bowie-Reed-Pop idolaters, to which I confess to belonging, with occasional visits to the Cave-Cohen-Cale clan of miserabilists. Others belong to the British Indie golden age collective, or are Ibiza vinylists, US post-punk pseudo-anti-intellectuals, or more senior Led Zep theocrats.

A tiny few try to keep up. Bob Greig, born in 1965, got into techno and house music in his early forties.

“I still listen to Oakenfold mega-mixes in the car,” he says. My young daughters hate my "beepy" music.

“The beats make me feel alive more than anything else. It's drug-like. My body reacts: my heart speeds up, thoughts speed up, my mood improves, body movements can become jerky. I am prone to replaying a particular song over and over.

“I think it goes back to my days as a boy chorister when I could frequently lose myself in a piece of music - I frequently found myself in a trance like state.”

The need to drink at the fount of youthful music may be borne of the fact that so-called Adult-Oriented Rock – the likes of Foreigner, Toto or Phil Collins – is truly awful. But what about jazz and classical? As we age, we tend to move away from Ladybirds and Enid Blyton and take on more challenging books. We acknowledge that Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye are for younger readers, and read novels aimed at our age group. Yet only a percentage of people move on to supposedly more mature musical genres.

“I've tried jazz,” says Jon. “I fancied being 'the kind of bloke who likes jazz'. The jazz bloke is the guy I could have become if I'd done classics at uni, worn polo-necks and read Howl when I was 21. I didn't. Punk was my soundtrack when I was young and still is today.”

“Jazz is OK for me on Sunday evenings at my local pub,” says Bob. “But while I’ve been able to move on from Jim Beam to malts, I can’t make the full transition to jazz or classical. I just don’t like it enough.”

So we stay rooted in our past, stuck in our collections, lost in the banter of rock n roll trivia. Which would be fine if it were not for the opportunity cost of any life-absorbing pastime. In High Fidelity – that Bible of the pop-loving male – Nick Hornby warns of the dangers of obsessing about any cultural product:

“It seems to me if you add music (and books, probably, and films, and plays, and anything that makes you feel) at the centre of your being, then you can't afford to sort out your love life, start to think of it as the finished product….”

Thus pop music, which started its life – and starts in each of our lives – as an overture to love and sex, could end up being a substitute, or a sort of emotional contraceptive.

Romance novelist Stella Knightley, 42, says that she personally prefers opera, but believes “a woman in love is more than happy to listen to a man waffle on about anything.

“I'd swap a night at Covent Garden for a night on a futon listening to Neil Young if the sex was better. And it probably would be.”

So all is not lost. You can still soundtrack a cosy soiree at home with ‘Old Man’, and play ‘The Needle and the Damage Done’ while you’re grating the parmesan. But pop-and-rock-obsessives please note that Stella (herself an Ian Curtis-worshipper) is less forgiving about the accoutrements of fanhood:

“One of my exes is a huge Bowie nut, and spent a fortune on some out-take from the Ziggy Stardust album cover shoot. I mean, more than a very nice car. I find decorating your grown-up house with photos of rock stars just a bit tragic. I bet he kisses his on the way to bed each night.

“And I would draw the line at band t-shirts. No way. Never.”