Yes, Jagger’s an alley cat but I’ve got sympathy for the old devil
NEWS that Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger is to undergo heart surgery to replace a faulty valve took me rather by surprise.
Not just because the perennially perky, whippet-thin Peter Pan of rock has always seemed so immune to the humiliations of age. But also because, well, let’s be honest, who knew the old goat even had a heart?
Whatever else you may think about Jagger as a rock star — and I am a great fan of his music — no one could ever accuse him of sentimentality when it comes to affairs of the ticker. The 75-year-old has all the morals of an alley cat.
There’s Chrissie Shrimpton, sister of Jean, who took an overdose of sleeping pills after Jagger left her for Marianne Faithfull — married with a baby of her own at the time. Jerry Hall, who gave him four children but had to endure him conducting an affair with ex- model Carla Bruni ( now married to France’s ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy), as well as fathering a child with Brazilian model Luciana Gimenez Morad.
He’s said to have slept with more than 4,000 women, from Brigitte Bardot (backstage in 1966) to Angelina Jolie. At one point he took up with the model Sophie Dahl, now 41, who’s more than three decades his junior.
HE’S HAD eight children by five women. His current partner, Melanie Hamrick — the mother of the youngest — is just 32. Might she now be slightly regretting joining the party so late in the life of the ageing lothario? It’s one thing basking in the glory of a rock god; quite another nursing a sick old man through a heart op.
Fortunately, though, all the indications are that the operation will go without a hitch. Which, for fans like me, is absolutely vital.
Because for all his awful behaviour, his arrogance and the reports that he’s tight-fisted; for all the disregard he has shown friends and lovers over the decades, there is something utterly irresistible about the man.
A world without Jagger is a world without colour. It’s not just the songs, the incorrigible lyrics or the stage presence, which remain undimmed across the decades. It’s what he represents: a sheer unabashed lust for life, an elemental, selfish, irrepressible
joie de vivre which seems rare in these anxiety-ridden times.
Just look at the latest pictures of him taken this week on Miami Beach, messing around with his girlfriend and his daughter by Jerry Hall, Georgia May. There he is looking utterly absurd in a baseball cap and sandals, surrounded by plastic toys and pulling ‘crying’ faces for his two-year- old son Deveraux, who’s tickled pink.
He is so completely focused on that curly-haired blond bundle with those trademark lips, nothing else — not even impending heart surgery — seems to matter.
It’s so typical of his generation — the baby boomers who seized life by the throat and never let go. For them, it was about making every moment count.
Such a contrast with today’s prevailing climate of handwringers. Where everyone seems paralysed by fear and indecision. Where no one seems to have the guts any more to just jump onto life’s stage, grab the microphone and see where the great adventure takes you.
That, for me, is what Jagger and the Stones have always represented. Something vital and virile.
Not something you would necessarily want to take home to Mother. But all the more thrilling for it.