But a profound commitment to his art underlies such a punishing exercise routine. “I worry about his joints from all that jogging,” Richards joked in 2018. Jagger’s father was a physical education teacher, and even in his 70s, Jagger’s health regime involves running eight miles a day, cycling, yoga, kickboxing, meditation and ballet (the latter under the influence of current paramour and rumoured fiancé, ballet dancer Melanie Hamrick). Keith Richards and Mick Jagger on stage together It is Richards’ piratical irreverence that the baby boomer generation waxes nostalgic for, even if few would actively adopt the guitarist’s louche lifestyle. In a strange way, Jagger has come to be regarded almost as a showbiz fraud because his healthy lifestyle, sense of organisation and discretion doesn’t chime with the band’s original rebellious spirit. Yet the Stones are Mick’s gang, he’s stuck with them.” Mick does actually organise every little detail of the tour, while Ronnie and Keith just have to decide whether they’re going to get drunk or not, that’s the big decision of the day. ‘How’s Ronnie?’ ‘Alright.’ And I said, ‘So how are you?’ And he said, ‘Well I’m still doing f***ing everything’. “I said, ‘How’s it going?’ and he said, ‘Er…alright.’ I said, ‘How’s Keith?’ ‘Alright’. “I spoke to Mick on the phone the other day, the Stones were going into rehearsal in Boston,” Pete Townshend of The Who told me in 2006. Whilst Keith Richards spent much of the ’70s in heroin-addicted disarray, it was Jagger who kept the Stones rolling, saving them from financial ruin and transforming them into a lucrative global live entertainment brand. The whole package made the Stones the essence of a generation in the process of convulsive change. Photo shoots and artwork were daring and clever, with Jagger recruiting top artists including Andy Warhol and Robert Frank to the band’s cause. Of course, it helped that the young Jagger had such an androgynously beautiful face, with what Joan Rivers memorably described as “child-bearing lips.” He was boldly stylish too, wearing clothes with mischievous humour, whether it was appearing in a “man dress” in Hyde Park in 1969, or a mix and match suit for a court appearance on drug charges in 1967. Their presentation dropped a significant divide between audience and performer: the Stones appeared on stage as themselves, long haired hipsters incarnate. “There’s more to it than just music and I think we worked that out pretty fast,” as Jagger once said to me. The Stones represented a radical break with the superficiality of pop. Jagger with Lou Reed, Lulu and David Bowie in 1973 And I want to now thank this 80 year old genius for all of that.” I owe my entire life, attitudes, ambitions, tastes and more to that blissful smelly epiphany. Geldof tells me he first saw the Stones at the cinema in 1964. “He was, is and I believe forever will be, the greatest showman, the greatest frontman of any rock ‘n’ roll band ever.” When I spoke to Bob Geldof recently, he puts it even more emphatically. There’s Mick, and then all the rest of us are somewhere down the line.” “You’re never going to out-front Mick Jagger, he’s the best frontman there’s ever been,” as The Who’s Roger Daltrey, now 79, once said to me. Jagger has never outgrown his role as the ultimate rock star because he has been effectively inventing it as he has gone along. He would, I suspect, brush his youthful remarks away without a hint of embarrassment, an emotion Jagger does not seem well acquainted with.Īt each stage of a career now stretching into its seventh decade, he has simply taken the next whirling, jiggling, swaggering step forward, pushing back the frontiers of what it is possible for a contemporary musical entertainer to do and to be. Today, Wednesday, July 26, the great man turns 80, still singing Satisfaction with the Rolling Stones, still demonstrating with vigour and panache what it takes to lead the greatest band in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. Back in 1975, at what must have once seemed the height of his youthful fame, Mick Jagger declared he’d “rather be dead than singing Satisfaction when I’m 45.”
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