And Mick, more than any of them, seems timeless. We want to go near their flame while Mick and his generation still have that life force. He’d helped to pen songs that we wanted to watch him perform for as long as he could.Īs with Elton at Glastonbury and Paul the year before, the wide demographic of the crowd is because these old guys gave us a cultural gift, and we want to thank them for it. But here we have a song who’s lyrics are as relevant today as when they were written. Mick had famously once said “I’d rather be dead than sing Satisfaction when I’m 45”, not even he was yet believing this was a career for life. We may have talked about the street but we secretly desired the Croisette where we imagined Jagger lounged. Marrying Bianca in St Tropez making music in a French villa while on the run from a cloying Britain white suits in chateaux and white horses under mirror balls, and an accent that morphed to whomever he needed to flirt with. The Dartford boy had broken into the palace and had his kippers firmly under the grill. To a working-class lad, his brand has always represented gatecrashing aspiration. But Mick didn’t decide to put out a panicked punk record, he went disco and delivered the masterful Miss You, swerving all the bullets and staying on top. “No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones in 1977,” sang The Clash … and for a while so did we all, convinced their time was up. Townshend was given a free pass but all other ‘Old Farts’ were under threat. He’d written the hymn book they all wanted to sing from.Īnd then along came punk. In fact the first time I ever saw Rod – he was performing Maggie May on Top of the Pops – I just thought, ‘Oh, he’s copying Jagger.’ Jagger was the template they all used. The term ‘rock star’ was being freshly coined at the time and here was the man who’d invented the job description for it.ĭraped in multiple scarves, slashed shirts and tight red trousers, he’d found the dress-code for the archetypal front-man, adopted by singers from Steven Tyler to Rod Stewart. My brother and I were both thrown into immediate ecstasy as the singer sent his shamanistic spirit far into the cavernous arena and into the hearts and crotches of the thousands there. Who could possibly have known then that we’d still be dancing to a gyrating Jagger more than 50 years later, a man who has just joined his fellow pop octogenarians from the Beatles.Īt the gig, Mick kicked his way out of a folded giant tulip which became the band’s stage. Audiences for any rock concert were unlikely to contain people in their 30s and there was much speculation about whether it would be possible, or even decent, for any of these rock stars to carry on once they’d reached that stately age – the age of the jacket and tie, the mortgage and the slippers. It was first used on the Stones’ Sticky Fingers album, the cover of which was a crotch in jeans with an actual zipper for you to fiddle with.īut Mick was 28 at the time, and rock and roll was a young person’s sport. I think we can now safely add to those two images the Rolling Stones’ famous Lips and Tongue logo, which, as we all know, was based on Mick Jagger’s own legendary rubber gob.ĭesigned in 1970, to Mick’s brief, by John Pasche, a student of the Royal College of Art, it’s anti-authoritarian gesture also carried all the sexual connotations that rock and roll – and Mick – represented in that time of the sexual revolution. He was also well-known for his many relationships and having children into his 70s. Charlie was a global phenomenon and cinema’s most universal icon. I once read that during the first-half of the last century, the two most internationally recognisable images were of Christ on the cross and the silhouette of Charlie Chaplin as the Little Tramp.
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