No drag getting old for the poster boys of the wild Sixties
The archetypal rock band open their archives and Neil McCormick asks Mick Jagger about it
‘IT’s fair to say I’m not very nostalgic,” said Mick Jagger. It might seem an odd statement from the 72-year-old rock star as he prepared to launch a major interactive multimedia exhibition of the Rolling Stones’ five-decade career after the band’s gig in Cuba.
“The thing about nostalgia is that it is trying to hark back to something that no longer exists, and I don’t really feel like that about this exhibition. I look at it as part of an ongoing story.”
The show, Exhibitionism, is taking over the entire two-storey Saatchi gallery in King’s Road, London. It showcases more than 500 artefacts from the band’s archives, including Jagger’s outlandish stage clothes and Keith Richards’s collection of rare guitars.
There is backstage paraphernalia, draft lyric sheets, original art work from such giants as Andy Warhol and Richard Hamilton, stage props, thousands of photographs, rare music, films curated by Martin Scorsese, and tactile full-scale recreations of locations such as the band’s first bedsit and recording studio. There is even a 3-D simulation of what it is like to be on stage with the Stones.
American curator Ileen Gallagher, who put the exhibition together, said: “We’ve tried to look at their career thematically and not chronologically.”
As perhaps the archetypal rock band, the significance of the Stones has not been just musical. From purist blues revivalists to ’60s anti-establishment rebels, through the hedonistic excesses of the superstar ’70s to their latter-day status as guardians of rock’s enduring heritage, the Stones have played their part in a multitude of major cultural shifts.
“It was never just about music,” said Jagger. His role in the show, much like in the band, has been to direct the bigger picture. “My input into this was thinking about how the rooms unfold and what should go in them to tell a bigger story. I wasn’t very good at actually finding things, because I’ve not really kept anything much, except for clothes. I’ve got a lot of clothes. They’re very easy to keep.”
And, with his physical dimensions unchanged in 50 years, he could still fit into them if he wanted to.
“It got very outlandish in some periods, before we found a way back to something a bit straighter and more elegant. I think most of them are better in a museum.”
Everyone involved is insistent that the exhibition should not be viewed as a poignant memorial to the end of an era.
“Because the Stones are still very much present in popular culture and they are not stopping any time soon,” said Gallagher.
Said Jagger: “It just seemed like the right time for this. Some people say we’re always making an exhibition of ourselves. There’s more to it than just music and I think we worked that out pretty fast. Music was super-important, obviously, and we were very much a band immersed in music. We were trying to create something that we thought was an authentic reproduction of the music we listened to. These were the days of lingering traditions, there were so many music movements obsessed with fidelity to tradition, traditional folk, traditional jazz, and we went through a period of being somewhat purist in our approach to the blues. But we all liked Elvis and everyone realised that a lot of the things we liked about Elvis was not only the music, which we loved, but the style and the way that he put the music across.”
The “disgusting” flat where it all began was the genesis of the band, according to Jagger. “I lived there with Keith and Brian between 1962 and 1963. I thought it would be good to recreate it. The first room when you go into the exhibition is very sleek, modern and state of the art, big screens, lots of information, and I like that, but I thought it would be interesting to go completely the other way in the next room, and establish a more old-fashioned museum experience of looking at objects. I’ve seen rooms recreated in different exhibitions and it’s always interesting. You know perfectly well they are not the real room and yet it somehow gives you this different, very tangible experience. And this is going to be very tangible. Pungent even. It was a pretty stinky, disgusting place.”
Jagger still passes the place often. “It’s not some distant thing that you are far apart from, or that has been demolished. I remember it; it was important to us.”
What was the inspiration for the Hot Lips logo?
“I can’t remember whose idea it was,” said Jagger. “Bands didn’t really have recognised logos as such in those days. But I remember trying to think of what one could be and I was at this little corner store, and the guy had a calendar with the disembodied tongue of [the Hindu goddess] Kali on the wall, and I thought that was a good image. So we went to John Pasche, who was an illustrator I had got to know through the Royal College of Art, and asked him to make a modernised version. And it was just a really good piece of work that he produced and we’ve kept it ever since. That was an early piece of fortuitous marketing.” Mick in a dress? “[British designer] Michael Fish had a boutique, Mr Fish, in Clifford Street [in London] and I went to buy an outfit, any outfit, before the show [in 1969]. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I saw this and I thought it was just unusual, new. I don’t think there was a great plan to be a man on stage wearing a dress.
“I didn’t think anything more, and I certainly didn’t think it would end up, 40 years later, in an exhibition. I bought two Mr Fish dresses on the day, an orange and a white one. The white one vanished along the way, but I still have the orange one, so we recreated it based on that. Clothes are an important part of the story.”
On working with other artists, Jagger said: “We’ve worked with a lot, the most famous being Andy Warhol. You have to be slightly different in your attitude when you work with a fine artist than commercial artists, who are used to having advertisers over their shoulder, shouting at them. With a commercial artist they don’t mind you saying: ‘OK, I like your yellow, but can you make it blue?’ If you try that with a fine artist . . . let’s just say they don’t really appreciate being told what to do.
“Sometimes collaborations really work well and sometimes you just have to say: ‘Thanks very much, but I don’t think we’re on the same wavelength.’ I tried to do something with Claes Oldenburg, who I’m an admirer of, but it didn’t work out. But over the years we’ve had some really good ones. I think Andy’s zipper for Sticky Fingers is a pretty outstanding piece of work. The central image is strong and the real zip adds a whole other dimension. Its seems such an obvious idea in a way, to superimpose a real object on a piece of cardboard, but no one had done it before, and that’s what makes it so clever. But it turned out a bit more complicated than we all thought.”
Do any of his outfits make him flinch when he looks back?
“Ha. Nearly all of them. To be honest, they can still make me flinch when I think about what I’m going to wear at the next gig, but when you get out there on stage it’s a bit different. It’s very hard to do clothes in an exhibition like this because they are actually supposed to be worn. You can have a very garish look, but in front of 50 000 people in the daylight of summer on a moving person, the impression it creates is very different from having 20 of them lined up in a confined space in a dark room.
“When clothes don’t have movement, they all look a bit wonky, but that’s the fun of it. If they all looked immaculately elegant and in wonderful good taste, it would be boring. I mean some of them are in hideous taste, but that makes them funnier to me.
“Some of the time you are playing this for a laugh. In the ’70s, it got to be very outlandish. We’ve got quite a lot of [’60s fashion designer] Ossie Clark jumpsuits. My daughters have borrowed them over the years and I think the curators had trouble getting them back, but Ossie made me loads.”
Backstage, said Jagger, the Stones are a funny bunch.
“There’s been a lot of water under the bridge, but I think we still feel that camaraderie. I have a really good feeling when we get together and play, when we’re rehearsing and doing show days and so on. Before we go on stage, when you’re chatting, we still make jokes, it’s very light-hearted. We don’t do prayers, but we do jokes. So the bond is still there and it’s good that it is. It would be really rough if we didn’t have that. I think it would be impossible, to be honest.”
I’ve not really kept anything much, except for clothes. I’ve got a lot of clothes