In collaboration with PASSIONS, VOICE OF ASIA is proud to present timeless articles from the archives, reproduced digitally for your reading pleasure. Originally published in PASSIONS Volume 57 in 2013, we present this story on Sir Mick Jagger, and how he wants to keep rocking the world for as long as the world will let him.
With his distinctive voice and somewhat notorious lifestyle, Michael Philip Jagger, now Sir ‘Mick’ (knighted in 2003), together with his Rolling Stones band, has been a major force in the rock and roll scene for more than 50 years. Caspar Llewellyn Smith met the star following a storming Glastonbury festival debut, and the ensuing insights from the frontman were released, in a Malaysia exclusive, to PASSIONS. We get up close and personal with the man known as ‘The Lips’.
“If you start thinking how pretty the sunset is, you get lost.“
Sometimes it’s hard to remember that Mick Jagger isn’t just a playboy of the western world – before all that, he was the singer in a rock’n’roll band and, 50 years on, that much hasn’t changed. In fact, try to get him talking about how the Rolling Stones revolutionised society in the ‘60s, or about the lifestyle he pursues during downtime from the group, and he’s not really having it. Instead, he talks about the meticulous preparation that went into playing Glastonbury for the first time and the group’s two subsequent shows in Hyde Park.
“It’s the alternative Ascot, let’s face it,” says the sprightly 70-year old, talking about the Glastonbury Festival, before adding quickly, “Not that I’ve ever been to the proper Ascot.”
The last time the Stones played Hyde Park, it was July 1969 and Brian Jones had died two days earlier. Jagger read Shelley’s poem on John Keats’s death from the lip of the stage, and hundreds of cabbage white butterflies released from cardboard boxes, that were meant to flutter over the crowd, never made it.
Q: What do you remember about Hyde Park?
“Everyone was banging on about it,” says the frontman now, “but what I remember is thanks to the film that was made of it [by Granada TV]. The film supersedes my own memory.”
“Someone asked me if I was thinking about ‘69 when I was on stage this summer,” he continues. “Listen, darling, if I was thinking about that, I’d really be losing it. If you ever start thinking about how pretty the sunset is, you get lost. You can never start wondering about what you’ll watch on TV when you’re back in the hotel… Homeland, or whatever. You need to pay attention. There are cables to trip over, it can be dark, people throw things. The stage can be a dangerous place to be…”
The interview took place in the Stones’ new HQ in Chelsea, west London. It’s a nondescript place, with plenty of expense spared on the decor and furnishings in keeping with the band’s famous Scrooge-like tendencies.
While drummer Charlie Watts had been unenthusiastic about the prospect of Glastonbury, Jagger now says that the whole band loved it in the end, despite the special challenges that the gig presented.
Q: How did you prepare for Glastonbury?
“It’s not your stage and it’s not your crowd per se – people have bought their tickets before any acts have been announced,” he says. “I know U2 didn’t have the best of nights [in 2011], although the weather didn’t help.”
In fact, Jagger sought advice from Bono on whether the Stones should appear, while Chris Martin of Coldplay, a long-term friend of the festival, wrote him a letter listing the reasons why the group should. “Chris was very sweet. The truth is, though, that they’d never actually asked us – and the first time they did, we said yes.” Jagger came prepared for the worst of British summer time: “I’ve done a lot of shows in the rain, so I dug out a whole wardrobe of glamorous raincoats!” But the notion that he camped there proves to be a lie. His girlfriend, [the late] L’Wren Scott, posted a picture on his Instagram account of him standing outside a luxurious yurt (a tent-type dwelling), which he captioned: “Me and my yurt!” Now, he confesses, it was just a joke. “It belonged to one of my daughters. I wasn’t going to rent my own.”
Instead, Jagger stayed in accommodation backstage, but he did explore the festival, watching the Arctic Monkeys on the Friday night in order to check out the sight lines from the stage and wandering into dark recesses of the site, such as the dance field Block 9.
One other constant for generations of Glastonbury-goers: “the queues for the loos! Not one of the high points….”
Did you, Sir Mick, actually use a portable toilet? At this, he demurs. “I can’t remember that part of it.”
Hyde Park shows and Glastonbury – all triumphantly received – came off the back of a 19-date North America tour. While the Stones are a notoriously haphazard live proposition, this time around the reception was overwhelmingly jubilant.
Q: How do kids today compare with their forebears?
“Yeah… up to a point. I suppose some of the drugs are different. But [in any age] when you’re 20, you’re more or less the same,” said the svelte survivor of Altamont, the hippie apocalypse that followed Hyde Park in ‘69.
Q: What other projects do you have in the works?
It sounds as if the 50 & Counting tour was a pleasant, and lucrative, interlude in his sybaritic life. “I recently returned from the Rajasthan International Folk Festival in Jodhpur, India, where I am a patron, and am priming for visits to LA and Mississippi for the filming of a new James Brown biopic, with a script by Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth, in my role as one of the producers.”
He also has an Elvis Presley film in the works, based on the Peter Guralnick book Last Train to Memphis, and we talk about the fascination that rock’s early heroes still exert on this septuagenarian kid from Dartford. “There’s a Taschen book of the journey that Elvis took from Memphis to New York to sing Hound Dog on TV in 1956, and in every picture he just looks so super glamorous.”
Did you ever meet Presley? “No. John Lennon told me not to.”In 2014, the Stones tour rolls on through Abu Dhabi, Asia and Australia and after that, who knows?
Q: Do you ever look back?
He is far less interested in everyone else’s preoccupation with his own life and times, which clearly feels a drag. “I saw a bit of a Jimi Hendrix documentary on TV the other night, which was quite good, I suppose, but I try to avoid these things. Whenever anyone talks about something going wrong in English society, it’s always the ‘60s and Mrs Thatcher that come up… but I don’t want to talk about that. There’s so much of it about. I don’t mind talking about this year, or the next one…”
It’s staggering to think that when his granddaughter Assisi has her first child this year, Jagger will become a great-grandfather. The only concession he makes to feeling his age comes when he says he also liked the festival show because of its shorter running time. Jagger himself is still the jobbing musician. “Oh, I write songs all the time; actually, I was just finishing doing some yesterday.” 29 studio albums, 109 chart singles and 250 million record sales on, and Sir Mick Jagger has every intention to keep on rocking and, of course, rolling.
