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The Rolling Stones Gather Mass Credibility
Michael Hann
The Guardian
The Rolling Stones have long been able to fill stadiums, but it has been a while since they have managed to fill so many column inches with such admiring copy - even the NME, obsessed for years only with the ephemeral and the faddish, gave the band a front cover last month.
The UK leg of the band's Licks world tour has seen critics and reporters - broadsheet and tabloid, glossy and inky, business pages and features sections - queue up to genuflect before the Stones, guitarist Keith Richards in particular. GQ even wheeled out the novelist Jay McInerney to interview the wizened wild man. "Somehow you don't expect to have a casual, coherent conversation with Keith Richards," wrote McInerney. "He talks. He smiles. He walks upright."
Richards has passed from outlaw to institution, an image confirmed for a new generation by Johnny Depp's performance in the swashbuckling Pirates of the Caribbean, in which he appears to be playing Richards, as both the Daily Mirror and the New Statesman noticed.
With a new wave of garage rock bands adopting the Stones' mid-60s attitude and sound, the originals have returned the compliment, said David Smyth in the London Evening Standard, inviting some of the hippest new bands around to support them. With groups such as the Strokes, the White Stripes and the Hives on the same bill, said Smyth, the Stones look "more like a band still vitally relevant to the present".
The Stones' kids have also put them in the limelight again. Jade Jagger and Leah Wood have been regulars on the social pages for some time, and the Sunday Telegraph devoted space to a report that Jagger's son James and Richards' daughter, Alexandra, have just split up.
But the unlikeliest of the worshippers? Fortune magazine ran a huge and admiring cover story on the band as their US tour began last autumn. "They are global, they pay taxes (grudgingly), and they litigate. The band has a P&L [profit and loss balance sheet] and budgets, and accountants, and lawyers, and investments, and software, and hardware," it cooed.
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