The world’s greediest rock band?
As the Stones demand £1,000 a ticket to rake in £16m for four nights’ work, are they ...
TO BORROW a line from one of their long-ago hits, this could be the last time for the Rolling Stones. And many may be asking — as the band greedily demands £1,000 a seat for the dubious privilege of listening to a bunch of re-heated old chestnuts — why they waited so long to say goodbye.
The hits dried up years ago. Until this month, there hadn’t been a record or a concert in five years. But Mick and Keith — who once called themselves the Glimmer Twins, but now might answer to the Zimmer Twins — are making one last throw of their tumbling dice and are doing a farewell ‘tour’.
How you label two gigs in London’s O2 Arena, plus a couple more in New Jersey, a ‘tour’ is hard to fathom. But the smell of greed swirled about their televised announcement this week that they’re back on the road — and ready to bleed the fans like never before.
To get the best view when the Stones hit the stage next month, you will have to part with £1,140, including VAT. Seats with a good view cost £406. Seats many furlongs distant from the stage — so take your binoculars — cost £106.
The Stones presented this pair of London gigs as a moment of crowning glory in the band’s 50-year history. But can these two dates really live up to the
Keith admits he can’t remember how the songs go
expectations and standards they set over the years?
In the etiquette of rock, you tour with a new album and play a mixture of your established hits and new material. Yet the best that Mick, 69, Keith, 68, Charlie Watts, 71, and Ronnie Wood, 65, can deliver this year, in the shops and on stage, is a couple of new numbers for a single plus a greatest hits CD. So there will be almost nothing new to listen to at the O2, and £1,000 seems an awful lot to pay for a trip down memory lane.
And it’s not just the tickets that will be raking in the cash — the Stones will also clean up thanks to associated merchandising being sold through their website and at the concerts.
A ‘deluxe edition’ (it comes with fancy extras) CD box set of their greatest hits comes in at a scorching £99.99, while the vinyl version costs £79.99.
A lithograph of the band (limited edition) signed by celebrated American artist Jeff Koons costs £3,000, a Rolling Stones poker set (why?) is £160, a ‘Keith Cool’ sweatshirt costs £49.99 — and even an ordinary T-shirt is £14.99.
No wonder Jagger, fronting a band that has grossed £ 1.8 billion since 1989 — is worth at least £200 million.
And he makes sure he keeps his fortune intact, primarily thanks to having declared himself, four decades ago, a non-domicile in the UK for tax purposes. (He also paid off his wife of eight years, Jerry Hall, with only £10 million and a house when they were finally divorced.)
His co- writer Richards — a resident of the U.S., where the taxman is kinder than in Britain — is estimated to be worth £175 million.
Charlie Watts, who does not receive song-writing royalties, is worth just under £100 million, while the junior member of the band, Ronnie Wood, is worth about £50 million.
So they don’t need any more money. The strapline on the Stones’ official website says ‘50 And Counting’, which implies that we’ll be seeing the band again next year, and the year after that. The clock, it implies, is still ticking. But many in the rock industry believe they’ll never play as an ensemble again.
‘Have they really got the will, or the ability, to do great stadium tours any more?’ one industry insider asked yesterday. ‘What are they ‘counting’ — apart from the money? There’s been a lot of speculation in the business about how well Keith can stand up to a two-hour workout on stage.
‘And the shrewder of his fans will be looking closely to see whether Keith is miming to a backing track rather than playing his guitar live. If he’s miming, with such outrageous ticket prices they may feel entitled to ask for their money back.’
Back in July, Richards confessed in a radio interview that sometimes he would start off a song without being able to remember ‘how the middle bit goes’. And there has been anxiety in the Stones camp that the band’s guitar hero hadn’t been able to shake off his near-fatal fall from a tree six years ago.
A blood clot formed on his brain, which gave cause for concern to his surgeon, Andrew Law, that he would never be able to play again.
Since that time there’s been precious little evidence Richards wants to test out the extent of his recovery with a full-out tour such as the Stones’ colossally successful Bigger Bang outing — which lasted from August 2005 to August 2007, and sold 4.5 million tickets over 147 concerts, grossing £355 million.
This time around, they are reportedly being paid just £15.7 million — but then it’s only for four nights’ work. Which some might think rather obscene.
Perhaps, if the music industry grapevine is right that this is the Stones’ farewell, shouldn’t the band be giving free concerts in Hyde Park and Central Park as a final thank you to their fans, instead of squeezing a few more million out of them? The trouble is, Jagger and, to a much lesser extent, the other members of the band have an almost pathological need to earn
Mick is desperate to earn more money than U2
more money than anyone else in the history of rock ’n’ roll.
Bono and U2 are ahead of them. U2’s 360° Tour in 2009-11 grossed £475 million — £120 million more than Bigger Bang, so there are still mountains left to climb.
But as the industry analyst observes: ‘After all the big talk from the Stones’ camp of a major 50th anniversary tour, this is all they can come up with.
‘It looks as if they won’t even be playing Glastonbury next year, even though they were announced as headliners back in the summer.’
Age is against the old rockers and, in the case of Richards and Wood ( who struggles to cope with alcoholism), health, too. That’s perfectly understandable. Charlie Watts is 71 and has had his battles with cancer. As a long-married man, touring can offer him little that he wants or needs these days.
That leaves Mick Jagger. Seemingly indestructible, he has survived five decades in a life-threatening business and, on stage, has the energy of a man half his age. And the voice is still good.
But like a vintage car, the Rolling Stones have four wheels. Three of them are threatening to fall off and there’s a strong argument that Jagger should come clean and admit it — rather than trying to squeeze the last penny out of adoring but gullible fans while laughing all the way to the bank.
Once they were called The World’s Greatest Rock ’n’ Roll Band. How shabby to go down in history instead as The World’s Greediest Rock ’n’ Roll Band.