Swift called ‘the rage of the groin’ is now known as sex addiction and can be cured by therapy, but Jagger has never shown any sign of considering it a problem.
Looking at that craggy countenance, one tries but fails to imagine the vast carnal banquet on which he has gorged, yet still not sated himself . . . the unending gallery of beautiful faces and bright, willing eyes . . . the innumerable chat-up lines, delivered and received . . . the countless brusque adjournments to beds, couches, heaped-up cushions, dressing room floors, shower stalls or limo back seats . . . the ever-changing voices, scents, skin tones and hair colour . . . the names instantly forgotten, if ever known in the first place . . . Old men are often revisited in dreams, or daydreams, by the women they have lusted after. For him, it would be like one of those old-style reviews of the Soviet army in Red Square. And at least one of the gorgeous foot soldiers is among his BAFTA audience tonight, seated not a million miles from Brad Pitt.
By rights, the scandals in which he starred during the 1960s should have been forgotten decades ago, cancelled out by the teeming peccadilloes of today’s pop stars, soccer players, supermodels and reality-TV stars. But the sixties have an indestructible fascination, most of all among those too young to remember them – the condition known to psychologists as ‘nostalgia without memory’. Jagger personifies that ‘swinging’ era for Britain’s youth, both its freedom and hedonism and the backlash it finally provoked. Even quite young people today have heard of his 1967 drug bust, or at least of the Mars bar which figured so lewdly in it. Few realise the extent of the British establishment’s vindictiveness during that so-called Summer of Love; how tonight’s witty, well-spoken knight of the realm was reviled like a long-haired Antichrist, led to court in handcuffs, subjected to a show trial of almost medieval grotesquerie, then thrown into prison.
He is perhaps the ultimate example of that well-loved show-business stereotype, the ‘survivor’. But while most rock ’n’ roll survivors end up as bulgy old farts in grey ponytails, he is unchanged – other than facially – from the day he first took the stage. While most others have long since addled their wits with drugs or alcohol, his faculties are all intact, not least his celebrated instinct for what is fashionable, cool and posh. While others whinge about the money they lost or were cheated out of, he leads the biggest-earning band in history, its own survival achieved solely by his determination and astuteness. Without Mick, the Stones would have been over by 1968; from a gang of scruffball outsiders, he turned them into a British national treasure as legitimate as Shakespeare or the White Cliffs of Dover.
Yet behind all the idolatry, wealth and superabundant satisfaction is a story of talent and promise consistently, almost stubbornly, unfulfilled. Among all his contemporaries endowed with half a brain, only John Lennon had as many opportunities to move beyond the confines of pop. Though undeniably an actor, as Jonathan Ross introduced him to BAFTA, with both film and TV roles to his credit, Jagger could have developed a parallel screen career as successful as Presley’s or Sinatra’s, perhaps even more so. He could have used his sway over audiences to become a politician, perhaps a leader, such as the world had never seen – and still has not. He could have extended the (often overlooked) brilliance of his best song lyrics into poetry or prose, as Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney have done. At the very least, he could have become a first-echelon performer in his own right instead of merely fronting a band. But, somehow or other, none of it came to pass. His film-acting career stalled in 1970 and never restarted in any significant way, despite the literally dozens of juicy screen roles he was offered. He did no more than toy with the idea of politics and has never shown any signs of wanting to be a serious writer. As for going solo, he waited until the mid-eighties to make his move, creating such ill-feeling among the other Stones, especially Keith, that he had to choose between continuing or seeing the band implode. As a consequence, he is still only their front man, doing the same job he was at eighteen.
There is also the puzzle of how someone who fascinates so many millions, and is so clearly super-intelligent and perceptive, manages to make himself so very unfascinating when he opens those celebrated lips to speak. Even since the media first began pursuing Jagger, his on-the-record utterances have had the kind of non-committal blandness associated with British royalty. Look into any of the numerous ‘Rolling Stones in their own words’ compilations published in the past four decades and you’ll find Mick’s always the fewest and most anodyne. In 1983, he signed a contract with the British publishers Weidenfeld & Nicolson to write his autobiography for the then astounding sum £1 million. It should have been the show-business memoir of the century; instead, the ghostwritten manuscript was pronounced irremediably dull by the publishers and the entire advance had to be returned.
His explanation was that he ‘couldn’t remember anything’, by which of course he didn’t mean his birthplace or his mother’s name but the later personal stuff for which Weidenfeld had stumped up £1 million and any publisher today would happily pay five times as much. That has been his position ever since, when approached to do another book or pressed by interviewers for chapter and verse. Sorry, his phenomenal past is all just ‘a blur’.
This image of a man whose recall disappeared thirty years ago like some early-onset Alzheimer’s victim’s is pure nonsense, as anyone who knows him can attest. It’s a handy way of getting out of things – something he has always had down to a fine art. It gets him out of months boringly closeted with a ghostwriter, or answering awkward questions about his sex life. But the same blackboard-wipe obliterates career highs and lows unmatched by anyone else in his profession. How is it possible to ‘forget’, say, meeting Andrew Loog Oldham or living with Marianne Faithfull or refusing to ride on the London Palladium’s revolving stage or getting banged up in Brixton Prison or featuring in Cecil Beaton’s diaries or being spat at on the New York streets or inspiring a London Times editorial or ditching Allen Klein or standing up to homicidal Hell’s Angels at the Altamont festival or getting married in front of the world’s massed media in Saint-Tropez or being fingerprinted in Rhode Island or making Steven Spielberg fall on his knees in adulation or having Andy Warhol as a child-minder or being stalked by naked women with green pubic hair in Montauk or persuading a quarter of a million people in Hyde Park to shut up and listen to a poem by Shelley?
Such is the enduring paradox of Mick: a supreme achiever to whom his own colossal achievements seem to mean nothing, a supreme extrovert who prefers discretion, a supreme egotist who dislikes talking about himself. Charlie Watts, the Stones’ drummer, and the one least affected by all the madness, put it best: ‘Mick doesn’t care what happened yesterday. All he ever cares about is tomorrow.’
So let’s flick through those yesterdays in hopes of refreshing his memory.
To become what we call ‘a star’, it is not enough to possess unique talent in one or another of the performing arts; you also seemingly need a void inside you as fathomlessly dark as starlight is brilliant.
Normal, happy, well-rounded people do not as a rule turn into stars. It is something which far more commonly befalls those who have suffered some traumatic misery or deprivation in early life. Hence the ferocity of their drive to achieve wealth and status at any cost, and their insatiable need for the public’s love and attention. While awarding them a status near to gods, we also paradoxically view them as the most fallible of human beings, tortured by past demons and present insecurities, all too often fated to destroy their talent and then themselves with drink or drugs or both. Since the mid-twentieth century, when celebrity became global, the shiniest stars,
