| August 22nd, 2005 07:17 PM |
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| Hannalee |
They may be well into their seventh decades on earth, and their fifth as royalty on planet rock, but the Stones have no plans to stop rolling any time soon, it seems.
As the band kicked off their latest world tour last night, Mick Jagger told the Boston audience for the first of at least 40 dates that "a good thing never ends", apparently keen to scotch any nonsense about this being a farewell tour.
That said, Stones concerts are not without a fair measure of nostalgia: last night at Fenway Stadium they played four songs from new album A Bigger Bang, but these were snuck in over the course of a two-hour greatest hits parade. It could hardly be otherwise: if tens of thousands of fans have parted with hundreds of dollars each to see them play, it would be a brave/foolhardy band that withheld the old favourites (and one whose future concerts, if they took place, would not take place in stadiums).
The thing is, even as pensioners trotting out some very well-worn material - Jumpin' Jack Flash was, of course, on last night's setlist - the Stones have the knack of injecting it with almost adolescent levels of energy.
I went as a sceptic to report on the Stones' last tour when it reached Twickenham in 2003. Jagger had missed a couple of dates on the tour due to a bout of flu and there was much speculation that Mick's volcano was finally exhausted.
Needless to say, at 7.30 sharp Jagger bounded on stage in indecently snake-hipped jeans and flew into his sexed-up semaphore, sprinting from end to end of the enormous stage for more than two hours and thoroughly trampling suspicions of this particular sword having outworn its sheath.
The band's eerily prolonged youthfulness - something to do with the anti-ageing properties of vast wealth and much younger partners - makes their audience feel younger, too. (For the Twickenham gig, a middle-aged Mail journalist was so revved up by the performance that he stood up on his seat, turning to me and saying "journalistic objectivity be damned!" before embarking on an elaborate air guitar riff.)
The Stones' longevity underlines the truth of an observation in Giles Smith's Lost in Music: when he was younger, he says, people told him that rock'n'roll was just a teenage phase he was going through. Now, we realise, teenagers were just a phase that rock'n'roll was going through.
This is heartening for those of us with whom time's winged chariot is catching up. But it's slightly worrying, too, as yet another sign that rock music's position as the place where idealistic young folks build a counterculture is over and done with. Does all that stuff happen on the internet these days? Perhaps a young person can tell me...
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