As Jagger turns 70, basking in adulation from sell-out concerts,

WHEN little Mike Jagger arrived at his new primary school in 1951, he told his fellow pupils that he had a chemistry set at home and was going to blow up the world. It was an ambition that, as he morphed into a rock star a dozen years later, he seemed to fulfil.

No one personified the rebellious spirit of the Sixties more stridently than Mick Jagger. He demonstrated against the Vietnam war and proposed abolishing private property. He wanted to top up Britain’s reservoirs with LSD to ‘turn the whole country on’.

He was an icon of insurrection, his most famous refrain — ‘I Can’t Get No Satisfaction’ — an anthem for youth disaffected by the repressive orthodoxies of the day. He composed a protest song, Street Fighting Man, sending a copy to a Marxist magazine with the line ‘I’ll kill the king’ emphasised in block capitals.

But Jagger’s lyrics were incoherent at best; it was the music of the Rolling Stones that was really subversive. Their brand of rock ’n’ roll was a form of aggression, a tumultuous assault on the proprieties as well as the senses.

Modern society could no more resist its seismic power, reckoned the Stones’ guitarist Keith Richards, than Jericho could withstand the blast of Joshua’s trumpets.

By the end of the decade Mick Jagger was widely identified as the voice on the soundtrack of sedition.

The antithesis of the melodious Beatles and a world away from crooners such as Frank Sinatra, he developed an inflammatory stage persona. With his gaudy clothes and shaggy hair, he was both dandy and ruffian. And he acted out his songs with gyrations that veered between the gymnastic and the orgiastic.

On stage he would strut, glide, dance, prance, mince, leap and jerk. He seemed animated by a potent erotic charge. He fluttered his hands and swivelled his skinny hips in a peculiarly sensual manner. Nothing about him was more provocative than his large, red lips. The comic Joan Rivers memorably called them ‘child-bearing lips’. Others dubbed Jagger ‘King Leer’.

He and his fellow Stones went out of their way to affront conventional opinion. They spat, swore, snarled and sulked. They ostentatiously picked their noses. They were fined for relieving themselves in public, and performing Satisfaction in Berlin, Jagger sparked a riot by goose-stepping and giving the Nazi salute.

His act became increasingly pornographic, as he strip-teased, clutched his genitalia and mimed masturbation. Often he seemed to celebrate mayhem, misogyny, sadomasochism and drug abuse.

OF COURSE, much of his truculence was sheer ballyhoo. His bad-boy image was fabricated. It was intended to attract teenagers by repelling their parents, a tactic that was gratifyingly successful as critics competed to denounce him.

Jagger insisted that he was entirely authentic. ‘ The grown-up world was a very ordered society,’ he declared, ‘and I was rebelling against it.’ If so, it was a very short-lived rebellion. Jagger’s dissident stance was always shaky, a masquerade of mutiny rather than the real thing.

And for all his supposed strictures on capitalism and consumerism, he was heroically acquisitive and obsessed by wealth.

He famously sang about Satisfaction. And last Friday, as he turned 70, perhaps what satisfied him most would have been the enormous fortune — reputed to be around €230m — he has accrued. He has long regarded music as a get-rich-quick branch of commerce.

A dropout from the London School of Economics, he treated the band as a business in which the most important instrument was his calculator.

Not for nothing was he seen as a singing accountant. He, more than anyone, transformed the Rolling Stones into a corporate leviathan. His ambiguities were legion. Often he played the rebellious superstar, assaulting photographers and smashing up hotel rooms. Just as often he appeared to be quiet, modest, fastidious and polite, notably in the presence of those he considered his betters — artists, professional cricketers, Fellows of the Royal Society in Britain.

He was as house-proud as any suburban matron, living a ‘prim, prissy, bourgeois life’, according to his drug supplier Tony Sanchez, and ‘worrying in case someone spilled coffee on his Persian carpets.’

So who was ‘the man behind the mascara’? The Rolling Stones themselves were puzzled. Bassist Bill Wyman branded him a hypocrite, as insincere as he was inconsistent. Jagger’s first wife Bianca said Mick was not famous for honesty.

Observers attributed his evasiveness to lack of moral fibre. He would not stand firm. ‘He is like a jelly,’ wrote one biographer, ‘ he never really commits himself to anything.’

In fact, like many born showmen, Jagger was a triumph of style over substance. He was whatever character he happened to be acting at the moment, a concoction of grease-paint, costume and performance. He pursued women compulsively and his ability to divorce copulation from emotion surprised even his childhood friend Keith Richards.

He attributed it to a basic contempt for the opposite sex.

‘Mick’s attitude towards women is that they are cattle,’ he said. ‘They are goods.’ Jagger claimed to like women — but really, he liked them under his thumb. When he wed, it was to someone who looked like a female version of him

‘I’m glad I’m as beautiful as Bianca,’ he said. ‘She looks like me.’

Bianca encouraged him to hold aloof from the other Stones and to ingratiate himself with the international smart set. Increasingly, the boy from Dartford, just south of London, organised his social calendar around debutantes’ balls and dinners with titled folk.

He basked in the flattery of the famous and acted the spoilt brat. He courted the likes of Nureyev, Onassis, Andy Warhol and Gore Vidal. The street-fighting man had changed into the playboy of the Western world. When he and Bianca split up in mutual recriminations about multiple adulteries, he found solace in the arms of Southern belle Jerry Hall, tall, blonde, gorgeous, and effervescent.

While happy to set up home with her and sire four children, Jagger liked to keep on the move, insisting that ‘domesticity is death’.

He boasted to Hall about his amorous escapades with ‘18-year-old debutantes’ and asserted publicly that recreational adultery was essential to secure their relationship.

When Hall had an affair of her own, Jagger became almost insanely jealous. Rather than lose him, Hall wrote to him saying, ‘I won’t be mad if you have other girls.’ He should be free, she thought, to fulfil his ambition ‘to go down in history as one of the world’s great lovers’.

Eventually, though, his ruttishness left Hall humiliated and depressed. According to his chauffeur, Jagger sometimes went from one woman to another in a single night, cajoling potential lovers by phone: ‘Come on baby, you know you want me.’

Latterly he took to making propositions by text message and received as many rejections as acceptances.

He did not attract all women — and disappointed some. One groupie memorably reported that he did not live up to his legend: ‘He was only so-so. He tried to come on like Mick Jagger, but he’s no Mick Jagger.’

Some of his bed partners may have felt let down by what Richards recently called Jagger’s ‘tiny’ appendage. But there was conflicting testimony over the size of his manhood. Years earlier, the politician Tom Driberg had made Jagger blush by gazing hungrily at his groin and exclaiming: ‘Oh my, Mick, what a big basket you have!’

Jagger reserved suites in luxury hotels to accommodate his women and, as one journalist wrote, ‘His bedpost is not so much notched as whittled to a fine point.’

For Hall, the last straw was his impregnation of a Brazilian underwear model. He tried to deny it, but when a DNA test proved the truth, she sued for divorce, denouncing Jagger publicly as a ‘lying, cheating, no-good slimeball’.

Jagger kept a base in London for his children. Otherwise he went his own way, a raddled roué pursuing girls young enough to be his grandchildren and demonstrating once again the aphrodisiac power of variety.

BACK in the mid- Seventies, Jagger had vowed to retire at the age of 33. A few years later he declared, ‘I’d rather be dead than sing Satisfaction when I’m 45’. But he couldn’t give it up. Now he is 70 and still performing — as he and the Stones did at Glastonbury and London’s Hyde Park a few weeks ago.

That they can still take to the stage together is little short of miraculous given the animosity over the years, not least because the bean- counter in Jagger insisted on running the show.

Richards found him unbearable, prone to treat other members of the group as minions. They retaliated by calling him ‘Her Majesty’.

Charlie Watts was less polite. Once when Jagger drunkenly summoned ‘my little drummer’, Watts gave him a right hook to the jaw and pronounced, ‘You’re my f***ing singer.’

For a while, Jagger flirted with a solo career. As he saw it, the others were debilitated by drink and drugs while he himself dieted, exercised and employed a masseur and a personal trainer. He even took singing and dancing lessons, much to the disgust of Richards, who thought musicians should do what came naturally. But Jagger without the Stones turned out to be a fiasco and so the band resumed its fitful routine of producing albums and touring to promote them, though the lyrics in their new songs were conventional to the point of banality with, as Jagger himself acknowledged, much ‘recycling’.

To disguise what was essentially a regurgitation of vintage hits, the band’s shows involved ever more fabulous backdrops, with lasers, pyrotechnics, 60-foot inflatable dolls and a phallic