Mick Jagger

Mick Jagger
Philip Norman

A miracle of still-plentiful hair, raw sex-appeal, and strutting talent . The frontman of one of the most influential and controversial groups of all time. A musical genius with a career spanning over four decades. Mick Jagger is a testament at once to British glamour and sensual decline, the ultimate architect and demi-god of rock.Bestselling biographer Philip Norman offers an unparalleled account of the life of a living legend, Mick Jagger. From Home Counties schoolboy, to rebel without a cause to Sixties rock sensation and global idol, Norman unravels with astonishing intimacy the myth of the inimitable frontman of The Rolling Stones. MICK JAGGER charts his extraordinary journey through scandal-ridden conspiracy, infamous prison spell, hordes of female admirers and a knighthood while stripping away the colossal fame, wealth and idolatry to reveal a story of talent and promise unfulfilled.Understated yet ostentatious; the ultimate incarnation of modern man's favourite fantasy: 'sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll', yet blessed with taste and intelligence; a social chameleon who couldn't blend in if he tried; always moving with the Jagger swagger yet modest enough to be self-deprecating, Mick was a paradoxical energy that reconfigured the musical landscape.This revelatory tour de force is ample tribute to a flawed genius, a Casanova, an Antichrist and a god who, with characteristic nonchalance realised the dreams of thousands of current contenders and rocker pretenders, longevity, while coasting on a sea of fur rugs.

TO SUE, WITH LOVE

CONTENTS

Cover (#uf990933b-471c-5803-8e2d-19ba31dff337)

Title Page (#uce304b1c-2501-57e5-bde3-246e3bf91a84)

Dedication (#u1b6755a3-0b0e-5841-baf9-1649d30d2364)

Prologue: Sympathy for the Old Devil

PART I: ‘THE BLUES IS IN HIM’

ONE India-Rubber Boy

TWO The Kid in the Cardigan

THREE ‘Very Bright, Highly Motivated Layabouts’

FOUR ‘Self-Esteem? He Didn’t Have Any’

FIVE ‘“What a Cheeky Little Yob,” I Thought to Myself’

SIX ‘We Spent a Lot of Time Sitting in Bed, Doing Crosswords’

SEVEN ‘We Piss Anywhere, Man’

EIGHT Secrets of the Pop Stars’ Hideaway

NINE Elusive Butterfly

TEN ‘Mick Jagger and Fred Engels on Street Fighting’

PART II: THE TYRANNY OF COOL

ELEVEN ‘The Baby’s Dead, My Lady Said’

TWELVE Some Day My Prince Will Come

THIRTEEN The Balls of a Lion

FOURTEEN ‘As Lethal as Last Week’s Lettuce’

FIFTEEN Friendship with Benefits

SIXTEEN The Glamour Twins

SEVENTEEN ‘Old Wild Men, Waiting for Miracles’

EIGHTEEN Sweet Smell of Success

NINETEEN The Diary of a Nobody

TWENTY Wandering Spirit

TWENTY-ONE God Gave Me Everything

Postscript

Picture Section

List of Searchable Terms

Acknowledgements

Also by Philip Norman

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE (#uf7997d5a-a073-50fc-b55b-2677213b6dcb)

Sympathy for the Old Devil (#uf7997d5a-a073-50fc-b55b-2677213b6dcb)

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts is not normally a controversial body, but in February 2009 it became the target of outraged tabloid headlines. To emcee its annual film awards – an event regarded as second only to Hollywood’s Oscars – BAFTA had chosen Jonathan Ross, the floppy-haired, foul-mouthed chat-show host who was currently the most notorious figure in UK broadcasting. A few weeks previously, Ross had used a peak-time BBC radio programme to leave a series of obscene messages on the answering machine of the former Fawlty Towers actor Andrew Sachs. As a result, he had been suspended from all his various BBC slots for three months while comedian Russell Brand, his fellow presenter and accomplice in the prank (who boasted on air about ‘shagging’ Sachs’s granddaughter) had bowed to pressure and left the corporation altogether. Since the 1990s, comedy in Britain has been known as ‘the new rock ’n’ roll’; now here were two of its principal ornaments positively straining a gut to be as naughty as old-school rock stars.

On awards night at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, a celebrity-packed audience including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Meryl Streep, Sir Ben Kingsley, Kevin Spacey and Kristin Scott-Thomas received two surprises outside the actual winners list. The first was that the bad language everyone had anticipated from Jonathan Ross came instead from Mickey Rourke on receiving the Best Actor award for The Wrestler. Tangle-haired, unshaven and barely coherent – since movie acting also lays urgent claim to being ‘the new rock ’n’ roll’ – Rourke thanked his director for this second chance ‘after fucking up my career for fifteen years’, and his publicist ‘for telling me where to go, what to do, when to do it, what to eat, how to dress, what to fuck . . .’

Having quipped that Rourke would pay the same penalty he himself had for ‘Sachsgate’ and be suspended for three months, Ross moderated his tone to one of fawning reverence. As presenter of the evening’s penultimate statuette, for Best Film, he called on ‘an actor and lead singer with one of the greatest rock bands in history’; somebody for whom this lofty red-and-gold-tiered auditorium ‘must seem like one of the smaller venues’ (and who, incidentally, could once have made the Sachsgate scandal look very small beer). Almost sacrilegiously, in this temple to pure acoustic Mozart, Wagner and Puccini, the sound system began chugging out the electric guitar intro to ‘Brown Sugar’, that 1971 rock anthem to drugs, slavery and interracial cunnilingus. Yes indeed, the award giver was Sir Mick Jagger.

Jagger’s entrance was no simple hop up to the podium but a lengthy red-carpet walk from the rear of the stage, to allow television viewers to drink in the full miracle. That still-plentiful hair, cut in youthful retro sixties mode, untainted by a single spark of grey. That understated couture suit, worn in deference to the occasion but also subtly emphasising the suppleness of the slight torso beneath and the springy, athletic step. Only the face betrayed the sixty-five-year-old, born at the height of the Second World War – the famous lips, once said to be able to ‘suck an egg out of a chicken’s arse’, now drawn in and bloodless; the cheeks etched by crevasses so wide and deep as to resemble terrible matching scars.

The ovation that greeted him belonged less to the Royal Opera House or the British Association for Film and Television Arts than to some giant open-air space like Wembley or Dodger Stadium. Despite all the proliferating genres of ‘new’ rock ’n’ roll, everyone knows there is only one genuine kind and that Mick Jagger remains its unrivalled incarnation. He responded with his disarming smile, a raucous ‘Allaw!’ and an impromptu flash of Rolling Stone subversiveness: ‘You see? You thought Jonathan would do all the “fuck”-ing, and Mickey did it . . .’

The voice then changed, the way it always does to suit the occasion. For decades, Jagger has spoken in the faux-Cockney accent known as ‘Mockney’ or ‘Estuary English’, whose misshapen, elongated vowels and obliterated t consonants are the badge of youthful cool in modern Britain. But here, amid the cream of English elocution, his diction of every t was bell clear, every h punctiliously aspirated as he said what an honour it was to be here tonightt, then went on to reveal ‘how it all came aboutt’.

A neat little joke followed, perfectly pitched between mockery and deference. He was here, he said, under ‘the RMEP – the Rock Stars–Movie Stars Exchange Programme . . . At this moment, “Sir” Ben Kingsley [giving the title ironic emphasis even though he shared it] will be singing “Brown Sugar” at the Grammys . . . “Sir” Anthony Hopkins is in the recording studio with Amy Winehouse . . . “Dame” Judi Dench is gamely trashing hotel rooms somewhere in the US . . . and we hope that next week “Sir” Brad and the Pitt family will be performing The Sound of Music at the Brit Awards.’ (Cut to Kevin Spacey and Meryl Streep laughing ecstatically and Angelina explaining the joke to Brad.)

Opening the envelope, he announced that the Best Film award went Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire – so very much what people used to consider him. But there was no doubt about the real winner. Jagger had scored his biggest hit since . . . oh . . . ‘Start Me Up’ in 1981. ‘It took a lot to out-glamour that place,’ one academician commented, ‘but he did it.’

Half a century ago, when the Rolling Stones ran neck and neck with the Beatles, one question above all used to be thrown at the young Mick Jagger in the eternal quest to get something enlightening, or even interesting, out of him: did he think he’d still be singing ‘Satisfaction’ when he was thirty?

In those innocent early sixties, pop music belonged exclusively to the young and was thought to be totally in thrall to youth’s fickleness. Even the most successful acts – even the Beatles – expected a few months at most at the top before being elbowed aside by new favourites. Back then, no one dreamed how many of those seemingly ephemeral songs would still be being played and replayed a lifetime hence or how many of those seemingly disposable singers and bands would still be plying their trade as old-age pensioners, greeted with the same fanatical devotion for as long as they could totter back onstage.