Mick jagger

Style, self-evidently among those who pursue an interest in such affairs, is, according to the Comte de Buffon, the man himself – the essence, the heart, the bowel, the bovril. While, among the much greater majority who pursue an ignorance in such affairs, it is an assumed gamut of off-the-peg tics, props, accent – style is something bolted on to a being’s chassis and core in the hope that it will hold. We can be certain which of these two nugatory classifications better suits the late Christopher Gibbs who in the course of his long, more or less antiquarian life encountered Everyone, absolutely Everyone. ‘Everyone’ in this instance unhelpfully signifies little beside the people, per se, whom Gibbs met, smiled at, sold to, bought from, bought for, advised and charmed.

On 30 May 1966, the Beatles released ‘Paperback Writer’ – a fortnight after ‘Paint It Black’ by the Rolling Stones and only days before Bob Dylan released ‘I Want You’ as a single. Paul Simon wrote and recorded (with Art Garfunkel) ‘A Hazy Shade of Winter’ not long after. Yes, yes, what bliss it was in that dawn etc. But anyone predicting back then that, exactly 60 years later, all four artists would still be releasing new music and touring to large and appreciative audiences would have been laughed clean out of the Bag O’Nails. Even when glossy monthly music magazines such as Q started appearing in the 1980s, 40 was regarded as the dark side of the moon for the foundational pop stars of the 1960s.

‘A working class hero is something to be.’ Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer must have missed the conflicted, sardonic edge to John Lennon’s lyric, from his 1970 song ‘Working Class Hero’, given their rush to scrub away the whiff of privilege in the crudest manner imaginable. Sunak, desperately, by means of bemoaning a childhood forever blighted by lack of access to satellite TV; Starmer by dully hammering home that he is the son of a toolmaker. A country pile, a double-barrelled girlfriend and a mock-regal drawl were valued plunder in 1960s pop As in politics, so in music. In both fields, class anxiety has become inverted. The fear now is to appear too privileged. It wasn’t always thus.

Most of us have at one time played the you-couldn’t-make-it-up game. What were the odds back in, say, 1973, that millions of us would casually engage in Jetsons-style video chats, conduct business at the swipe of a thumb, or consider the prospect of a space-tourism flight courtesy of Virgin Galactic? Or for that matter, rue the fact that the all-conquering Oakland Athletics might fall so low as to become the worst team in baseball last season, with a dismal 50-112 record? Perhaps the biggest shock to someone contemplating the future in 1973 might have been the knowledge that Keith Richards, the guitarist and primary creative force of the Rolling Stones, would still be alive and well at the time of his eightieth birthday on December 18, 2023. Wrecked. Sick. Zombielike. Undead.

Among the other jewels in the crown of Sir Mick Jagger’s songwriting career is a number he and his longtime creative partner Keith Richards knocked off in December 1963 to promote the Kellogg’s company products. Don’t laugh — it’s an infectious little tune in its way, even if the key lyrical message — “Wake up in the morning/ There’s a pop that really says/ Rice Krispies for you and you and you!”) falls some way short of the same duo’s “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” which followed barely twelve months later. But then Jagger, who turns eighty on July 26, was always a quick study. Last year’s four-part EPIX documentary series My Life as a Rolling Stone may be numbingly banal (“They set the bar for what a rock ’n’ roll band should sound like, look like..

First, the good news. Despite the recent death of drummer Charlie Watts, the Rolling Stones are back among us, playing a series of sold-out US stadium shows between now and Thanksgiving. It’s not just that the three surviving band members, now all in their seventies, refuse to grow up. They seem actually to live in a time warp: in an era when most rock stars dress like they work at UPS and offer a relentless diet of screwed-up nihilism and phony salves, the Stones are still out there in their skimpy, Day-Glo T-shirts and leather pants, serving up great meat-and-potato rock songs garnished with lyrics about sex and drugs, and generally carrying on like it’s 1967 all over again. Now the bad news.