Still on a roll – the Stones surprised us then and can do it again
Following yesterday’s surprise announcement that British rock legends The Rolling Stones will be playing at the home of Scottish rugby again as part of a new UK and European tour, we thought it would be worthwhile to dig through the archives and recall their previous visit to the venue.
On 4 June 1999, Jagger, Richards, and co. brought their Bridges to Babylon world tour to Murrayfield.
With the Stones then approaching their 40th anniversary, most would have expected this to have been their sixth and final appearance in the capital.
How many from the 51,000-strong crowd that day could have envisaged a Murrayfield encore almost two decades later? Very few we would wager.
Page two of the following day’s Scotsman contained more than 500 typically acerbic and witty words on the gig from one of Scotland’s brightest-ever journalists, the late Ian Bell, who, like the rest of us at that time, would probably have burst out in fits of laughter at the outlandish suggestion that the already ancient rockers would still be strutting their stuff in distant 2018. I know it’s only rock and roll but I like it... like it: The Rolling Stones at Murrayfield Stadium, 4 June 1999 You know all the jokes. If Jagger attempts Start Me Up, will a roadie with jump leads be summoned? Zimmer Frame for the Devil, anyone? Street Fighting Senior Citizen?
The spectacle that is the Rolling Stones 1999 has everything to do with the simple, if extraordinary, fact that they are still doing it and nothing to do with the lingering possibility of musical revolution.
This is the self-styled Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World, after all, who cancelled last year’s planned appearance at Edinburgh’s Murrayfield Stadium to avoid prejudicing their corporate tax position?
Cutting edge? There is something seriously strange, indeed, about watching teenagers watching men old enough to be their grandfathers playing at being teenagers. It is stranger still when the grandparents in the audience probably outnumber the teenagers.
If this was sex, drugs and rock and roll, the drug in question was doubtless Viagra. The Stones made it to Edinburgh last night in any case, kicking off a brief British tour a year older while leaving their audience none the wiser about one of the great mysteries of modern life.
How, after almost four decades of bombast, posing and self-indulgence, does it feel to be a Rolling Stone? They don’t need the money; they do not require the fame (although rows of unsold seats at Murrayfield testified to a mystique that is waning a little) and they surely cannot find much left to interest them in songs they have played to death and beyond. Presumably it gets you out of the chateau.
Michael Philip Jagger seems daunted by none of this. He runs, dances, gyrates and pouts with the same old camp conviction. The voice is still there. And technology, in the shape of a huge screen and one of the more preposterous stage sets seen lately, does its best to keep him in touch with the MTV generation. A sound system, apparently on loan from NATO, allowed the rest of Edinburgh an earful of what they were missing.
Naturally, the sight of Keith Richards, the man whose crows’ feet have crows’ feet, on a giant screen was precisely as scary as you might imagine. Otherwise this was a show choreographed to the last mincing step and power chord, complete in every cliche.
“It’s great to be back in the capital of Scotland,” Jagger announced by way of introduction. Then they were off through that incomparable back catalogue.
And there lies the difficulty of assessing an institution. The Stones have so many songs that other bands would kill for they are some way beyond criticism before they take the stage. On a good night – and last night was one – they have no peers. It’s silly, of course, and in any real sense redundant, but no one at Murrayfield seemed to care.
Jumping Jack Flash; Honky Tonk Women; Angie; Paint it Black; Gimme Shelter; Sympathy for the Devil; It’s Only Rock and Roll; Start Me Up; Brown Sugar – rock and roll’s department of antiquities is still, for as long as it lasts, a thing to treasure. And ask yourself: who else could do it at that age, at any age?