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| VoodooChileInWOnderl |
Sympathy for the old devil
By Paul Sexton
As Sir Mick reaches his seventh decade on July 26, our correspondent offers 60 Jagger facts and figures
1 Mick and Keith Richards were born in Livingstone Hospital in Dartford, five months apart.
2 Keith will turn 60 in December. “He likes to make out he’s still a very rebellious 59-year-old,” Jagger told me last year.
3 Neither Jagger nor the Rolling Stones has ever won a Brit Award.
4 Jagger’s mother, Eva, was born in Australia and moved here when she was four.
5 Father Joe’s real name was Basil Fanshawe Jagger. He came from a teetotal Baptist family.
6 “I can’t see myself doing all this when I’m 30,” said Mick in 1970. “I’ll draw the line then.”
7 A distant relative, Joseph Hobson Jagger, rumbled the secret of a famous roulette wheel, inspiring Fred Gilbert’s music hall favourite The Man who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo.
8 Mick’s TV debut, at 14, was with his father in a series called Seeing Sport, demonstrating rock climbing and putting up a tent.
9 “I did have a problem getting girls until I started singing,” he says in a quote from his own website. “I got nothing. Maybe I was just shy.”
10 A Jagger impersonation contest in September 1964 at Greenwich Town Hall was won by 16-year-old Laurie Yarham, in reality Mick’s younger brother Chris.
11 Mick contributed backing vocals on three of Chris’s albums.
12 As a youngster he was known as Mike, and hated being called Mick.
13 He was honorary secretary of the Basketball Society at Dartford Grammar.
14 Jagger passed O levels in English language, English literature, history, French, mathematics, geography and Latin.
15 As rock’n’roll hypnotised Britain’s youth, Mick’s mother fretted. “I would watch my lovely boys sitting so neat and clean watching that dreadful Cliff Richard,” said Eva, “that awful hair and that sexy dancing.”
16 Young Mike wrote letters to Pye petitioning them to release more records by Bo Diddley.
17 He left home at 19 to move into a £16 per week flat with Brian Jones in Edith Grove, Chelsea.
18 The group failed their BBC radio audition in 1963 because Auntie thought Jagger’s voice was “too black”.
19 On their early Can I Get a Witness, Jagger sounds breathless (their then co-manager Andrew Oldham recalls) because he had run from Regent Sound Studios in Denmark Street to Freddy Bienstock’s office in Savile Row to collect a copy of the sheet music.
20 The Stones’ publicity machine made Mick a year younger, while Bill Wyman’s birthdate was brought forward five years.
21 Wyman was the first of the original Stones to reach 60, in 1996.
22 Mick and Keith’s Wastin’ Time was recorded by Jimmy Tarbuck as a B-side.
23 In December 1966, rumours spread through America that Jagger was dead.
24 The real “Brown Sugar” was widely thought to be one of Ike & Tina Turner’s Ikettes.
25 Jagger has never reached the UK top 20 with any of his solo singles.
26 An Abbey Road tape box from May 11, 1967, bears the words “The Beatles + Mick Jagger?” He may be on the singalong chorus at the fadeout of Baby You’re a Rich Man.
27 He became a grandad when his daughter Jade gave birth to Assisi in July 1992.
28 Jagger recordings have already been used in ten films this century, including his solo track God Gave Me Everything in Bruce Almighty.
29 In 1981 he walked off the troubled set of Fitzcarraldo after five crew members were killed.
30 He allegedly failed an audition for the role of Antonio Salieri in Amadeus. Mick also chased the role of Dr Frank N. Furter in the movie of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which went to Tim Curry.
31 He was voted the 83rd worst Briton in a Channel 4 poll in May.
32 In a 1994 poll of London School of Economics students, Mick was voted honorary president ahead of Mother Teresa.
33 The Stones’ 1963 debut single Come On charted as Jagger turned 20. “We believe,” he told NME earnestly, “there is a lot of room for the rhythm-and-blues sound broadly patterned on the type of music put down by Chuck Berry.”
34 A month later, the group made their TV debut on Thank Your Lucky Stars.
35 In 1964, it was reported that Mick and the band would make their first film. Rolling Stones, about a group of drifters, which was to have been produced and written by Lionel Bart.
36 Mick told the NME in 1964 that his miscellaneous likes were “driving at night by myself, and girls”.
37 Eleven boys were suspended from a Coventry school in 1964 when they turned up with “Mick Jagger haircuts”.
38 In 1966, soon after Keith moved into his country retreat, Redlands in West Sussex, Mick bought him a lawnmower from Selfridges.
39 At the Stones’ Shepherds Bush Empire gig in June 1999, a month before Jagger and Jerry Hall separated, he told an audience including Jimmy Page, Kate Moss, Liz Hurley and Jerry herself: “It’s good to be back in London with old friends, wives, ex-wives . . . and that’s just Charlie Watts.”
40 Rock folklore has it that when the Stones signed to Atlantic in 1971, a deal clincher was that the legendary Atlantic boss Ahmet Ertegun fell asleep while talking to Mick at the Whisky A Go-Go in Los Angeles.
41 Mick made his official solo live debut at Live Aid in Philadelphia in 1985, backed by Daryl Hall and John Oates’s band.
42 The eldest of Mick’s seven children, daughter Karis by the singer Marsha Hunt, is 32.
43 The youngest, son Lucas by Brazilian model Luciana Gimenez Morad, was four in May.
44 Among the websites he recommends on his website are those of the Bodleian Library and www-uk.cricket.org
45 On the 2001 film Enigma, which Jagger produced, he loaned an original four-rotor Enigma encoding machine to the production for historical accuracy.
46 A Jagger quote verified by his website: “If the band’s slightly lacking in energy, it’s because we spent all last night f***ing. We do our best!”
47 The Jagger v Richards feud that carried on during the Dirty Work album sessions in 1985 prompted the unfinished Keith songs Why Do You Treat Me Like a Fool? and Knock Your Teeth Out One By One.
48 During those sessions in Paris, Ronnie Wood described Mick as “the man of a thousand prances”.
49 Keith took to referring to him as “Brenda”.
50 Jagger’s country house Stargroves in Hampshire was used as a location for the Tom Baker-era Dr Who adventure Pyramids of Mars.
51 Mick, Keith, Ronnie and Charlie are featured on a set of stamps issued last month in Austria on the day the Stones played in Vienna.
52 Another quote from www.mickjagger.com: “To me, I’m just an ordinary English bloke, same as everyone else.”
53 In 1993, the Sunday Times Rich List put his fortune at £90 million. This year, it was estimated (inaccurately, he claims) at £175 million.
54 In 1988, during a period of stasis for the Stones, Jagger and his band played in Sydney as the Brothers of Sodom.
55 Tomorrow at the Jagger Centre, the arts facility opened with his support in Dartford in 2000, the Midnight Jazz Orchestra are appearing. “Dance to the sound of Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman and all your big band favourites.”
56 The Stones’ Toronto concert on July 30 is intended as a post-Sars boost to what Jagger calls their “favourite city”.
57 That rings true, as the band have rehearsed for their last three world tours there in an opulently furnished former masonic temple.
58 Mick’s inspiration for Sympathy for the Devil was The Master and Margarita by the Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov, about the Devil’s visit to Moscow in the 1930s.
59 Mick has endorsed remixes of Sympathy by the Neptunes, Fatboy Slim and Full Phatt.
60 “I’ve worked out that I’d be 50 in 1984,” Mick told Disc in 1966, calling that maths O level into question, as he would actually be 41. “Halfway to a hundred. Ugh! I can see myself coming onstage in my black, windowed invalid carriage with a stick. Then I turn round, wiggle my bottom at the audience and say something like ‘Now here’s an old song you might remember called Satisfaction. ” |
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| Soul Survivor |
This was a very interesting read. That last one, was Mick losing brain cells?
[Edited by Soul Survivor] |
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| stonedinaustralia |
quote:
Soul Survivor wrote:
This was a very interesting read. That last one, was Mick losing brain cells?
no soulie, i think it was just that demon life had him in it's sway - destroying his notion of circular time and all... |
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| Soul Survivor |
Ahhh, got it.
By the way, doesnt it seem like Bill is too old? The dude will be 70 is 2006. 3 years away! |
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