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Nowhere are the contradictions more evident than in the character of Jagger. It is safe to assume that England's progress in the Ashes is piquing his interest just as much as his reckoning of the box office receipts on tour, while he still prances around the stage with the energy of a man half his age (and still with a 29-inch waist). None of this should add up, yet Jagger remains at ease with himself.

'He is contradictory,' says his friend Patrick Woodroffe, the Stones' lighting technician since 1982. 'He can be very cautious, a very careful man; but then you think of the risks he takes. As a performer he works incredibly hard: he exercises for an hour and a half, he exercises his voice for two hours; he has business meetings; he works through the production side of the show in incredible detail. Before the start of every tour there's a day off for the band, but the night before Boston he was there at 9pm, going through the final cues. But it's so he has the bases covered - he can then produce this fantastic, visceral performance.'

Friends know Jagger to be generous and good company, with wide-ranging interests, including cricket, collecting art (by painters such as Edward Burra) and reading biographies and books on history. On tour, he has been known to spend his time off-stage faxing his children with help on their homework.

'He lives life on his own terms,' Woodroffe says. 'That means people can think he's selfish. But it's because he doesn't allow who he is to influence the way he goes about his business. He can play the rock star, but he doesn't go everywhere with bodyguards or a huge entourage, for example. He's had years and years of practise at being famous.'

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According to Patrick Woodroffe: 'Mick and Keith continue to stimulate each other on all sorts of levels; the end product is what you see on stage, where they have this enormous respect for each other.'

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