There comes a time in everyone’s life where you stop saying to yourself “eww look at that old person making music” and start saying “wow, look at them still managing to do it!”
A time when you realise that the sound of rock ‘n’ roll or punk or raving in a field is for life, not just your teenage years.
I guess it’s called middle-age. A time when you realise ageing isn’t about winding down, but about finding the focus to do the things you still want to do.
Ageing the Stones way
Even if that thing you want to do is as simple as finding the time to dig out your old records and put them on the turntable again.
For the Rolling Stones, ageing means digging out the old records and playing them to audiences of thousands.
Actually 15 million in total across their career, the new four-part documentary My Life as a Rolling Stone (BBC Two) tells us.
The band have famously become icons of musical endurance well into their elderly years, although their thunder was stolen somewhat the other week when both Paul McCartney and Diana Ross gave televised and entirely credible Glastonbury performances.
Don’t forget Paul
McCartney, in particular – at 80, two years older than the ‘Glimmer Twins’ Mick Jagger and Keith Richards – surprised with a performance which didn’t just have energy and clarity, but also a decent amount of genuinely imagination-grabbing music written after he’d reached his half-century.
Yet the Rolling Stones have now been together as a unit for a full 60 years.
This is a major achievement and unlikely to be repeated any time soon (unless the Who are still together?).
This tribute is the least they deserve, although perhaps it could have paid closer attention to Mick Jagger’s opening plea that “I thought we weren’t doing cliches today?”
A band member per episode
Each episode focuses on an individual bandmember, which glosses somewhat over the band’s own membership changes over the years.
Of those featured, Ronnie Wood joined a mere 46 years ago, while drummer Charlie Watts sadly died last year.
The main events, then, are the focuses on Jagger and guitarist Keith Richards, with the former occupying this first episode.
In a specially-recorded interview, he eyerolls at the mythology which has built around the band, and jokingly asks the lighting person to not make him look “too mournful or boring.”
Jagger is fascinating and open, denying the suggestion they wanted to be a blues group (“we were an ‘everything’ band”) and opening up about his eventual control of the group’s business affairs “to make sure they don’t get f***ed,”
Around this, personalities like Sheryl Crow, Lulu, Rod Stewart and the ever-eloquent Chrissie Hynde chip in with reflections, as do Richards and Wood.
“He’s really a very honourable man,” says Keith with a wheezy laugh. “Under all the crap.”
There are moments of insight here, for example Lulu’s memory of Jagger frightening her, so vivid was the sexuality of his performing persona.
But there’s a fair amount of the cliché the singer wanted to avoid, all narrated by Sienna Miller in a tone which suggests this is a documentary about the Queen.
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