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| VoodooChileInWOnderl |
Jul. 20, 2003. 01:00 AM
Jagger is `a nice bunch of guys'
Sir Mick a doting dad and grandfather
Touring keeps him happy and healthy
MARIELLA FROSTRUP
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
From unpromising beginnings I've grown to like Jagger a lot. We met four years ago at the launch party for a book about the Stones. My view of him then pretty much echoed that of the tabloids. A dirty old man rocking on way past his bedtime.
It was the week of the Stones' show at Wembley in 1998 and, on introduction, Mick told me that he was aching from head to foot. "You poor thing," I sympathized. "The show must be really exhausting." "Oh, it's not the show, today is a day off. It's the cricket." "You've been playing cricket?" "No, spectating. At my age even that's exhausting!" He burst out laughing and our friendship was born. In ``real life,'' Jagger is one of the funniest mimics I've come across, he's also erudite, incredibly well informed about just everything and one of the most enthusiastic, if unconventional, dancers I've ever come across. There's a lot of elbow and lip work.
A year after we met, I spent millennium New Year's Eve with a group of friends on Mustique. Mick took to the dance floor at midnight and was still there at 3 a.m. with the teenagers. He unabashedly gyrated this way through five Stones songs in the course of the evening.
On another occasion, while making a short film to keep the children amused at his chateau in France, Mick's part (Sir Michael Du Lac) required him to walk through the formal garden dancing. We had no stereo outside, so it had to be imaginary music. He wriggled his way with gusto down the front lawn towards us like a '70s disco queen. My husband asked him what he'd been dancing to. ``Brown Sugar,'' he whispered. "It's one of my favourites."
When I ask him if it causes him embarrassment when his songs come on he replies, "I had to make a decision a long time ago — dance or cringe. I went for the dance option."
It's hard to equate the touring, serpentine, slightly reclusive singer with the figure he cuts when he's not on the road. At his modest chateau, Jagger drives a small hatchback and can be found pottering around the local garden centre looking for plants to fill borders. Guests are led through the flourishing vegetable garden. Ever present, squealing by the pool, or clustering around him, are his children, now numbering seven and including Karis, the product of his brief affair with singer Marsha Hunt; Jade, the child of his first marriage to Bianca Jagger; his four children with Jerry Hall, Elizabeth, 19, James, 17, Georgia, 13 and Gabriel, 5; and finally Lucas born of his affair with Morad.
Watching Sir Mick prowling around the stage, it is hard to imagine him as doting dad and grandfather. Then again, as a band member famously observed: "He's a nice bunch of guys." Jagger admits that the singer and father figure are quite disparate. "Yeah, they are, but I can switch from one to the other quite quickly." He giggles and his face settles with such ease into its laughter lines that it's clear he's spent the majority of his six decades smiling.
``The other night I was tying to get Gabriel to come on stage and hide behind the amps and watch. Which I thought was a funny thing to do. It was half way through the show where Keith does his two songs and he was just finishing. It was a big stadium show. So I said come on Gabriel, let's just go up and hide behind the amps, but he got really scared.
``One minute I was being dad and then suddenly I had to go on and I was left with Gabriel halfway up the steps and he started to cry. You know, like children get very fearful. I can remember those fearful moments, usually involving large crowds when my father would take me to football matches. Anyway, I had to go back on so I gave him to the first person there, Alan, who's worked with me forever, so he was fine, and I rushed off and did `Sympathy for the Devil.'"
At which point he opens his iceberg-blue eyes wide and delivers a burst of ``Woo, woo'' — the crowd chant that greets that particular Stones' anthem. "It was just a funny moment. Talking about going between one and the other."
For a granddad, he's in good shape. Jagger's milky-white stomach is on display throughout the interview in a stripy blue-and-white shirt only buttoned across his nipples. He is so lean and wiry that you could follow the progress of a pea journeying through his intestines. The Stones have always looked nutritionally challenged: Jagger puts it down to the fact that they're World War II babies, but to have a rock-hard belly at 30, let alone 60, is quite an achievement. Gym sessions every other day with his Norwegian trainer, Torje, (``It's not fashionable to do it every day''), a near teetotal stance on alcohol and eight hours' sleep a night are just some of the contributing factors. Then there's the more unusual assertion that touring not only keeps him healthy but brimful of vitality.
"You know, you're very involved, you have to be very healthy, you have to work very hard, you're interested in things and you're seeing a lot of the world. All these things make you much more vibrant than if you were the classic, semi-retired rock musician that's got money but is sort of going to seed and doesn't really like anything going on around him, because everyone else is 30 years younger and selling records and he's not doing anything. I'm not in that position — which I think is not a very good position to be in, to be honest."
On tour he slips very comfortably into the giant bubble that is built around their transitory existence. Jagger, with all the trimmings, is a shock if you have any experience of the off-tour Mick, a shadowy will-o'-the-wisp who slips in and out of London alone, with only his driver and the blacked-out windows of his car hinting at his iconic status. "There are some famous people who like to be in a bubble the whole time. I find it fantastically restricting.
"I think it's very important to be part of a larger society. Not just a famous individual that's isolated."
On tour, Jagger's computer keeps him in touch with the world; he emails friends and reads the papers via the Internet. He keeps his beady eye on world affairs. "There was a front page in the Independent the other day about how the Brazilian rainforest is disappearing even faster than anticipated thanks to the European obsession with soy beans. It was on the BBC web page, too. So, I immediately cancelled my soya intake, which was minimal I admit, probably once a week when I had soy on my salmon. But it's terrible to have to say to your children, look at this now because when you're my age it will be gone.'' One of Mick Jagger's most appealing qualities is his unabated lust for life. If you're planning an adventure, Mick's in. Recently, in answer to his publicist's question about what he'd do if he wasn't a rock star, Mick replied: "I'd write travel guides." He's only partly joking. I've seen him in operation, poring intently through Lonely Planets and Rough Guides and that was just to plan a possible trip to Martinique. An unscheduled break in the Far East, thanks to the SARS epidemic, saw Jagger and his children making a long-anticipated trip to Cambodia's Angkor Wat. "It was a wonderful place.
"I visited the main temple, which is vast, during the full moon and there was absolutely no one there. Rather dangerously we climbed the temple. There were no handrails. It's very steep, by the way," he says, laughing. "Steep and narrow steps and quite high and quite dark. As I was clambering up with my children I thought, `Oh, I'm not sure this is such a great idea.' There's only one section which has a handrail and we weren't on it." The eternal bad boy continues to seek his thrills, not in nightclubs, not with a cocktail of narcotics, but clambering up temples in the dead of night. Happy 60th, Sir Mick. |
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| Highwire Rob |
What a great article! And doesn't this sound like a man with a lot of inspiration for the next Stone's album... 
I can't wait... |
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| corgi37 |
That is one of the best articles i have ever read about Mick. As a new-ish dad mysef, i respect and man who hs time for his kids. Here is the worlds biggest rock star, mid show, trying to get his kid to watch from behind the amps. He is a top dad, Keith too! These 2 obviously havent got any Jack or Kelly Osbourne in their clans. Mick seemed to have opened up a bit for the interviewer. Its great to see a positive spin on him. I am so sick to death of the articles portraying him as a perverted, money obsessed control freak. Not that theres anything wrong with that.
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