What a drag it’s getting previous…until you’re Mick Jagger

What is it with pop stars and ageing? Roger Daltrey sang the immortal line from The Who’s hit My Generation – “Hope I die before I get old” – in October 1965.

Pete Townshend wrote that when he was 20. Lennon and McCartney’s When I’m 64, with its stark references to ‘losing hair’ and ‘wasting away’, featured on 1967’s Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Paul had penned the tune when he was simply 14.

And The Rolling Stones’ singer Mick Jagger sang: “What a drag it is, getting old.” That was in 1966, on the Stones’ hit Mother’s Little Helper. He and guitarist Keith Richards had been 22 once they wrote it.

Not that any of them expired prematurely.

Macca turned 81 final month. Townshend and Daltrey might be 80 and 79 subsequent birthday. Mick Jagger-nauts his means into his ninth decade in the present day as he turns 80. What a swell occasion with 300 besties he could have.

For a multimillionaire rock famous person, there isn’t a hiding place. The numbers hang-out. The mirror taunts. He is eighteen from behind, 81 in entrance. The pert derriere and sinewy limbs could defy gravity, however the crinkled face and deflated-lilo lips are useless giveaways. Even the artfully-tousled moptop could also be enhanced.

It’s the factor about age. It catches up with you. One minute you’re swinging on down the highway from Twickenham to Tennessee banging out Satisfaction and It’s Only Rock and Roll alongside your Human Riff boyhood pal Keef – each having neatly sidestepped the demise of Brian Jones, their founder, who drowned in his swimming pool in 1969 on the age of 27. Foul play lengthy suspected. Nothing proved.

The subsequent, you might be lamenting the lack of your lifelong drummer Charlie Watts – who succumbed to most cancers in 2021 having simply notched up his personal four-score – and searching frantically at one another, questioning who’s subsequent.

No one is extra conscious of his personal mortality than Jagger. Critics had been imploring him and the Stones to name it a day 40 years in the past. On the one hand, Mick’n’Keef, the final remaining members of the unique line-up, crab about like fossilised derelicts inching ever nearer in the direction of the abyss. On the opposite, don’t look too intently, they’re as very important as ever. Which makes them specimens to be treasured, like all species on the verge of extinction.

For the basic rock era is lumbering into the sundown. Our heroes are falling like flies. Keith Richards, 80 in December, who has survived extra life-threatening incidents than a Hollywood stuntman, has pledged to drop useless stay on stage.

Don’t ask him, he hasn’t acquired a date.

Most of us take inventory on large birthdays. We are inclined to pause and look again. Acknowledge the great instances. Rue the dangerous. Give thanks for the issues we acquired away with, and come clean with long-harboured regrets.

But Jagger doesn’t do regrets. He has by no means allowed himself to be horrified or embarrassed by the excesses of his misspent previous.

“It was just part of your life then,” he says. “I look at it and think, ‘Yeah, I remember that. We did this and we did that’. So what? And now we do something else.

“There were loads of drugs… but everyone had their own drug habits which they weren’t necessarily sharing with everyone else. It’s pretty vivid. I wasn’t that out-of-it that I don’t remember. I can recall most of it pretty well considering some of the stuff. Blimey!”

Mick famously returned a reported million-pound advance to writer Weidenfeld & Nicholson, a colossal sum in the course of the Eighties, insisting that he couldn’t keep in mind sufficient to write down his memoirs.

“I don’t really like the idea of doing it,” he confessed. “I’m not sure how excited I feel about it, digging into your own past. Apart from getting paid, I don’t know what you really get out of it.”

It isn’t any stretch to think about why he by no means fancied retracing his steps. Jagger’s private immorality story options an overload of misdemeanours he would slightly neglect.

What would nice grandfather Mick make of his schoolboy face secretly caked in his Avon-lady mom Eva’s make-up samples? Of his college-scarfed poncing on the London School of Economics, the place he was all too briefly a pupil?

Of his band’s unceremonious offloading of early supervisor Giorgio Gomelsky in favour of teenaged blond hustler Andrew Loog Oldham – who would later allege that Jagger wears lifts in his sneakers and is lamentably under-endowed (a revelation additionally shared by Richards)?

Of the best way he and Keef snatched management of the group from Brian Jones as a result of, whereas the latter may decide up and play any instrument, he may neither sing nor write songs? Of their behaviour which will have helped drive the unlucky Jones to drug habit and into an early grave?

As for his remedy of girls: my year-long analysis into Jagger’s 1000’s of relationships and encounters for my e book The Stone Age: 60 Years of the Rolling Stones was mind-boggling.

After writing the tune Under My Thumb about her, Mick proposed to Chrissie Shrimpton, sister of mannequin Jean. Then he womanised behind her again so relentlessly that she tried suicide.

He progressed to Marianne Faithfull, a 17-year-old Reading convent schoolgirl about to sit down her A-levels, whom Loog Oldham had met at a celebration. They talked her right into a recording studio, and she or he had a Top Ten hit with their composition As Tears Go By. Mick emptied a champagne flute into her cleavage within the Ready, Steady Go! TV studio, as a come-on.

Despite which, she married her boyfriend John Dunbar and gave start to a son. Motherhood bored her. She had a fling with Brian Jones, fell for Keith Richards, with whom she loved “the best night of my life”, however gave in to Jagger when she was 19. Somebody informed her he’d wished the actress Julie Christie. Marianne, to him, was “God’s second attempt”.

They moved right into a mansion on Chelsea’s Cheyne Walk, and have become essentially the most lovely couple of the Sixties. She saved her sapphic affairs to herself. He shared his homoerotic fantasies about bandmate Keith, which might later be consummated.

Mick informed Marsha, a star of West End stage manufacturing Hair, that he longed to conceive a child along with her. But whereas she was pregnant with Mick’s first little one Karis, he fell for Nicaraguan magnificence Bianca Pérez-Mora Macías, whose sulky eyes, sculpted philtrum and pendulous underlip prompted Marianne to remark: “Mick had fallen in love with himself.”

He informed Marsha he’d by no means cherished her and threatened to sue for custody of Karis. He subsequently denied paternity. Marsha needed to pursue him by the courts for little one assist.

When Mick married Bianca in May 1971, she was anticipating his second daughter, Jade. The Stones escaped Her Majesty’s tax inspectors, moved to the south of France and set about recording their career-defining album Exile on Main Street. A studio was arrange within the basement of Villa Nellcôte, the lavish home in Villefranche rented by Keith. Mick resided in a Paris house with Bianca, and commuted.

On one sojourn south, he seduced Brian Jones’s younger substitute, guitarist Mick Taylor – beneath the noses of Taylor’s associate Rose Millar and their six-week-old daughter Chloe and behind the again of his pregnant spouse. Taylor by no means forgave himself. He stop the band in 1974, to get replaced by Ronnie Wood.

Texan mannequin Jerry Hall left Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry for Mick in 1977, gave him 4 extra kids – Lizzie, Georgia May, James and Gabriel – married him in Bali in 1990 and turned a blind eye to most of his womanising.

But she drew the road, in 1999, at his affair with Brazilian mannequin and TV host Luciana Gimenez Morad that resulted within the start of his seventh little one and third son, Lucas.

Jerry divorced him, solely to seek out that that they had not been married within the first place. The ceremony in Bali had been a sham. Mick challenged her claims by the London courts, and screwed her payout to a fraction of what she deserved. She later married and divorced nonagenarian media baron Rupert Murdoch.

Mick appeared to settle with statuesque American clothier L’Wren Scott, whom he met on a shoot in 2001. It was claimed she got here between Mick and the remainder of the band, who known as her “the First Lady”, “the apostrophe” and “le Man”.

Despite this dissent, she and Jagger lasted 9 years.

In March 2014, simply after that they had returned from a vacation in Mustique and after Mick had departed on a Stones tour of Australia and New Zealand, she hanged herself. The tour was cancelled.

Her failing enterprise and cash worries had been blamed. We haven’t any means of realizing whether or not she had found that Mick, now 70, had met a ballerina in Tokyo, Melanie Hamrick, a 27-year-old dancer with the New York-based American Ballet Theatre.

Although they had been photographed collectively on a balcony in Zurich, their rumoured affair was denied. The couple grew to become the proud mother and father of Mick’s eighth little one and her first, their son Deveraux, who was born in December 2016, 32 months after L’Wren died.

Three years later, Melanie retired to concentrate on choreography and to mom her son. And her lover..

Along the best way, there have been dalliances with a monarch’s sibling, first girls, politicians, socialites, aristocrats, publishers, photographers and journalists. There had been many fashions, actresses and porn stars, movie star daughters, nannies, cooks and housekeepers, and loads of male lovers too – together with actor Helmut Berger, Rolling Stone journal writer Jann Wenner and David Bowie.

No affair was ever denied. It is claimed that everybody is aware of somebody who is aware of somebody who has slept with him.

Sixty years of debauchery, infidelity, duplicity, divorce and denial. It’s rather a lot to lug round. Little surprise that Jagger prefers to focus forwards.

The world nonetheless falls at his ft. Tickets to Stones gigs change palms for 1000’s of kilos, and are nigh on unattainable to bag. Why? He has by no means been an important singer. His strutting, swaggering, finger-pointing antics veer hilariously in the direction of self-parody. The band’s instrumental work has at all times appeared sloppy.

They haven’t had a UK Number One since Honky Tonk Women in 1969. But they nonetheless lay declare to the title Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band within the World. How?

Because they’re nonetheless right here. We circle again to them for a wistful swig of forgotten youth. We’ll by no means be younger once more. But the Stones and their music remind us of what that was like.

“Not fade away,” Mick blares defiantly, within the spirit of the tune’s composer Buddy Holly. He means it. As he lives and breathes.

• The Stone Age: 60 Years of the Rolling Stones printed by John Blake Publishing/Bonnier Books UK is out now in paperback.