FOR those of us who have spent a lifetime listening to The Rolling Stones, growing up with countless images of Mick Jagger implanted onto our consciousness and, after a few drinks, pouting our lips and strutting across the living room with an exaggerated hip swagger the moment Street Fighting Man comes on, meeting the man in the flesh comes as a shock.
“How you doin’?” Mick says, a slight figure in a colourful shirt, skinny black trousers and shiny new trainers, a swathe of auburn hair topping off an 80-year-old face that manages to look young and old at the same time. He has the deep wrinkles of any man his age, but at the same time there’s a twinkling mischievousness, a spirit of irreverence, which means it is impossible to imagine him grumbling about, say, the way they play music so loudly in restaurants these days.
When you’re the singer in the greatest rock ’n roll band in the world, not to mention having a six-year-old Mini-Me in son Deveraux with his ballerina-turned-writer girlfriend, Melanie Hamrick, putting your feet up clearly isn’t an option.
Mick is famous for not looking back. “Enough of all this nostalgia bollocks!” he says, more than once, over a Saturday evening at an ornate arts and crafts-style house in London. We’re meeting in one of the wood-panelled rooms because The Rolling Stones have a new album out, their first of original material since 2005’s A Bigger Bang.
Hackney Diamonds is the best Stones album since 1978’s Some Girls and it shares with it a jagged, punky spirit, perhaps because both were recorded the same
