| September 30th, 2005 12:13 PM |
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| Mel Belli |
Copyright 2005 The Spectator Limited
The Spectator
October 01, 2005
SECTION: Pg. 63 64
LENGTH: 808 words
HEADLINE: Below the belt;
ARTS - Olden but golden
BYLINE: Charles Spencer
BODY:
Thanks to Keith Richards and his big mouth, I'm GBP 50 poorer this month. Let me explain.
The Rolling Stones have just released their first new studio album for eight years, and are once again embarked on yet another punishing, hugely lucrative world tour. God knows how they manage it.
Richards, firmly tipped 30 years ago to be rock's next casualty, is now an unrepentantly boozy 61, Jagger is a super-fit 62, while Charlie Watts, the band's superb, and superbly laconic, drummer is 64 and recovering not only from throat cancer but also a recent car crash that broke his sternum. Ron Wood, who still seems like the new boy though he joined the band 30 years ago, is a mere stripling of 58.
Apparently, he's back on the wagon again after yet another spell in rehab. Trying to keep up with Richards's heroic intake has always been a dangerous game.
Anyway, to launch both tour and album, the band has been giving umpteen interviews, and, after 42 years on the job, they're extremely good at it. Richards, in particular, played an absolute blinder when he spoke to Q magazine.
'But you've never really been a womaniser, ' hazarded the interviewer to dear old Keef. 'Whereas Mick. . .' That was all the great man needed to set the cat among the pigeons. 'Oh, his cock's on the end of his nose and a very small one at that. Huge balls. Small cock. Ask Marianne Faithfull.' The idea that Jagger, the astonishingly durable sex symbol and notorious philanderer, might actually be physically underendowed is curiously consoling as well as richly comic. It certainly cheered me up no end, and I have whiled away many happy moments imagining Mick's reaction to Keith's below-the-belt revelations. It's not exactly the kind of remark that ensures a happy atmosphere on the tour bus, is it?
Anyway, you can imagine my excitement when a colleague, Mark Shenton of the Sunday Express, told me that he was going to interview Jerry Hall about her forthcoming appearance in the musical High Society. A statement on the size of Mick's manhood from Hall, who stuck with him through, er, thick and thin, for so many years, would surely be definitive. So I promised Shenton 50 quid if he dared to pop the question.
Now Mick's balls may be huge, but Mark's are clearly made of brass. Having conducted a cordial interview, he raised the subject of Mick's member, reading her Keith's remarks in full. Apparently, the fabulous Texan laughed uproariously, declared that Mick and Keith were like a rather sweet, bickering married couple, but declined to enter the controversy herself.
There's class for you. Here was a perfect chance for revenge on the old philanderer who must have caused her much pain over the years, but Hall did the thoroughly decent thing.
This was the woman who once magnificently declared, 'My mother said it was simple to keep a man you must be a maid in the living room, a cook in the kitchen and a whore in the bedroom. I said I'd hire the other two and take care of the bedroom bit myself.' How could old rubber lips have treated this paragon so shabbily?
Actually it's a question Mick seems to have been asking himself, if the new album, A Bigger Bang (ahem), is anything to go by. Miraculously, it's the best Stones album since Some Girls (1978) and though it isn't quite up there with the satanic majesty of Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street, there are moments when it comes thrillingly close.
The Stones' approach to old age is simply to ignore it. There's none of the wry wisdom of the Grateful Dead's A Touch of Grey, for instance, or the rueful intimations of mortality to be found on Bob Dylan's Time Out of Mind. No, Mick's still scampering around like an old billy goat on Viagra, hymning the delights of sex in filthy flats, dissing the babes who done him wrong, and revealing a streak of the cruel misogyny that has always been part of the Stones.
But there are glimpses of self-knowledge amid the strutting braggadocio. Take the terrific opener, 'Rough Justice', which finds the band in a fine old frenzy of classic riffing. 'Once upon a time I was your little rooster, ' Jagger leers, before self-mockingly adding, 'But now I'm just one of your cocks' begging the crucial size question all over again. And during the fabulously maudlin ballad, 'Streets of Love', for my money the Stones' finest love song since 'Angie', he seems to be offering something approaching a public apology to Hall as he soulfully sings, 'The awful truth, it's awful sad, I must admit, I was awful bad.' Call me a sentimental softie, but I found myself unexpectedly moved by the repentant old rogue, and, apart from a few duff tracks near the end, the whole album proves a musically muscular, lyrically trenchant treat. Age may have withered them, but custom cannot stale the Stones.
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