Gimme Pfizer! Mick Jabber rocks the Lockdown Blues
IN the middle of a pandemic, you can’t always get what you want – even, it seems, if you’re a rock icon.
Mick Jagger released a song and video yesterday lamenting lockdown and summing up the experiences of many.
In Eazy Sleazy, the Rolling Stones singer, 77, reflects on being trapped behind ‘prison walls’ and all the hobbies he and many others have been forced to take up to pass the time. Not one to shy away from controversy, just three lines into the song he complains about being ‘bossed around by pr*cks’ in an apparent reference to the British government.
Jagger told Rolling Stone magazine: ‘The beginning [of the Covid pandemic] was horrible and you couldn’t believe people were dying. It was shocking. The people in government were all talking rubbish and would change their minds every five minutes.’
The song rails against the boredom of lockdowns with ‘way too much TV, its lobotomising me’, adding: ‘Think I’ve put on weight.’ In lyrics that will resonate with many, Jagger also sings about ‘pacing in the yard’, TV football matches with fake crowd noise and putting down travel brochures. He refers to catching up with people on Zoom with the jibe ‘see my poncey books’ – an apparent dig at the shelves of important books many insist on showing off during virtual meetings.
Taking aim at anti-vaxxers, the father-of-eight – who has been vaccinated – jokes: ‘Bill Gates is in my bloodstream.’ A more upbeat final verse sees Jagger promise ‘we’re all headed back to paradise’, before closing with a line from the chorus: ‘It’ll be a memory you’re trying to remember to forget’.
He wrote the hard-rocking song, on which he sings and plays guitar while his collaborator, Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl, provides vocals, drums, guitar and bass.
Jagger told Rolling Stone: ‘I wrote the lyrics really quickly. Just the pandemic and hopefully coming out of the pandemic, the-lightat-the-end-of-the-tunnel chorus.
‘It sounded really good and I thought, “You gotta put it out now because it’s not gonna be any good in three or six months”.
‘The whole year, we’ve been doing this and going through different emotions through it and having false starts and stops.
‘End of last summer, everything seemed to be going well and people were out and about and great, and then – especially in Europe – everything’s shut down again and you haven’t had any kind of social interaction. It’s a long time for people to have to endure that.’
‘Couldn’t believe people were dying’