Do you ever have one of those moments when the way you see yourself, that point in your life at which you stopped the self-perception clock, comes face-to-reflection with reality? Not the morning shave or the make-up moment, I tend to the former, but in your essence. You catch yourself mirrored in the glass at a bus stand or in a shop window and are briefly ‘blimey-ed’. This is what others see. Youth no more.
Imagine, then, being Mick Jagger. The frontman of the self-branded “greatest rock ‘n’ roll band in the world” has turned 80 (26 July). The fount and essence of youthful defiance, Mr Jumping Jack Flash, the Street Fighting Man, is an octogenarian.
It must, I think, be an exquisite form of torture. Like seeing oneself eternally preserved in the beauty of a silver-screen yesterday. An ageing Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor forever condemned to watching Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and thinking, “I was that, now I am this”.
Like his contemporary, Roger Daltrey, Mick Jagger swore fealty unto death to the very fact of being young. “Hope I die before I get old.” “I’d rather die than be singing Satisfaction at 45.” Yet here both are. While bandmates have fallen to age and the sort of lifestyles the years condemn, they grow old disgracefully. Or, rather, artfully.
Both, of course, are students of physical fitness, Jagger’s father a PE teacher, and both great students of the frontman art. And the two men specialise in a thrusting, rock masculinity well into their later years. Daltrey, a sort of ‘you’ll never take me alive, Regan!’ retro gangsterism, Jagger’s a bantam strut, the rooster still cock of the henhouse.
But it is the Rolling Stone who gathers the least moss. Readers of Philip Norman’s biography will know that a constant theme of Mick Jagger’s life, along with sex and a point-blank rejection of establishment orthodoxy, is the verbless New Labour idea of ‘forward not back’. No regret, neither nostalgia nor retrospection. A man who returned the advance on his autobiography because to look back was antithetical and “not living in the now.”
On, on to the next thing, when not touring or recording session harmonica – a blues staple of which he is an acknowledged maestro – a film part here, a World Cup there and don’t forget the cricket.
With this comes a discipline. Not just the discipline of the lissom, two-hour gig body. The discipline that held the band up when Ron Wood had fallen down, Keith had never got up, the Jones boy was increasingly high or the tax man had them in a headlock.
In business too, the acumen is ferocious. Stones tours, Stones merchandising, the Stones franchise. All steely-eyed and, contrary to rock ‘n’ roll habit, risk-free. I once worked for a company that sponsored a European tour. The negotiation was hard, and the spin-offs, for which they had an eye all put forward on the basis that the cost lies elsewhere while the reward, well, let’s talk about that.
That tour took me to a private gig at the Astoria in London. Unusually retrospective in that it was the first sizeable venue the Stones ever played on graduating from Richmond pubs and Marquee clubs. From the moment Richards appeared and took the rock solid stance that yielded the rock solid riff of Jumping Jack Flash, you could see, in the half light of the old theatre, the boy in the master that the cavorting Jagger had become. New light through old windows.
This ability to be all things to all people surely contributes to his longevity. A famous bedder of women but sexually ambiguous, a bohemian with intellectual pretensions but a proud Dartford boy with a hint and more of the Estuary, co-conspirator in the destruction of Marianne Faithfull but beloved by the many that went before, rock and roll but in the gym not the bar. Blues to Ruby Tuesday. A ‘Sir’ who declines to kneel. Elusive. He is, as Keith Richards famously described him; “A nice bunch of guys.”
Resilience too. Drug busts, Keith fall-outs, Jones in a swimming pool, Altamont. There’s a permanence to Jagger like cockroaches and crocodiles; they’ll be there after the asteroid hits.
Sympathy with the Devil, Their Satanic Majesty’s Request, Goats Head Soup. The honky tonk loucheness of a million others. One could almost believe he’s struck a bargain somewhere. Stop dancing and your soul is mine. So Mick Jagger dances on.
Oh, and the Devil still has all the best tunes.
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