Chapter Sixteen
In October 1983, a month ahead of the release of Undercover – the Stones’ seventeenth UK album, their nineteenth in the States – Jeff Griffin, the award-winning BBC producer who recorded the Stones live many times for the In Concert series and other programmes, accompanied distinguished Radio 1 presenter Andy Peebles to London’s Savoy Hotel to record interviews with Bill Wyman and Mick Jagger.
‘We did Mick in Mick’s room,’ recalls Griffin, ‘and we did Bill … somewhere. We then flew to Paris to do Keith at the Warwick Hotel. We had to go to him because Keith was doing a tax year out. We went with EMI executive Wally Slaughter. We go in the room, everyone introduces themselves and we get ready to set up. Sherry Daly from the Stones office is in the anteroom, while Keith is waiting for us in his room. “Don’t ask Keith anything about drugs,” Sherry warns us. I turn and stare at her. “I have to say to you,” I said, “that I do not accept any pre-conditions. I have interviewed Keith many times. I have known him for years. If he says that, I will take it from him, but I am not going to take it from you.” Wally’s looking at me like he’s about to drop dead or kill someone. He’s terrified that I’ve just blown the entire interview.
‘Anyway, we’re in there with Keith, we’re having the preliminary chat, and I look him in the eye and say, “By the way, Keith, about these things you don’t want to talk about.” And we start discussing all the bad publicity he’s attracted over the years because of taking hard drugs. It had been in the news recently, so it was relevant. But it’s always preferable to get it from the horse’s mouth.
“Ah, well, man, let’s just see how things go,” Keith nods at me. He smiles. He’s relaxed. I glance at Andy. Who is brilliant, he knows exactly the way I want things to go. We sit down and switch on. We’ve picked two or three tracks from the Undercover album to discuss during the interview, and everything is simmering nicely. At which point, I nudge Andy, and on cue he comes out with the relevant question.
‘Well. Keith totally opens up about it. He says how glad and relieved he is to have got himself off the hard stuff. He tells us about his New York apartment down on Fourth and Broadway, about going out at night on those mean streets to meet his dealers. “I’d be down there with a wad of money in one hand and a gun in the other,” he says. “I could have been killed. Many times. The positions I put myself in, it seems unreal to me now.” He was so candid, it was unbelievable.
‘Back in London, I told Derek Chinnery, the then controller of Radio 1, that I wanted to use this. “I think it was much better for him to get it all out,” I said. To my amazement, Derek agreed. He was absolutely fine about it. It was unheard of at that time for the BBC to broadcast such shocking material. The only other time I can recall something similar happening was when we went to interview Ozzy Osbourne. He’d not long given up taking drugs as well. When you’ve got a rock superstar revealing past weaknesses and really opening his heart, it makes for compelling radio. And it was just one of the reasons why I loved working with Andy Peebles. He is so talented. He had a knack for winning the trust of these people and putting them at ease, so that they lost their fear and said what they needed to say. I would call it a form of psychotherapy.’
Something happened during the 1980s that knocked rock’n’roll off its trajectory, divorcing it from its roots and changing it so profoundly that it would never be the same again. It started with the pounding vibe that heralded a certain single towards the end of 1984 that not only deprived my friend Jim Diamond of a Christmas No. 1,1 a robbing he actively encouraged, but which set the wheels in motion for a global fundraising extravaganza the following summer that would both save lives and ring a death knell. To call it the day the music died is no exaggeration.
Live Aid was regarded at the time in some quarters as evidence of the rockerati snatching back control, having expunged punk and got the hang of hairspray. Umbrage was taken at the sight of millionaire musos banging out fifteen minutes of fame, I mean tunes, in the name of feeding the world. Bob Geldof’s ‘Give us your fucking money!’ message stuck in the craw, given that these fat cats could have clubbed together to solve third world hunger from the comfort of their own bank accounts. So who was the giant gig for, really?
When the ‘Global Jukebox’ subject arises nowadays, it is usually in the context of Queen having stolen the day, using the occasion to relaunch themselves after a couple of bumpy episodes (a ban from the Musicians’ Union for playing Sun City, South Africa, during apartheid, wrecking their reputation in America with their single ‘I Want to Break Free’) to go again as world-beaters. This rejuvenated force soared from strength to strength on the back of it, unaware at first that Freddie Mercury was on the way out. So solid was their Live Aid performance that their name has become synonymous with it. It misses the point. That benefit gig was for famine relief, not for the benefit of Queen.
Prompted by the success of the Band Aid single ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ Live Aid has long been hailed as ‘the day that rock’n’roll changed the world’. On the contrary – and those of us who got this at the time would have been lynched for saying so – it was the day that the world changed rock. Not just because the sight of Princess Diana in a baby-blue frock, clapping politely, and the Prince of Wales in an unsuitable suit, looking bewildered by it all, made some of us feel uneasy about proceedings. It had to do with something more momentous, which we sensed but couldn’t quite put our finger on. It was this: that by donating their time and music to raise funds for the starving millions of Ethiopia via a concert broadcast on an unprecedented scale, the cream of the planet’s rock stars were giving the money men big ideas. How about this as an under-tapped force to be harnessed?! Prised open with all the ease of an artist flipping the top off a tin of paint, the lid to Pandora’s box was never going back on.2
On seemingly innocuous moments has the world long turned. Just as the advent of all-seater stadiums, the abolition of standing terraces and the subsequent fall in violent behaviour between clashing fans led to an explosion in the popularity and influence of football; just as the England team’s devastating exit from the Italia ’90 FIFA World Cup semi-finals made a money mascot of blubbing midfielder Paul Gascoigne, fetching hundreds of millions of pounds’ worth of investment into the beautiful game; just as the Premier League stole its essence and point, making the focus about transfer fees, ludicrous wages and extortionate broadcasting deals; and just as football sold its soul to the advertising industry, rock’n’roll post-Live Aid sold out on a boggling scale.
Its creators, Bob Geldof and Midge Ure, would disagree vehemently. But even they would have to concede that music was changed irrevocably, because it was hijacked after that by the corporate world. Not only that, but this would lead to an eruption of musical talent shows on television that turned rock and pop into karaoke, from the relaunched New Faces, Search for a Star and Stars in their Eyes to Popstars, Pop Idol and The X Factor to the travesty called The Voice. The sight of Queen guitarist Brian May thrashing the Red Special3 on Strictly Come Dancing during the 2011 ninth series, in which his wife Anita Dobson (former Queen Vic landlady Angie Watts on EastEnders) was a contestant, was the moment I almost hung up my pen and went home.
Those not born when it happened or too young to remember or care will not regard 13 July 1985 as significant. Their field of reference extending only as far back as the bands who were big during their childhood, it is of no concern to most of them that the music industry was reconfigured during the eighties; nor that what came before had had such bearing on the sounds with which they grew up. They will be blissfully unaware that MTV launched on 1 August 1981 in New York, or that it became available in the UK on the same date in 1987. If they have heard of weekly television chart show Top of the Pops, they probably have no inkling that its once massive influence began to decline during the late 1980s, thanks to a demise in the show’s association with BBC Radio 1. It began to be perceived as uncool, sending viewing figures into decline. There was no longer any central, cohesive judgement of the pop music released each week. MTV, while mopping up its viewership and projecting promotional videos as of equal importance to the songs, failed to provide a barometer. As for football: unaware or uninterested in the fact that there was a time when soccer did not dominate every aspect of our lives, particularly the media and especially television; when most women never watched it; when its players would have fallen about laughing at the idea of being Rolex-and-designer-clad style icons and entertainers; and when WAGS,4 the future influencers of the shopping habits, hair, make-up, nail styles and even values of young girls (thanks, Victoria Beckham, Coleen Rooney and Becky Vardy) had not yet been invented, they are similarly unruffled by the thought that genuine rock breathed its last in Wembley and Philadelphia that long-ago day. The Premier League, stupid money and the music industry coalesced during the early nineties, adding weight and wealth to the growing phenomenon of celebrity culture … which was itself a triumph of style over substance, of publicity, marketing and merchandise over authenticity, and of the validation of the vicarious thrill.
The Stones did not perform at Live Aid. As a group, that is. Mick’s recorded jaunt and video with David Bowie, lively and successful though they were, and Keith’s and Ronnie’s inadequate, best-forgotten accompaniment of Bob Dylan, hardly count. The band did not rock up as a collective, as a contributing live act. The irony is that they have benefited beyond imagining, above and beyond everyone else, from the global celebrity culture that ensued. They would overcome their differences, conclude their estrangement and capitalise on their worth on the back of it. They became mainstream celebrities and tabloid fixtures from that point on. Their private lives, spending habits and especially their women were now pored over, dissected and gossiped about by folk who had little to zero interest in the music they were making. Should I say, made. Because the Stones had peaked creatively during the seventies and early eighties. There was nothing innovative or outstanding beyond Exile on Main St. (1972), with the exception of 1973’s Goats Head Soup and 1981’s Tattoo You. The second of those, despite being a No. 1 album, disappointed the critics and is widely considered to have marked the start of the band’s creative decline.
Pause to reconsider these three great Stones albums. Exile is famous for ‘Rocks Off’, ‘Tumbling Dice’ and ‘Sweet Virginia’. Mick said that it reflected the band as ‘runaway outlaws, using the blues as its weapon against the world’. It scored a No. 1 in the UK, America and Canada. Remastered and re-released in 2010, the upgrade featured a bonus disc offering ten new tracks. It hit No. 1 in the UK and No. 2 in the US.
Goats Head Soup also sailed to the top in the UK, the US and around the world. It spawned ‘Angie’ and ‘Star Star’, the latter better known as ‘Starfucker’. That track’s subject matter, inventive sex with a groupie, is reckoned to be Mick’s riposte to Carly Simon for her tongue-lashing, ‘You’re So Vain’. There are blatant lyrical echoes. Either way, the song encapsulates the extreme excesses of the seventies in ways that make for fun or uncomfortable listening, depending on what floats.
‘With Exile on Main St., we were ready to go, we just lived in my basement and did what we did,’ Keith told Paul Sexton in 2020. ‘We were still on each other’s backs. But by the time we got to cut Goats Head Soup, Mick and, well, all of the band, had separated over the world for a while. So we had to figure out how to write songs, not being in each other’s pocket.’ Of the remastered expansion, Keith informed the music writer, ‘Sometimes by listening in a different time and in a totally different space, whole different areas come to mind.’
Before Tattoo You came Black and Blue: the mostly forgettable album that nevertheless stormed to No. 1 in America, No. 2 back home, and which spawned ‘Fool to Cry’. Not that the critics jumped all over it. Its general reception was lukewarm. Yet as is so often the case, one reviewer’s vanilla ice cream is another fan’s red-hot chilli.
Tattoo You was their last album to top the US charts. It arrived during the year when the band signed a new four-album deal with CBS worth a staggering $50 million. At the time, it was the biggest recording deal in history. What exactly did CBS believe they were going to get for this? That was some blind faith. By 1986, Mick and Keith would barely be talking to each other, let alone in the mood to record. While each immersed himself in his own solo albums, the Stones were not recording anything at all.
I confess to a soft spot for Tattoo You. It’s the album that gave us ‘Start Me Up’, with its ‘bathroom reverb’, stark beat, trademark riff and classic groan, ‘You make a grown man cry’. The one that they so often open live shows with, it is the last great Rolling Stones song. It also gave us ‘Waiting on a Friend’, one of my all-time favourites. Its searing sax appeal courtesy of legend Sonny Rollins5 helped it to No. 13 in the US. What a shame it passed Europe and the UK by. It is notable for its portrayal of Jagger, who was now pushing forty, as a man who at long last sees sense. Even though, as it turns out, his Damascene conversion was short-lived. Eschewing women and other distractions, he reawakens to the value of lifelong friendship. Which is ironic, given the permafrost that would set in between him and Keith during the eighties.
Check out the video, which might be the coolest Stones footage of all. It sums up, for me, what they were about at that time. There’s Mick looking all camp in an edgy East Village doorway,6 and laid-back Keith making his way along the street. They meet, and Keith bends to kiss his old school chum. They sit for a moment before sauntering off in the direction of a downbeat bar and grill. Propping up the bar is a backcombed Ronnie, three sheets to the wind by the look of him. His presence is interesting, given that he doesn’t play on the track. Bill and Charlie are seated behind, grinning self-consciously. The four indulge in an inebriated sing-song before meandering down the back, taking up their instruments and launching into an inevitable jam, of which no one else in the place takes a blind bit of notice. It’s simple and nostalgic, and was a big MTV hit at the time. It was who we wanted the Stones to be. It was who I believed they were.
While we are in this zone, let’s take a moment to ponder the modern trend for remastering, reworking and re-releasing every little thing. ‘Bonus tracks’, ‘previously unreleased material’ and ‘stuff we didn’t know was in that box behind the freezer in the garage’ saturate the market with alarming frequency. Much of it feels mercenary. We either like it or we don’t. Because I was immersed in the originals when I was young, I find the variations challenging to listen to. Such ‘new’, ‘improved’ releases diminish the worth of what artists created in the first place. They seem somehow disrespectful to the millions who paid good money for them the first time round, at least some of whom must feel short-changed. Granted, technology has moved on. Songs, like teeth, deserve a polish. Just as everyone should get a second chance (never a third), music is allowed a new lease of life. The record industry is only following Hollywood’s lead, with its remakes of classic motion pictures.
For my money, it’s a rare effort indeed that lives up to its predecessor. Take Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, featuring Leo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan. The reviewers raved, bully for them, but how could it eclipse Francis Ford Coppola’s seminal 1974 piece starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow? They shouldn’t go messing with Breakfast at Tiffany’s either (it’s coming), Lawrence of Arabia, The Sound of Music or Gone With the Wind. The fact that Spielberg couldn’t leave West Side Story alone is irksome enough. Pretty and lively but. You know. If it ain’t broke.
Besides, there is much to be said for rudimentary recording techniques. They are an important element of retro charm. That music was made then, not now. It reflects the times during which it was written and laid down, and should therefore still sound like ‘then’. The commercial incentive to reach younger fans who couldn’t have heard it in antiquity, and whose skin-so-soft ears are accustomed to digital finesse, is understandable. Reworkings and re-releases allow new generations to discover vintage music for themselves. Music must live and breathe if it is to survive, and therefore to a certain extent must change. But the fashion for upgrading and improving can go too far. How does the painter know when his work is done? He decides.
Back to the records. When the post-Live Aid Stones became a touring circus, a magnificent happening and a very monument to their own divine majesty, the impact of their music, ironically, seemed to recede. Do people really attend rock gigs simply to gaze at the objects of their fascination, the way they might crowd around Borneo elephants, four-eyed turtles or Bahama Nuthatches in a zoo? You’d be amazed. The Stones experience had reached a stage at which it was less about the songs, more about the spectacle … as well as the opportunity to purchase the spenny logo’d T-shirt, hoodie or hat that you couldn’t buy anywhere else. Forget band, the Stones were now a brand: the greatest rock’n’roll brand in the world. And they believed their own mythology. At least, Mick did. The music had become a means to an end, and it showed. Their raison d’être now seemed avaricious. At which point, many went off them. Millions more, who of their dark, distant history knew little and could care even less, switched on.
‘But all the rebellion, their anti-Establishment stance, had melted away,’ remembers former journalist Stuart White. ‘There was not a trace of the anti-Fab Four who excited us in the first place. All that energy, the strange Mars bar-eating shenanigans (myth though that was, we loved it) and weirdness had gone. They no longer pissed on forecourts outside South London petrol stations, infuriating local burghers and getting themselves nicked. Now, it was multi-million-dollar tours, Jagger in a blazer watching cricket at Lord’s, Keith in a mansion in Switzerland. Switzerland? Land of eternal neutrality, yodelling and the cuckoo clock? That was like Satan taking a bijou bolthole in the Vatican City. Go get a pad down in Haiti, Keith, mate. Don’t play at it, do it for real. Rum, drums and voodoo, get the picture? Switzerland? Say it ain’t so. At least he made it to Jamaica and based himself there for a while, which was much more his speed and where Anita could misbehave until the coneys came home, far from the prying eyes of Fleet Street.
‘There was talk,’ Stuart remembers, ‘of Jagger laying down pipes of port in a cellar somewhere.7 Port! Rumour had it he was after a knighthood. Well, the sword did tap his shoulder eventually. Up yours to the world and now we want to kneel before Her Non-Satanic Majesty? At least, Jagger did. How Keith must have howled. We were told that Richards was disgusted by his bandmate’s official acceptance by the Establishment. This is what so repelled our parents? This was who we were warned not to be, because if we aped them we would ‘never get on’? O tempora! O mores!8 They were now in a nosedive from groundbreaking rock’n’roll down, deeper and down to a plateau of corporateness. As Clinton didn’t say, “It’s the money, stupid.”9 Okay, maybe not for Krazy Keef, the rock’n’roll Hells Angel. But Charlie Watts, great drummer though he was, looked like a lad from the Land of Perpetual Boredom throughout all those lucrative tours. One could almost hear him thinking, “Right, Montreal tomorrow … Vancouver and then home. Ker–ching!”’
Their rogue spirit had clearly deserted them. Thus, as Stuart implies, did the Musical Marx Beat Bolsheviks make it, turning from little Lenins into latter-day Roman Abramoviches … he of the private jets, and another oligarch casualty of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
‘What next, one wondered: “Rolling Stones PLC”? A Royal warrant: “Purveyors of Fine Rebellious Songs to Her Majesty the Queen”? They should have broken up while the legend was still alive and kicking, as the Beatles had the courage to do. Instead, Mick Jagger became Bill Gates and the band became Microsoft. An admittedly amazing global corporate enterprise – but to misquote Thunderclap Newman,10 they were not suggesting that anyone “Get out the arms and ammo, because there’s something in the air.” Reimbursement was now the R-word, not revolution. My dear, late mum and dad, who regarded the Stones’ “awful racket” as aural anarchy and the band as sex-maniac drug addicts, would have been delighted to see how those scruffy lads turned into model citizens with distinct conservative and Conservative values.’
The other key contributing factor was the unofficial abolition of age constraints. While the so-called ‘older generation’ tended to disconnect from youth culture at around thirty-five or forty latest, as my father’s record collection (which I still own) testifies, there now prevailed a number-blind defiance. People no longer felt obliged to ‘settle down’ and become adults until they were well into their thirties. Although the law regarded you as fully mature once you reached the age of eighteen, the pressure from above to ‘act your age’ was off. We had the scientists to thank. Professors engaged in the study of the brain and nervous system were just beginning to find that the age at which humans achieve full maturation is not uniform, but different for everyone.
We now knew that this was an infinitely more nuanced transition than originally thought, which takes place over several decades. No longer expected to transform overnight from caterpillars to butterflies before being sucked into the cyclone and shrivelling to dust, we could take our time over it. This would lead to us making big-birthday statements such as ‘thirty is the new twenty’ and sixty is the new forty’. Which boiled down to a communal acceptance that we were now hitting middle age ‘later’. The point at which we thought people were ‘old’ shifted too. The healthy were now living longer and the numbers could be adjusted, taking into account the extra time that we might expect to live.
The knock-on effect on rock stars was magnificent. Where once the idea of them doing it beyond the age of forty or even thirty had seemed ridiculous, the game was now gloves off and no holds barred. Likewise, people could now decently remain rock fans beyond their forties. Observers no longer batted an eye; or if they did, they kept their opinions to themselves. Tina Turner in a fanny pelmet shrieking ‘Nutbush City Limits’ into the gods11 was still flinging into her dotage. She gave her last live performance in 2009, aged seventy. Lulu’s still out there shaking a thigh bone at seventy-four, as is Suzi Quatro at seventy-two. Macca, Neil Diamond, the Who, Aerosmith, the Beach Boys, Rod Stewart, Iron Maiden and Def Leppard were still at it, last time we looked. No one is telling these groovy grandads (in some cases, great- or even great-great-grandads) that it’s time to slow down. It’s rock-’til-you-drop from here on in.
It can be uncomfortable, in that case, to recall that the rock that emerged after Live Aid was a parody of itself. Those who slam rock-themed stage musicals – Rock of Ages (eighties classic rock by Bon Jovi, Poison, Pat Benatar et al), Bat Out of Hell (Meat Loaf numbers), Queen’s We Will Rock You, Tina (the Tina Turner story, featuring songs by the artist who has sold more concert tickets than any other solo performer in history, and who oversees this production personally) – as a diminution and betrayal of the original music overlook the fact that corporate rock/arena rock/stadium rock (whatever you want to call it) did precisely the same thing. It changed it into something that challenged its integrity. Contemporary fans don’t want to hear that rock’n’roll died during the eighties, or that the Stones did their share to kill it off. If rock music in general seems to have become a sub-genre of musical theatre, at least it is part of something passionate and thrilling that captures every art form: not only acting, singing and dancing but songwriting and storytelling, with set-, costume- and make-up design, staging, spectacle and special effects, and orchestral and band accompaniment. Most of which we don’t get when we attend a Rolling Stones gig? Au contraire, we get the lot!
Purists who bog down in categorisation are inclined to miss a simple truth: that the arts are not about categories. They are bigger than that. They are cross-categorisational. They also allow us to experience, to remember, to touch base, to feel alive. Go to a show, check your problems and preoccupations at the door, immerse yourself in the adventure and let the tidal wave wash over you. For the next two hours or however long it lasts, you are on a ride through surreality and on a dance through sheer abandonment, in which you get to live life through others’ eyes. Your heart and soul are stretched to bursting. You can actually imagine yourself as Mick or Keith, up there on stage, giving it welly. You are re-energised by the wildness, and wrung out by the time you head home. Without even realising, you have just taken part in a mass celebration of creativity. Which is in itself a manifestation of hope. Because, though life is short, human art can last forever. If this is as close as we’ll ever get to experiencing immortality, I’m in, baby. Who says it’s no good unless it’s cool? As the kids say, ‘it hits different now’. What is ‘cool’ anyway, but a beatnik relic kept on life support by marketeers?12
‘When hell freezes over’ is a common trope in rock’n’roll. As in, ‘We’ll get back together like never.’ The Eagles looked as though they might properly kill each other when they fell out so badly in 1980 that they swore never to go near one other again. The chiller retort was apparently made by Don Henley. Following which, the singing drummer, lead guitarist Don Felder and frontman Glenn Frey went off to wallow in successful solo careers, and we never imagined that we would see them on stage again. But anger fades, and bank accounts dwindle. In May 1994 they reunited for the first time in fourteen years, to embark, in Burbank, California, on their ironically entitled Hell Freezes Over tour, promoting the album of that name and proving beyond doubt that fans will pay whatever it takes if they want to see something badly enough. That tour grossed more than $63 million. The Eagles went down in history as the first rock band to charge a hundred smackers per person, at a time when tickets to Midwestern shows were selling for between twelve and twenty dollars top whack. Life in the fast lane if you like. Play the scalpers at their own game and take the punters for mugs, let’s do this.
Picture the poor sweaty guy over at CBS Towers, who must have felt like he’d bought the Stones with his life. Would there ever be anything to show for it, beyond compilations and re-releases? The world had to wonder. At least the band’s comeback wasn’t as tardy as that of those Eagles. Our boys only took eight years. Voodoo Lounge, their twentieth British offering, twenty-second in the US and their first without bassist Bill Wyman, put smiles on the critics’ faces and took the Grammy for Best Rock Album the following year. But it set not a turntable alight, nor did it frizz a single airwave.
Its most prominent song, ‘Love Is Strong’, was not that memorable. Disagree? Sing it to me. The album fell short of a Top 40 hit. Despite which, the tour to support it grossed $320 million, making it the world’s highest-grossing tour of all time. The man at CBS breathed and took a toilet break. The Damoclean sword moved not a millimetre. Then 1997 was the year of the Bridges to Babylon album, though how hard was that to make? Because, oh, boys, Mick and Keith were not speaking again, and could barely bring themselves to be in the studio at the same time. The single ‘Anybody Seen My Baby?’ seemed symbolic. By the time they went out to promote it, they were managing to squeeze past each other in corridors without slashing each other to bits. The tour was another massive success. Who said that rock’n’roll stars don’t know how to act?
Another eight years on, they celebrated their fortieth anniversary in 2002 with a double greatest hits album, Forty Licks. The one in everybody’s collection scored them a No. 2 at home and in America. Three years later, their two-year Bigger Bang tour in support of Licks, their last clutch of original songs, broke their own extraordinary 1994 record. The single ‘Streets of Love’ fell short of the American chart, but landed at No. 15 in the UK and performed decently around the world. Their compelling documentary Shine a Light, directed by Martin Scorsese and the one that everybody has seen, is the film of that tour.
February 2006 saw them perform their biggest-ever free concert to more than a million Brazilians in Rio. You had to wonder whether Hyde Park and Altamont crossed their minds that heaving night. Come a long way there, boys. They were hardly off the road thereafter for the next fourteen years. Which by anybody’s standards is remarkable for men of the twilight zone. Kerching, and thrice ker-ching.
Yet another decade flashed by in a beat. The older we get, the quicker it zaps. Out came the Blue & Lonesome covers album in 2016. Their twenty-third in the UK and twenty-fifth in America, this was the first Stones album for eleven years. But they could beat even that: when it took the Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album, it was their first award from the US Recording Academy in twenty-three years.
All the old rumours resurface, with the predictability of infectious disease outbreaks. Jagger’s undergoing a sex change operation – this story actually ran, in the Daily Express. (What the fuck is going on? It was a joke! I think you’ll find that Mr Altham was just pulling your leg, sir.) It’s ‘let’s get them in the papers for any reason we can think of’ to begin with, then suddenly it goes the other way. They build up a wall, so people write on the wall. Don’t take it so seriously, folks, it’s only rock’n’roll. They cooked a dog in a microwave? Not that one again. I mean, I could have sworn it was a cat.
‘They are spent, in terms of new music, and have been for a long time,’ muses their former publicist Keith Altham. ‘But I don’t see why some of their old music won’t last forever. Which is true of only a chosen few. Elvis will always be Elvis. The Beatles, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix. That’s it. The rest are forgettable.
‘The fact is, there is something remarkable about the Rolling Stones,’ he concedes. ‘Especially Jagger. He is certainly a showman who never completely runs down. He has established a unique position in popular music history. But there was a price to pay for that. He used to be fun. It’s gone out of him. I wish I’d never become his PR. I would like to have preserved the memory of the keen-to-please young guy with the coconut smile, and with all that vitality. I got too close. It’s like seeing your dad dressed up as Father Christmas, or going backstage. Once you’ve witnessed it at point-blank range, you can never again bring yourself to believe in magic.’
None of which deterred anybody. Once Mick and Keith patched up their differences, bought new pants and hauled the show on the road, it was just like the good old days. The ghouls are back on the ghost train. Fill the smoke machines, tweak the mirrors – these guys are cool, they still have twenty-eight-inch waists, they’re wearing eyeliner! Keith’s looking a whole lot better since he got his teeth fixed, right? He’s still got fish hooks in his hair! And that’s his real hair, right? None of your implants, fake bangs or hair dye for the Human Riff. I bet he still cuts it himself, too. Always did, back in the day. I ever tell you ’bout the time he did mine?
‘ … Keith Richards cut your hair?’
‘ … with a cutlass. Out on the terrace at his place Point of View in Jamaica, that old house in Ocho Rios, used to belong to some dude by the name of Steele.’13
Which just goes to show. There are few who’ve never indulged in the Rolling Stones fantasy.
The past forty years have been all about what the Stones represent rather than who they actually are. Haven’t we known this all along? Stuart White insists so. ‘When you think about it,’ he reasons, ‘all the good stuff on the Stones happens before 1976. I look back and I note, why yes: after that, it becomes a plateau of wealth and corporateness. Same old, same old. What distinguishes the eighties from the nineties, the two thousands from the twenty-tens and the dozen years after that? Not a lot. It all rolls into one. There’s an immutability about it. For which, read boredom. They’ve been going through the motions for so long now that it’s no longer possible to get excited about them. There’s nothing to keep you awake at night, panting for your next fix of them. The vast majority of their younger fans don’t feel that way, of course. Maybe it’s us who got old, not them.
‘Maybe they have portraits in the attic after all.’14
You can’t help wondering when the cynicism crept in. We know, and we know they know we know, that we the paying punters are just another date ticked off, another bunch of money banked, another step along the road towards the end of yet another tour. Which in some ways can’t come soon enough, they’re a bit sore and queasy these days. But they will miss it like hell as soon as it’s done. Which makes them slaves to it. They have no choice but to start planning the next outing, and so it goes on. They might have overcome the narcotics and other evils, but the road remains the most threatening addiction of all. Every artist experiences this, whether they admit to it or not. That’s show business. The brighter the light, the deeper the shadow.
‘Believe what?’ asked Shadow. ‘What should I believe?’
‘Everything,’ roared the buffalo man.15
He’s behind you. Oh yes, he is. Just as every cop is a criminal, and all the sinners saints.