DIAMONDS IN THE ROUGH
He’s the Rolling Stones’ legendary frontman who, at 80, shows no signs of slowing down. Mick Jagger tells Will Hodgkinson about the band’s early days and recording their latest album with help from Paul McCartney, Lady Gaga and Elton John.
For those of us who have spent a lifetime listening to the Rolling Stones, watching films of the band in action, growing up with countless images of Mick Jagger implanted on to our consciousness and, after a few drinks, pouting our lips and strutting across the living room with an exaggerated hip swagger the moment Street Fighting Man comes on, meeting the man in the flesh comes as a shock.
“How you doin’?” Jagger says, a slight figure in a colourful shirt, skinny black trousers and shiny new trainers, a swathe of auburn hair topping off an 80-year-old face that manages to look young and old at the same time. Jagger has the deep wrinkles of any man his age, but at the same time there is a twinkling mischievousness, a spirit of irreverence, which means it is impossible to imagine him grumbling about, say, the way they play music so loudly in restaurants these days. When you’re the singer in the greatest rock ’n’ roll band in the world — not to mention having a 7-year-old Mini-Me in son Deveraux with his ballerinaturned-writer girlfriend Melanie Hamrick — putting your feet up clearly isn’t an option.
Jagger is famous for not looking back. “Enough of all this nostalgia bollocks!” he says, more than once, over a Saturday evening at an ornate Arts and Crafts-style house on the river at Hammersmith, West London. We’re meeting in one of the woodpanelled rooms because the Rolling Stones have a new album coming out, their first of original material since 2005’s A Bigger Bang.
Hackney Diamonds is the best Stones album since 1978’s Some Girls and it shares with it a jagged, punky spirit, perhaps because both were recorded the same way: quickly. It also touches on the aspects people love about the band in their late 60s, early 70s imperial phase: the gospel uplift of 1969’s Let It Bleed, the soulfulness of 1971’s Sticky Fingers, the ragged abandon of 1972’s Exile on Main St. Not that Jagger wants to be reminded of all that. When I say a lamenting ballad called Depending on You reminds me of Wild Horses, the yearning 1971 classic recorded at Muscle Shoals, a tiny studio in the depths of Alabama famous for capturing the quintessential country rock sound, he’s having none of it.
“I don’t hear that at all,” he protests. “To me, Depending on You is modern LA pop. You don’t want people to say, ‘Oh, Ronnie’s playing the same old guitar part again,’ so we added an organ, strings, vocal stacks
. . . Don’t get that in Muscle Shoals. That place was lo-fi even then. I mean, listen to Wild Horses today. It sounds like it is covered in blankets.”
Part of Jagger’s drive to keep things new and fresh involved hiring a young producer for Hackney Diamonds. Andrew Watt is a 32-year-old New Yorker building a reputation as the goto guy for classic rockers. He’s worked with Iggy Pop, Paul McCartney and Ozzy Osbourne, but he started out playing guitar for Justin Bieber.
“Andy’s a pop producer who loves rock ’n’ roll,” Jagger says. “But rock ’n’ roll doesn’t make you any money and it doesn’t make you famous, at least not any more. I’m not trying to make the Rolling Stones not sound like the Rolling Stones — that would be really stupid, especially after not putting out an album for so long — but the temptation a lot of producers have is to remake their favourite Stones album. I had to say to Andy, ‘We’re not making Sticky Fingers Mark II here. A few references are okay. Loads of references are not okay.’”
Jagger does seem like a big one for pushing forward, for ensuring the Rolling Stones don’t rest on their laurels but remain relevant in and connected to the 21st century. “You’ve noticed, then,” Keith Richards says in a sardonic growl down the line from his library room in Connecticut. “I have to live with it. But that is Mick’s thing: ‘Let’s do it.’ And in this instance, it was the right time to put the boot behind us and get going. We bumped into Andrew Watt, which gave us impetus because he is a very energetic young man. We call him the Kid.”
Jagger’s biggest battle was getting the album made in the first place because nobody, not the record label, not the management, not even the band, was crying out for a new Rolling Stones record. “I was actually really worried because nobody had any f ***ing urgency to do a record. Everyone seemed happy to do a tour every few years and nothing for the rest of the time. In the old days, the tour used to be a promotion for the record and the record was the thing. These days you make loads of money on the road and you don’t make much money on the record, which means you’re still selling tickets even when you don’t have a new album to promote. And you end up thinking, ‘They just want to hear Paint It, Black. They don’t want to hear anything else. They’re quite happy. Who cares about our new record?’”
ONE PERSON who did care was Jagger. After years of recording bits and pieces without ever really getting anywhere, he realised that what the band needed was a deadline. (“How stupid of us not to have realised that eight years ago.”) He told Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood and Steve Jordan, the band’s drummer since Charlie Watts died in 2021, that they were going into the studio in the northern autumn 2022, they would finish by Valentine’s Day, they would have the record out by autumn 2023 and they would go on tour after that. Just like in the old days.
“And Keith went, ‘Well, it’s a bit optimistic.’ I said, I know, but you’ve got to be optimistic. In the end, Keith was very supportive, which I was surprised about because I thought he was going to say, ‘I can’t be f ***ing bothered. Can’t be doing that. I want a break, I don’t want to be working in December.’ But he didn’t. In fact, he worked very hard. I don’t think Keith’s worked that hard in years. Ronnie was very keen too, so we went into a studio in Los Angeles and did it in about three weeks.”
“The Stones do work hard,” Richards agrees. “When we work.”
A few friends dropped in along the way, most notably on Sweet Sounds of Heaven, a Stonesy gospel epic in the tradition of You Can’t Always Get What You Want and a highlight of the album. “I was sitting there singing when I saw a woman sitting at my feet and went, ‘Oh, it’s Lady Gaga,’” Jagger says, sounding supremely unfazed at the turn of events. “Turns out she was recording next door. I gave her some headphones, she did a few oohs and aahs, and I said, ‘Why don’t you sing the words?’ It came together very quickly.”
Stevie Wonder also dropped by to play the keyboard parts on Sweet Sounds of Heaven, while elsewhere on the album Elton John (or as Keith Richards calls him, “Reg”), the late Charlie Watts and the Stones’ original bassist, Bill Wyman, all pop up. Perhaps the standout guest spot comes from Paul McCartney, who plays some extremely distorted bass guitar on a punky track called Bite My Head Off. It is classic Jagger material: sounds angry and rebellious but is in fact all in the spirit of good, clean fun.
“I was kind of surprised Paul wanted to play on that track actually,” says Jagger, McCartney’s old friend and, if the endless competition between the Beatles and the Stones is to be taken seriously, lifelong rival.
“Andy told me he didn’t have to take a hiatus in making our record before being forced to admit that he did — he had a five-day booking with Paul. So he dealt with it by getting Paul to play on our album. I wrote so many punk songs for the Stones and I could never get away with them, but Paul is a very open-minded person — musically speaking.”
Didn’t McCartney say, not so long ago, something rather rude about the Rolling Stones? “He said the Beatles were better than the Stones because the Stones were really just a blues cover band,” Jagger says, looking amused at the memory. “Well, the Beatles were also really just a blues cover band when they started out. Every band is a cover band at the beginning, because that’s how it goes. When we’re on tour I like to say that someone is in the audience when they’re actually not, to create a big moment, so I said one time, ‘Paul McCartney is here tonight. He’s going to come up on stage and play some of our blues cover tunes.’ I texted Paul to say thank you for his comment because it has given me a lot of comic material.”
WHAT BECOMES clear, over the little time we spend together, is that Jagger is above all else a professional. He’s friendly, courteous, disarming, with none of the intimidation you might expect from someone who has been asked every question under the sun for the past 60 years.
But you’re not going to get him to go off script and say something he might regret later. And he is unquestionably the captain of the Stones camp, even if the JaggerRichards songwriting partnership remains an equal one. He has said in the past that he doesn’t particularly enjoy being the business brains of the operation, but when it became obvious — some time in the late 60s — that nobody else in the band was interested in taking on the job, he had no choice. There is a song on the album called Whole Wide World, which looks back to a state that seems unthinkable now: penury. For a brief period in the early 60s, Jagger, Richards and the Stones’ bluesobsessed founder, Brian Jones, were poor, unknown and sharing a flat of legendary squalor in Edith Grove, Chelsea.
“It was student digs. Don’t overdo it!” Jagger says, after I paint the Edith Grove flat as a rat-infested hellhole where the three novice Stones would fight over scraps of mould-encrusted bread before going out and hollering the blues for their supper. “I don’t come from poverty and I wasn’t poor at the time because I had a student grant, which meant they gave me money to go to university. Can you believe it? Keith and Brian, meanwhile, really didn’t have any money. We didn’t have many gigs and nobody was paying us anything, but it didn’t last long because we went very quickly from rags to riches. And although we didn’t have any real money until later, Keith no longer had to steal potatoes. So he says. Never saw it myself.”
As a cover version on Hackney Diamonds (Rolling Stone Blues) of the Muddy Waters blues standard Rollin’ Stone, after which the band are named, reminds us, the Stones began with nothing more than a goal to play the music of their black American blues heroes in an authentic fashion. Or as authentic as a bunch of callow youths from suburban London could muster. “We didn’t set out to do anything else. We were very preachy about bringing blues to a broader audience and all that bollocks, because when you’re young, that’s what you want to do.”
Jagger and Richards started writing songs in 1964 after being locked in a kitchen by Andrew Loog Oldham, their manager at the time, who didn’t allow them out until they came up with the lovelorn ballad As Tears Go By. It meant the Rolling Stones were no longer blues purists and before long they were writing Paint It Black, 19th Nervous Breakdown and Mother’s Little Helper: sharp, catchy pop songs evoking British postwar realities with a new kind of defiance that was very much in keeping with the mood of the times.
“We certainly didn’t have any political message, but it was the beginning of the awareness of reflecting society in songs, wasn’t it? You had
Bob Dylan popularising it with our generation, I suppose.”
I have a theory on why Jagger transformed from rebellious hero of the counterculture to the head of a vastly successful, remarkably enduring enterprise. On February 12, 1967, the Rolling Stones were seen as enough of a threat to the establishment to be the target of a drug bust after the News of the World, smarting at a libel warning from Jagger when a reporter mistook him for
Brian Jones boasting about drugs in a nightclub, tipped off police about a party at Keith Richards’ Redlands house in Sussex.
The Stones had been making the most of their bad boy image for years. It was Loog Oldham who in 1965 planted the newspaper headline, “Would you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone?” All of a sudden, the image brought with it serious implications.
Jagger was only found with four pep pills, bought legally in Italy, but that was enough for the Rolling Stones-hating Judge Block (“filth” and “scum” were two of the more colourful terms included in his critique of the band) to hand down a three-month sentence. The public outcry, not to mention the famous “Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?” editorial by Times editor William Rees-Mogg, meant the sentence was reduced to a conditional discharge. But going to jail, if only for a few nights, was enough of a shock for Jagger to have realised, I suspect, how dangerous going up against the old order can be.
“It was a very weird thing,” Jagger says of the Redlands affair. “I was cleaning out my garage a couple of weeks ago — as you do; it was such a mess — when I came across an old Evening Standard from 1967. On the diary page, after a bit about a film premiere and who was spotted at the latest nightclub, was a column in which this guy said the sentence was completely unfair because normally what people got for these offences was a fine. If we got 15 shillings and a reprimand, it wouldn’t have become such a cause celebre, but then on top of that you had the slightly conspiratorial nature of the arrest.”
Jagger says he doesn’t want to bring up “that old 60s bollocks”, but goes on to reveal that in the decades since the arrest a lot of police corruption around it has come out. Before he ended up stars of the day, John Lennon, George Harrison and Dusty Springfield among them. It was Pilcher, immortalised as Semolina Pilchard on the Beatles’ I Am the Walrus, who pushed through the Redlands bust.
“The Rolling Stones weren’t a threat, not really. It was the perception,” Jagger says. “At the time there were so many different niches of consciousness and that meant we were seen as far more dangerous than we were. There are pockets in which everyone is thinking, ‘Oh, I think it is fine to smoke marijuana.’ Others are so against it that they think it is a terrible moral problem. And when we went from the Kings Rd to, say, Barnsley, it looked like another country. It certainly didn’t look like the Swinging 60s.”
Amid all this, even in the early 70s when the Stones were at their most druggy and dissolute, when Keith Richards’ legendarily decadent mansion, Villa Nellcote, in the south of France became a hangout for everyone from the heroin-addicted country rocker Gram Parsons to the heroin-dealing Corsican mafia, Jagger kept it together. He never seems to have put on an ounce of weight. Back in the 90s my wife worked as a fitting model for Katharine Hamnett, and when the label was commissioned to make Jagger a pair of trousers she was the only one who could fit into their 26in waist. It helps explain why he remains fit enough to boogie across the world’s stages today and, according to his old friend Pete Townshend, that physical discipline has a lot to do with his father. “Mick Jagger is a wonderful example to us all,” Townshend says. “Every time I feel a bit creaky I think, ‘All I need to do is start running around Richmond Park and I’ll be as fit as he is.’ His dad wrote two books about the callisthenics movement and how to stay young and he was a very fit old man, but he ended up with Alzheimer’s. Every time he saw me he would say, ‘I know you. You’re in my son’s band.’”
I mention this to Jagger, and the suggestion that his father might have shaped the direction his life went in. “He was inspiring in terms of physical exercise,” he agrees. “He wasn’t that tough a father, not a severe disciplinarian or anything like that, but he taught me how physicality was important. What he didn’t do, what he was so against, actually, was me being involved in any way in the arts.”
He didn’t approve of his son being in a rock ’n’ roll band?
“No, he did not. He was an academic person and a teacher and a fitness enthusiast. That meant he taught me how to be academic, how to learn things and how to be fit. Clearly I had a whole other part of me that wanted to be creative, but it was my own fault. The school I went to [Dartford Grammar School] did have theatre, it did have performance, it did have music — none of which I participated in at all.”
Surely, I suggest, he always wanted to be a singer. He is after all the most famous rock singer in the history of the world. The suggestion appears to bring about an attack of soulsearching and reflection.
“Yeah, kind of,” he says hesitantly, not sounding too sure about it at all. “I was also interested in films. I was interested in acting. So why wasn’t I in any of the school productions? Obviously I wasn’t interested after all. But you can’t do everything, can you? There was so much academic work to do, and so much sport, and my father certainly didn’t lead me down that direction.
With my children, if they want to do acting classes I’ll say, ‘Do acting classes.’
I can sit down at the piano in my home and come up with something . . . It is magic, in a way, because you sit down with nothing and 10 minutes later you have something. Then comes the craft.
Mick Jagger
That’s the modern parent for you.” Those eight children, the younger ones at least, might do well to take some acting classes after Jagger hinted, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, that he is thinking of leaving the Rolling Stones’ back catalogue and its estimated US$500 million valuation ($847m) to charity. “You see what they are inclined to do, not what you want them to do,” Jagger continues of his own parental approach. “My dad had an idea for me, but his idea was not what I wanted to do.”
What was his idea for you? “God knows!”
THE OTHER man with the most significant impact on Jagger’s life is Keith Richards. It was Jagger and Richards who took over control of the band from Jones the moment they started writing songs together; whose conflicting, somehow complementing personalities have driven the band’s chemistry; whose creative partnership continues to produce songs that make the world seem, if not a better place, then at least a more exciting one. You wonder how their co-songwriting approach, and their relationship as a whole — given they spent so much of the 80s tearing strips off each other before becoming friends again — has changed.
“It’s completely different,” Jagger says. “We used to live in the same flat. I didn’t play much guitar; he did.
Sometimes he would give me ideas for lyrics and I sang all the top lines. Because we lived together we would come up with all this stuff, then carry around a reel-to-reel tape recorder when we were on tour and that’s how it worked. Not like that now. He’s in Connecticut, I’m in England or France, and with this album I came up with a lot of the original ideas before asking Keith, Ronnie, everyone, to make those ideas better.”
“Mick always wants to speed things up and push it,” Richards says, on the way the pair fashion songs together. “I want to take it easy. There is a difference between having impetus and running over your own feet.”
To prove this, Richards wrote and sang the slowest, most reflective song on the album. Tell Me Straight is a mournful, rather fatalistic ballad about accepting a less than perfect reality. “It’s a good Keith song,” concurs Jagger. “’Is the future all in the past?’ That’s a good line. I threw a few lines in there too. Can’t remember if he used them or not.”
Then there is Ronnie Wood. “I wake up and think, ‘I’m in the Rolling Stones,’” the guitarist says, still sounding rather pleased about this turn of events at 76. “I found myself at the right place at the right time, and it was no surprise to me that I joined because I always lived by the Stones. I was born into it.”
Wood is perennially known as the new boy, even though he joined in the mid-70s. “That’s a load of nonsense,” Jagger says of the “new boy” tag. “I look to Ronnie for a lot of support, actually. He is very gregarious, very enthusiastic, and I like tossing ideas around with Ronnie because he is communicative. Keith is more . . . I wouldn’t exactly say quiet . . . I don’t really live in America any more, so I don’t see Keith as much.”
Perhaps, underneath his louche persona, Keith Richards is actually rather shy? “He is a shy person,” Jagger confirms. “He always was. I have known Keith since he was 4 and that is the reality.
“But we all went through shy periods in our lives, didn’t we? You find ways to deal with it.”
As for songwriting itself, Jagger says it gets easier as you get older. “Well, you know what you’re doing by now and when you start you haven’t got a clue. These days, I know I can sit down at the piano in my house and come up with something. Might be Sweet Sounds of Heaven. Might stand there with a distorted guitar and come up with Bite My Head Off .Itis magic, in a way, because you sit down with nothing and 10 minutes later you have something. Then comes the craft, and it’s the same with you. You might have a great idea for an article, you get the outline, dash it off, and the rest is an application as you write your 800 words.”
One difference, I suppose, is that a stadium full of people will never, ever sing those 800 words back to me, least of all almost 60 years after I wrote them, as Jagger experiences with Satisfaction, Jumpin’ Jack Flash and any number of solid-gold smashes. For someone who doesn’t like looking back, who has led his band towards a superb new album, who can’t stand all that nostalgia bollocks, it is a bit of a conundrum. So I finish by asking Jagger what he thinks will be the Rolling Stones’ legacy.
“The only thing I want the Stones to be remembered for is being a good rock band. There is going to be the Beatles and there is going to be the Stones and together they will represent the rock era,” he says. “The Stones are much longer-lived, obviously.”