Sorry Sir Mick, but this song is a masterpiece of Covidiocy
The Stones singer surprised the world this week with a new single about lockdown. It sounds like a cry for help, says Neil Mccormick
Mick Jagger has a new solo song out, and unfortunately, it is everything we have come to expect from the venerable rock legend whenever he goes behind the back of his fellow Rolling Stones. Titled Eazy Sleazy, and released on Tuesday, it features the 77-year-old superstar channelling his teenage Johnny Rotten, sneering comically sarcastic lyrics about life during the pandemic over a raucous garage-rock clang. “Bossed around by pricks / Stiffen upper lips,” Sir Mick yelps, in that shouty voice he sometimes adopts when nobody restrains him. “Looking at the graphs / With a magnifying glass / Cancel all the tours / Football’s fake applause / No more travel brochures / Virtual premieres / I’ve got nothing left to wear!”
We’ve all been there, wondering what shirt to wear to a virtual redcarpet shindig. As protest songs go, this isn’t exactly Anarchy in the UK, is it? At one point, as Jagger bewails the privations of lockdown, he snarls “You’re trying to take the Mick!” and you momentarily wonder whether he really is? Perhaps this is just part of some postmodern satirical commentary about lockdown art?
Sir Mick has form in the “clunking political protest song” department. His dreary 2017 single, England Lost, was essentially a Brexit blues, exhibiting even less nuance than his latest effort: “I went to find England, it wasn’t there / I think I lost it in the back of my chair”. Exactly a year ago, by contrast, during our first lockdown, The Rolling Stones put out Living in a Ghost Town, which exhibited a nicely sleazy rock-reggae skank, and managed to comment on the state of the nation without laying it on with a trowel. The “ghost town” metaphor offered a looser, more poetic frame for Jagger to wail with bluesy sorrow about widows a-weeping and no beds to sleep in. Living in a Ghost Town was their first original song since One More Shot in 2003, and it supposedly presaged a new album – on which they claim to have been working for a decade.
Yet Eazy Sleazy sounds like the kind of silliness with which bands routinely knock about in rehearsals – before they get down to business. It’s all a bit of fun, but if wiser heads had prevailed, it would never have seen the light of day, or at least not until Sir Mick needed extra outtakes for a retrospective box-set. It’s interesting that in his rush quickly to record and release this masterpiece of Covidiocy, he didn’t run it past his bandmates – presumably just as bored and under worked – in the Stones.
I suspect he knew what their reaction would have been to a tirade such as this. “That’s a pretty mask / But never take a chance / Tik Tok stupid dance / Took a samba class / Landed on my ass / Trying to write a tune / You better hook me up to Zoom / See my poncey books / Teach myself to cook / Way too much TV / It’s lobotomising me…” Can this really be the work of the same man who wrote Sympathy for the Devil? “I wanted to share this song that I wrote about coming out of lockdown, with a bit of much needed optimism,” Jagger announced in a tweet on
If wiser heads had prevailed, it would never have seen the light of day
Tuesday. Oh, Mick, you shouldn’t have. (No, really, you shouldn’t.)
With Jagger on guitar, in the chunky ham-fisted downstroke style that he sometimes adopts when Keith Richards is looking the other way, it sounds as if the Rolling Stone had discovered punk 45 years too late. Being a wellconnected rock legend, Jagger was able to call up the Foo Fighters’ all-rounder Dave Grohl to play drums, bass and guitar, and add backing vocals, secure in the knowledge that Grohl would be too dazzled to offer any critical perspective. “It’s hard to put into words what recording this song with Sir Mick means to me,” Grohl accordingly said. “It’s beyond a dream come true.” This is one way to avoid saying whether you think the song is any good.
The final verse of Eazy Sleazy has Jagger poking fun at anti-vaxxers and the rise of loony conspiracy theories. “Shooting the vaccine / Bill Gates is in my bloodstream / It’s mind control / The earth is flat and cold / It’s never warming up / The Arctic’s turned to slush / The Second Coming’s late / There’s aliens in the deep state.” It isn’t exactly subtle; nevertheless, it appears to have deceived the very audience it was mocking. The lockdown sceptic Toby Young was straight on Twitter, applauding Jagger’s coming out as “the latest addition to our ranks”. I’m not convinced that that was quite what Sir Mick intended.
Perhaps the Stones frontman had just become fed up with waiting for his bandmates to get back to making music. I choose to think of this lockdown song as a cry for help.
When Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Ronnie Wood hear the depths to which their frontman has been driven without them, perhaps they’ll summon the energy to make a musical intervention. Until then, let’s leave the last line to Sir Mick: “It’ll be a memory you’re trying to remember to forget.” My sentiments exactly.