Gary Kemp on Mick Jagger: the timeless rock star keeping us all young
As the Rolling Stones return with Hackney Diamonds – out now, and their first full-length album of original songs in 18 years – revisit Gary Kemp reflecting on watching Mick Jagger perform live for the first time. It was originally published on 26 July, 2023 to mark the rock’n’roll icon’s 80th birthday
I once read that during the first-half of the last century, the two most internationally recognisable images were of Christ on the cross and the silhouette of Charlie Chaplin as the Little Tramp. Charlie was a global phenomenon and cinema’s most universal icon. He was also well-known for his many relationships and having children into his 70s. I think we can now safely add to those two images the Rolling Stones’ famous Lips and Tongue logo, which, as we all know, was based on Mick Jagger’s own legendary rubber gob.
Designed in 1970, to Mick’s brief, by John Pasche, a student of the Royal College of Art, it’s anti-authoritarian gesture also carried all the sexual connotations that rock and roll – and Mick – represented in that time of the sexual revolution. It was first used on the Stones’ Sticky Fingers album, the cover of which was a crotch in jeans with an actual zipper for you to fiddle with.
But Mick was 28 at the time, and rock and roll was a young person’s sport. Audiences for any rock concert were unlikely to contain people in their 30s and there was much speculation about whether it would be possible, or even decent, for any of these rock stars to carry on once they’d reached that stately age – the age of the jacket and tie, the mortgage and the slippers. Who could possibly have known then that we’d still be dancing to a gyrating Jagger more than 50 years later, a man who has just joined his fellow pop octogenarians from the Beatles.
The surprise isn’t that his hips can still swivel or that those iconic lips still pout themselves for stadiums full of people, it’s that we still want it and that they’ve managed to survive and fight off decades of intense pop competition.
I first saw Mick at Earls Court in May 1976. I went along with my younger brother, Martin. The Stones had already beensuccessful for 12 years. In fact I remember talking to my dad when I was six (England had just won the World Cup) and knowingly goading him that I preferred the Stones to the Beatles. He was outraged (He was 35 and actually in his slippers). They represented a sleaze – the black to the Beatles’ white as the Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham had declared. Paint it Black, sang Mick. This was the attraction.
At the gig, Mick kicked his way out of a folded giant tulip which became the band’s stage. My brother and I were both thrown into immediate ecstasy as the singer sent his shamanistic spirit far into the cavernous arena and into the hearts and crotches of the thousands there. The term ‘rock star’ was being freshly coined at the time and here was the man who’d invented the job description for it.
Draped in multiple scarves, slashed shirts and tight red trousers, he’d found the dress-code for the archetypal front-man, adopted by singers from Steven Tyler to Rod Stewart. In fact the first time I ever saw Rod – he was performing Maggie May on Top of the Pops – I just thought, ‘Oh, he’s copying Jagger.’ Jagger was the template they all used. He’d written the hymn book they all wanted to sing from.
And then along came punk. Townshend was given a free pass but all other ‘Old Farts’ were under threat. “No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones in 1977,” sang The Clash … and for a while so did we all, convinced their time was up. But Mick didn’t decide to put out a panicked punk record, he went disco and delivered the masterful Miss You, swerving all the bullets and staying on top.
To a working-class lad, his brand has always represented gatecrashing aspiration. The Dartford boy had broken into the palace and had his kippers firmly under the grill. Marrying Bianca in St Tropez; making music in a French villa while on the run from a cloying Britain; white suits in chateaux and white horses under mirror balls, and an accent that morphed to whomever he needed to flirt with. We may have talked about the street but we secretly desired the Croisette where we imagined Jagger lounged.
Mick had famously once said “I’d rather be dead than sing Satisfaction when I’m 45”, not even he was yet believing this was a career for life. But here we have a song who’s lyrics are as relevant today as when they were written. He’d helped to pen songs that we wanted to watch him perform for as long as he could.
As with Elton at Glastonbury and Paul the year before, the wide demographic of the crowd is because these old guys gave us a cultural gift, and we want to thank them for it. We want to go near their flame while Mick and his generation still have that life force. And Mick, more than any of them, seems timeless. I was trying to avoid typing this but yes, time is on his side.
I’m back at Earls Court in 1976 and a giant 10-foot erect penis has just inflated on stage. The song is Star Star, with it’s chorus of “Starfucker starfucker”,and Mick has now straddled it and it’s projecting out over the crowd. Back then it all made outrageous sense – simpler times I suppose, and younger men.
The inflatable – nicknamed the Tired Grandfather (I guess it didn’t always work) – may no longer be appropriate but Mick’s toolbox of tricks, his snake-hips, his stage fitness, his unique vocal delivery, his utter rockstar physicality, and not forgetting his undiminished generosity to his ticket-buying audience, not just keeps him relevant and desirable but keeps us alive and youthful too. While he performs a great deal of my childhood stays alive and so does a great deal of amazing rock and roll.
He still moves like Jagger. Happy birthday, Mick.
