every h punctiliously aspirated as he said what an honour it was to be here tonightt, then went on to reveal ‘how it all came aboutt’.
A neat little joke followed, perfectly pitched between mockery and deference. He was here, he said, under ‘the RMEP – the Rock Stars–Movie Stars Exchange Programme . . . At this moment, “Sir” Ben Kingsley [giving the title ironic emphasis even though he shared it] will be singing “Brown Sugar” at the Grammys . . . “Sir” Anthony Hopkins is in the recording studio with Amy Winehouse . . . “Dame” Judi Dench is gamely trashing hotel rooms somewhere in the US . . . and we hope that next week “Sir” Brad and the Pitt family will be performing The Sound of Music at the Brit Awards.’ (Cut to Kevin Spacey and Meryl Streep laughing ecstatically and Angelina explaining the joke to Brad.)
Opening the envelope, he announced that the Best Film award went Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire – so very much what people used to consider him. But there was no doubt about the real winner. Jagger had scored his biggest hit since . . . oh . . . ‘Start Me Up’ in 1981. ‘It took a lot to out-glamour that place,’ one academician commented, ‘but he did it.’
Half a century ago, when the Rolling Stones ran neck and neck with the Beatles, one question above all used to be thrown at the young Mick Jagger in the eternal quest to get something enlightening, or even interesting, out of him: did he think he’d still be singing ‘Satisfaction’ when he was thirty?
In those innocent early sixties, pop music belonged exclusively to the young and was thought to be totally in thrall to youth’s fickleness. Even the most successful acts – even the Beatles – expected a few months at most at the top before being elbowed aside by new favourites. Back then, no one dreamed how many of those seemingly ephemeral songs would still be being played and replayed a lifetime hence or how many of those seemingly disposable singers and bands would still be plying their trade as old-age pensioners, greeted with the same fanatical devotion for as long as they could totter back onstage.
In the longevity stakes, the Stones leave all competition far behind. The Beatles lasted barely three years as an international live attraction and only nine in total (if you discount the two they spent acrimoniously breaking up). Other bands from the sixties’ top drawer like Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and the Who, if not fractured by alcohol or drugs, drifted apart over time, then re-formed, their terminal boredom with their old repertoire, and one another, mitigated by the huge rewards on offer. Only the Stones, once seemingly the most unstable of all, have kept rolling continuously from decade to decade, then century to century; weathering the sensational death of one member and the embittered resignations of two others (plus ongoing internal politics that would impress the Medicis); leaving behind generations of wives and lovers; outlasting two managers, nine British prime ministers and the same number of American presidents; impervious to changing musical fads, gender politics and social mores; as sexagenarians still somehow retaining the same sulphurous whiff of sin and rebellion they had in their twenties. The Beatles have eternal charm; the Stones have eternal edge.
Over the decades since their joint heyday, of course, pop music’s essentials have hardly changed. Each new generation of musicians hits on the same chords in the same order and adopts the same language of love, lust and loss; each new generation of fans seeks the same kind of male idol with the same kind of sex appeal, the same repertoire of gestures, attitudes and manifestations of cool.
The notion of a rock ‘band’ – young ensemble musicians enjoying fame, wealth and sexual opportunity undreamed of by their historic counterparts in military regiments or northern colliery towns – was well established by the time the Stones got going, and has not changed one iota since. It remains as true that, even though the pop industry mostly is about illusion, exploitation and hype, true talent will always out, and always endure. From the Stones’ great rabble-rousing hits like ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ or ‘Street Fighting Man’ to obscure early tracks like ‘Off the Hook’ or ‘Play with Fire’, and the R&B cover versions that came before, their music sounds as fresh as if recorded yesterday.
They remain role models for every band that makes it – the pampered boy potentates, lolling ungraciously on a couch as flashbulbs detonate, the same old questions are shouted by reporters, and the same facetious answers thrown back. The kind of tour they created in the late sixties is what everyone still wants: the private jets, the limos, the entourages, the groupies, the trashed hotel suites. All the well-documented evidence of how soul-destroyingly monotonous it soon becomes, all Christopher Guest’s brilliant send-up of a boneheaded travelling supergroup in This Is Spinal Tap, cannot destroy the mystique of ‘going on the road’, the eternal allure of ‘sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll’. Yet try as these youthful disciples may, they could never reproduce the swath which the on-road Stones cut through the more innocent world of forty-odd years ago, or touch remotely comparable levels of arrogance, self-indulgence, hysteria, paranoia, violence, vandalism and wicked joy.
Above all Mick Jagger, at any age, is inimitable. Jagger it was who, more than anyone, invented the concept of the ‘rock star’ as opposed to mere singer within a band – the figure set apart from his fellow musicians (a major innovation in those days of unified Beatles, Hollies, Searchers et al.) who could first unleash, then invade and control the myriad fantasies of enormous crowds. Keith Richards, Jagger’s co-figurehead in the Stones, is a uniquely talented guitarist, as well as the rock world’s most unlikely survivor, but Keith belongs in a troubadour tradition stretching back to Blind Lemon Jefferson and Django Reinhardt, continuing on to Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Bruce Springsteen, Noel Gallagher and Pete Doherty. Jagger, on the other hand, founded a new species and gave it a language that could never be improved on. Among his rivals in rock showmanship, only Jim Morrison of the Doors found a different way to sing into a microphone, cradling it tenderly in both hands like a frightened baby bird rather than flourishing it, Jagger-style, like a phallus. Since the 1970s, many other gifted bands have emerged with vast international followings and indubitably charismatic front men – Freddie Mercury of Queen, Holly Johnson of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Bono of U2, Michael Hutchence of INXS, Axl Rose of Guns N’ Roses. Distinctive on record they might be, but when they took the stage they had no choice but to follow in Jagger’s strutting footsteps.
His status as a sexual icon is comparable only to Rudolph ‘the Sheik’ Valentino, the silent cinema star who aroused 1920s women to palpitant dreams of being thrown across the saddle of a horse and carried off to a Bedouin tent in the desert. With Jagger, the aura was closer to great ballet dancers, like Nijinsky and Nureyev, whose seeming feyness was belied by their lustful eyeballing of the ballerinas and overstuffed, straining codpieces. The Stones were one of the first rock bands to have a logo and, even for the louche early seventies, it was daringly explicit – a livid-red cartoon of Jagger’s own mouth, the cushiony lips sagging open with familiar gracelessness, the tongue slavering out to slurp an invisible something which, very clearly, was not ice cream. This ‘lapping tongue’ still adorns all the Stones’ literature and merchandise, symbolic of who controls every department. To modern eyes, there could hardly be a cruder monument to old-fashioned male chauvinism – yet it finds its mark as surely as ever. The most liberated twenty-first-century females perk up at the sound of Jagger’s name while those he captivated in the twentieth still belong to him in every fibre. As I was beginning this book, I mentioned its subject to my neighbour at a dinner party, a seemingly dignified, self-possessed Englishwoman of mature years. Her response was to re-create the scene in When Harry Met Sally where Meg Ryan simulates orgasm in the middle of a crowded restaurant. ‘Mick Jagger? Oh . . . yes! Yes, YES, YES!’
Sexual icons are notoriously prone to fall short of their public image in private; look at Mae West, Marilyn Monroe or, for that matter, Elvis Presley. But in the oversexed world of rock, in the whole annals of show business, Jagger’s reputation as a modern Casanova is unequalled. It’s questionable whether even the greatest lotharios of centuries past found sexual partners in such prodigious number, or were so often saved the tiresome preliminaries of seduction. Certainly, none maintained his
