Instead we had the Jagger who, after the Stones’ 1998 British concerts were called off, went to extraordinary diplomatic lengths to dispel the media view of them as unpatriotic misers. The decision followed Gordon Brown’s scrapping of the Foreign Earnings Deduction, which had allowed tax-exiled Britons a flexible quota of working days back in the UK each year. The plugged loophole would not only have penalized Jagger, Wood and Watts (Richards is a US resident) but also many among their 270-strong road crew, wiping in all some £12 million off the tour’s books.
The one-time Street Fighting Man was tact incarnate as he besought Tony Blair’s rock ’n’ roll-loving government to relax what was a retroactive penalty, offering that rare thing a Stones charity concert in the UK by way of exchange. Indeed, it was Blair’s treasury spokesmen who came across more like surly, macho Stones of old as they declined to be ‘lectured by millionaire tax exiles’. The controversy even brought Jagger to the Independent’s Right of Reply column, taking his turn with Robin Cook’s ethical foreign policy and the new one-way traffic system in Hampstead.
Nowhere was the New Jagger more cleverly sold than in the interview he gave Chris Evans on Channel 4 just prior to the British tour. It was a brilliant Jagger media coup, bypassing the middle-aged broadsheet pop pundits and aiming straight for a young, stroppy audience that might have been most likely to mock the Stones as pathetic has-beens. In a TFI Friday special, shot in edgy black and white, Evans was allowed moments of lese-majesty to make any old-time Stones follower gasp. He was allowed to follow Jagger around backstage, given a conducted tour of his wardrobe, treated to an impromptu piano number and an earnest homily about projection that would have done credit to Sir Henry Irving. To Jagger’s myriad accents were now added that of modern teenage Slop English (‘Yeah, it’s quih a loh of sho-yoos if you think abouh ih.’). Evans was there as the modern Stones ran offstage, to be wrapped in white bathrobes and spirited away as if to some health spa rather than time-honoured mischief in hotel rooms. At one point, Jagger’s interviewer teasingly showed him Polaroid pictures of humbler figures among his road crew and offered him $50 if he could identify them. Jagger won the $50.
His ultimate rehabilitation, of course, was the only one that really mattered. The Stones’ British concerts, when they did finally happen, were superb. Anyone who doubted that a rock gig at grotty old Wembley could hold any surprises had to eat their words along with their rubbery hot dogs. The best moment came halfway through, when a sort of Meccano drawbridge snaked out from the stage to a smaller one, about the size of a boxing ring, in the crowd’s midst. The Stones swaggered over the bridge like a troupe of strolling minstrels to play an in-the-round set of joyous, ragged-arsed blues.
And here was Jagger, the shameful old roué, the grandfather, demonstrating yet again that the newest, hottest young rock star of today can never be anything more than his apprentice. Here was the new, nicer Jagger persona which, alas, fell apart in the first line of every song. Here was the ‘man of wealth and taste’, replete once again with his opera cloak, cloven hooves and forked tail. Here, in the Seventies oldie Some Girls, was even a sarcastic nod towards Jerry, Luciana and the baby boy with outsize lips: ‘Some girls give me children I never asked them for …’ From the audience came not a single girl-power boo or catcall, only a ripple of complicit laughter. Maybe we don’t want him to change all that much.
1 In 2008, Ronnie left Jo for a Russian cocktail waitress, named Ekaterina Ivanova, forty-one years his junior, beating Bill Wyman’s record.
PLATE SECTION
The Glimmer Twins (front row, right) meet at Wentworth, circa 1954.
Jagger (front row, right) in his junior school cricket team. Andre Camara/Rex Features
Jagger and the Stones’ first manager, Andrew Loog Oldham. Rex Features
Brian’s Stones with ‘too normal’ Ian Stewart (fourth from left). Rex Features
Brian stealing the limelight, 1964. Getty Images
The Lips on an early outing. Bob Thomas Sports/Getty Images
On the beer in Paris 1966. Rex Features
Brian and Anita when things were good. Getty Images
Stones in the Park, 1967. Getty Images
Mick and Marianne. Rex Features
Marianne and Nicholas at the Hyde Park gig. Getty Images
Brian leaves West London Magistrates Court, June 1967. Getty Images
Mick and Keith outside Chichester Magistrates Court, May 1967. Getty Images
Marianne and Mick leave Cheyne Walk for Great Marlborough Street Court, June 1969. Getty Images
Beggars at the Banquet, 1968. Getty Images
Studio session filmed by Jean-Luc Godard for One Plus One. Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images
Introducing Mick Taylor, June 1969. Getty Images
The Sympathy for the Devil session, minus witches. Getty Images
Fancy dress for the Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus. Rex Features
Bianca watches her marriage end on her wedding day. Rex Features
Brian’s funeral, July 1969. Getty Images
Darkness closes in on Altamont. Getty Images
Trying to hide the Lips in leylandii in the early days with Jerry. Getty Images
The Glimmer Twins with Keith's son, 1973. Getty Images
Ronnie and the first Mrs Wood, 1979.
Jagger and Wyman, with Paul and Linda McCartney (right), 1978. Getty Images
The last of the old line-up. Rex Features
Bill Wyman and Mandy Smith. ‘I’m like a kid with a new toy.’ Getty Images
Voodoo Lounge, 1995. Redferns/Getty Images
Mick, Jerry and daughter Elizabeth. Rex Features
Mick and grown-up Jade party together. Richard Young/Rex Features
Keith discovers bad hair, 1999. Redferns/Getty Images
Wembley, 1999. ‘All other rock stars are still only his apprentices.’ Getty Images
AFTERWORD
The sexagenarian Stones might have been expected to view their approaching 50th anniversary with the misty-eyed camaraderie of old soldiers before Remembrance Day. Instead, it found Mick Jagger and Keith Richards on worse terms than at any time since the mid-1980s. One small line of print seemed to have achieved what the British penal system, heroin and a palm tree in Fiji between them had not, and extinguished the Glimmer Twins permanently.
Those two boys who got talking over a pile of record albums at Dartford railway station in 1961 could not have been more different characters nor more ill-matched friends and collaborators. Music, however, forges alliances between the most disparate types, and for Mick and Keith their original missionary zeal to bring the blues to Britain created an empathy that overrode all considerations of temperament or class. Each, moreover, had a quality that the other pretended to find uncomfortable but secretly envied. Mick would have loved not to give a fuck for anyone or anything like Keith, while Keith always hankered on the quiet for Mick’s social and intellectual gloss. The unlikely symbiosis was completed when Andrew Oldham locked them together in a kitchen in Willesden, north London, so creating what would become the longest-lived songwriting partnership of all time and the most commercially successful after Lennon and McCartney.
The pair’s deep mutual affection weathered even Mick’s sex-scenes with Anita in Performance to last well into the 1970s. When Keith was arrested for alleged heroin-trafficking in Canada in 1977 – the biggest threat to the band’s survival for a decade – Mick did not immediately flee the scene as many others would have done, but stood by him and cared for him (in Keith’s own words) ‘like a brother’. Later, while Keith waited to stand trial, he underwent ‘black box’ electrotherapy for his smack-addiction in a house in Woodstock, New York, shared with Mick and Jerry Hall. They nursed him through the ordeal, bringing him meals, re-attaching electrodes that fell off his head, watching for any sign of improvement like parents with a sick child. They knew he was on the road to recovery, Jerry recalled, when he went outside and started throwing knives at tre
es.
The Glimmer Twins’ real personality problems only set in with the Tattoo You world tour of 1982 –83 – that supposedly triumphant 20th-anniversary comeback that seemed to take them rolling on into the Eighties, and bigger bucks than ever before. Keith, now fully compos mentis for the first time in years, resented the despotic grip Mick had taken on the band while he was out of it. Purist musician that he still was, he hated the ‘fuckin sideshow’ of Jagger stage stunts, like the cherry-picker crane and the long-stemmed carnations. By the final gig, neither could bear the sight of the other, and things carried on getting worse from there. So, ironically, having built the framework for a new age of touring, with more revenue streams than even Mick had ever dreamed, the band were not to go out on the road again until 1989.
These were also the years when Mick made his long-delayed attempt to succeed as a stand-alone artiste. Keith, for whom the Stones had always been enough, reacted like a spurned wife, slagging off Mick’s solo albums behind his back; mocking his obsession with aristocrats and jet-setters and his refusal to age gracefully; inventing childish nicknames for him, like ‘Brenda’ and ‘Beef Curtains’; encouraging the other Stones to gang up on him just as they all once had against Brian Jones.
Open conflict erupted when Mick refused to go on the road with a new Stones’ album, Dirty Work, because he planned a tour to promote his second solo album, Primitive Cool, not long afterwards. Keith’s contemptuous fury knew no bounds, especially on learning that Mick’s backing musicians on the Primitive Cool tour would be playing some twenty Stones songs and included a lead guitarist who was being coached in Keith Richards moves. To one interviewer he threatened that if ‘Disco Boy Jagger’s Little Jerk-Off Band’ dared such plagiarism, he’d go after Mick and ‘slit his throat’.
For a while, everything pointed to a break-up that would make the Beatles’ seem discreet by comparison. While Mick and Keith traded insults through song-titles on rival solo albums, the other Stones rolled away to their own private projects (Bill Wyman to write film music and his memoirs, Charlie Watts to play jazz, Ronnie Wood to front a Miami Beach night-spot) in seeming terminal exasperation. At the 1985 Live Aid concert, when the world’s greatest pop names performed together for charity, Mick appeared at one end of the show, partnering Tina Turner, and Keith at the other, backing Bob Dylan with Woody. ‘When are you two going to stop bitching at each other?’ a UK music journalist said to Keith. ‘Ask the bitch,’ he replied.
Hostilities were scaled back during the Nineties and early 2000s as the Stones belatedly embarked on their era of mega-money tours, each far surpassing its predecessor in the fabulous amounts generated by merchandising and corporate sponsorship. During these years, Mick alone still monopolized the spotlight, though its radiance had become soured by his age-inappropriate love affairs and his treatment of Jerry.
If Mick became something of a fall-guy to the media, Keith interpreted the phrase literally. In 1998, on furlough from the Bridges to Babylon tour, he broke three ribs after slipping off a stepladder at his Connecticut home. An amazed international press found no drug- or booze-fuelled pratfall to gloat over: the steps turned out to have been in Keith’s library and he’d overbalanced while reaching for a book about Leonardo da Vinci. Then, during an R&R break from the 2006 tour – prophetically titled A Bigger Bang – he fell out of a coconut palm in Fiji, landing on his head, and had to be airlifted to New Zealand for medical treatment. He was said to have suffered only ‘mild concussion’; in fact, a team of surgeons had to work hard to save his life.
Internecine strife had started up again in 2003, with Mick’s acceptance of a knighthood from the Blair Labour government for ‘services to music’. To Keith, that unregenerate rock ’n’ roll outlaw, it was a betrayal of everything the Stones had always stood for. Publicly, he accused Mick of conduct unbecoming a one-time leftie London School of Economics student, adding that it was ‘ludicrous to take one of those gongs from the establishment when they did their very best to throw us in jail’. Privately, he admitted feeling such ‘cold cold rage at [Mick’s] blind stupidity’ that he almost pulled out of the current 40 Licks tour. ‘[Mick] said “Tony Blair is insisting that I accept this.” I said “You can always say no.” … But quite honestly, Mick’s fucked up so many times, what’s another fuck up?’ Lest he might also be under consideration for a royal sword-touch on the shoulder, he added that he ‘wouldn’t let that family near me with a sharp stick let alone a sword’.
Interviewing the now Sir Mick for BBC2’s Newsnight programme, Robin Denselow cautiously mentioned that Keith was ‘not happy’ about the honour. ‘He’s not a happy person,’ Sir Mick replied.
An elaborate show of Glimmer Twin-ness was needed in October 2006 when two Stones shows at New York’s Beacon Theater became a cinema documentary, Shine a Light, named after a song from Exile on Main Street and directed by long-time Stones addict Martin Scorsese. The shows were also a fund-raiser for ex-President Bill Clinton’s Clinton Foundation – aptly enough since, during his time in office, he’d introduced Stones-style backstage sex to the White House. Clinton attended the first show together with his wife, Hillary, now a US Senator, and the former president of Poland, Aleksander Kwasniewski. Beforehand, all the Stones, Keith included, lined up for a simpering meet-and-greet that would have sickened their younger selves to the soul.
Scorsese’s The Last Waltz, about the Band’s farewell concert in 1976, still stood as the all-time classic ‘rockumentary’. His involvement, moreover, guaranteed that Shine a Light would be released rather than joining previous brilliant Stones films like Rock and Roll Circus and Cocksucker Blues on the shelf. It featured a virtuoso performance from 63-year-old Sir Mick, duetting with Jack White from Stones soundalike band the White Stripes, on Loving Cup; shimmying suggestively with Christina Aguilera on Live with Me; then joining Buddy Guy in a version of Champagne and Reefers to demonstrate that no white man (except Brian Jones) ever played blues harmonica better. The resulting film had all Scorsese’s characteristic vitality and style, yet came nowhere near The Last Waltz. That had been about a young band breaking up while still on peak form; this was about one just a few steps ahead of the taxidermist.
The rift between the Twins widened to a Grand Canyon when Keith suddenly found success in two areas hitherto regarded as exclusively Jagger territory. After Performance and Ned Kelly at the turn of the Seventies, Mick had never made another significant feature film, despite being offered around thirty plum roles, from the young William Shakespeare to the male lead in A Star Is Born, and being courted by top directors from Franco Zeffirelli to Steven Spielberg. In twenty years, his only big-screen appearances had been in the dud sci-fi Freejack, as the proprietor of a dating-agency in The Man from Elysian Fields (straight to video in the UK), and as an extra in his own film company’s version of the Second World War drama, Enigma.
In 2003, Hollywood stardom arrived for Keith, albeit at first only ventriloquially. While preparing for a new film called Pirates of the Caribbean – based on the ride at Disney World – Hollywood heart-throb and Stones fanatic Johnny Depp borrowed the Human Riff’s slurry, stagey Sixties accent for his character Captain Jack Sparrow, adding a touch of cartoon skunk Pepé Le Pew.
Knowing Keith’s volatile ways, Depp wondered whether he might find himself slammed up against a washroom wall with a cutlass at his throat. But Keith was hugely amused, and in the third film of the hugely successful ‘Pirates’ franchise played a cameo role as Sparrow’s father, Captain Jack Teague (his beaten-up tricorne hat, thick black beard and dangling crucifix earrings striking a relatively normal sartorial note for him). As Captain Teague prepared to face the cameras for the first time, a journalist asked whether any screen-acting tips had been forthcoming from Sir Mick. ‘He’s the last person in the world I’d ask,’ was the reply.
Having muscled in on movies, Keith then turned to literature. Back in the early Eighties, Mick had accepted a then unprecedented £1 million advance to write his autobiogra
phy for London publishers Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Given the privilege of choosing his own ghostwriter, he had rejected the many professionals available in favour of a young literary journalist named John Ryle. Together, they had concocted a manuscript of such thinness and evasive blandness that its editor at Weidenfeld mentally titled it ‘The Diary of a Nobody’. Mick had agreed it was unpublishable, returned the advance in full and never since sought to tell his stupendous life story.
In 2007, it emerged that Keith was at work on an autobiography for which he’d received a reported $7 million advance from the publishers Little, Brown. Ghostwritten by James Fox, author of the non-fiction classic White Mischief, this appeared three years later under the simple title Life. If vague about landmark events in Rolling Stones history (‘I dunno what the fuck went down that day, man …’) its 547 pages contained great swathes about drugs, old Southern bluesmen and open-G guitar tuning. Some revelations fell into the category of ‘too much information’ – such as that after Keith’s father’s cremation he’d snorted the ashes with a line of cocaine. Other were plain surreal – such as that, in his heart of hearts, he pined to be a librarian. But what mainly propelled Life into the bestsellers was his extreme cattiness about his one-time Glimmer Twin.