Jumpin' Jack not so flash…

from The Telegraph…

Why doesn't Mick Jagger slow down? Because he can't.

It's too soon to write off ‘rock's sexiest frontman’.

By NEIL McCORMICK | 8:07PM GMT — Tuesday, 02 April 2019

Sir Mick Jagger performing in Berlin last summer. — Photograph: Agence France-Presse.

IS IT TIME for Jumping Jack Flash to sit down and put his feet up? News that Sir Mick Jagger is to undergo surgery to replace a heart valve will have come as a surprise to anyone who has seen the Rolling Stones on stage in recent years, where their hyperactive frontman still incessantly jiggles and jerks about as if his bandmates filled his underpants with itching powder for a joke.

Jagger may be 75 and sporting a face the texture of a leather suitcase rescued from a skip but he cavorts with more energy than most performers half his age. Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Ronnie Wood fire up the riffs but it is Jagger who personifies the physical vitality of the greatest rock and roll band in the world, still moving with the limber grace of a dancer and the energy of an athlete. He still wiggles his hips, for God's sake, when most of his generation have had theirs replaced.

It is a little discussed aspect of the Jagger-Richards axis how they embody contrary aspects of rock's eternal spirit. Richards stands at a perilous angle and plays as if he is about to keel over, his disregard for his physical appearance reflecting rock's devil-may-care cool. He looks like he's ready to blow cigarette smoke in the face of the Grim Reaper. However, the electrifying energy of Jagger's performances are a living testament to the immortal spirit that first fired up the Sixties rock revolution. When the septuagenarian Jagger hollers “I can't get no satisfaction, no, no, no” you know he's not just complaining that his local chemist ran out of Viagra.

But it turns out a Rolling Stone can gather moss, or at least furred arteries. The Stones have had to postpone the North American leg of their No Filter tour, which would have seen them play to a million fans over six weeks. Note that the operative word there is postpone, not cancel.

Sir Mick Jagger will reportedly undergo heart valve replacement surgery. — Photograph: Matt Cardy.

Jagger's statement said “I will be working very hard to get back onstage as soon as I can.” Reports from Miami, where the band had gathered to rehearse, suggest that Jagger has told friends he feels great and is already bored of taking it easy. He has been photographed on the beach with his ballerina girlfriend, Melanie Hamrick (31) and their two-year-old son Deveraux, Jagger's eighth child. Somehow, I really don't think he is ready to slow down.

Plenty of Jagger's contemporaries have announced retirements over the past year, including Neil Diamond (through ill health), Paul Simon and Elton John, although he's dragging it out for at least three years with a very long goodbye, yellow brick road. Ozzy Osbourne had to postpone his own farewell tour due to ill health. Black Sabbath have already packed it in, and Rush, Kiss, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Blue Oyster Cult have all been taking final, extended bows.

But there is another option, for the star who still wants to perform but finds the rigours of the road increasingly testing on their stamina and tinnitus: the unplugged show. Bruce Springsteen performed a solo acoustic residency in a Broadway Theatre for over a year, grossing over $113 million from 236 shows and still making it home to spend every night in his own bed.

Those kind of numbers might appeal to Jagger, who is notoriously focussed on the bottom line. But can you really see him sitting on a stool while Keith strums his way through Tumbling Dice, Brown Sugar or Honky Tonk Women? I have watched Jagger sing emotive ballads like Wild Horses without being able to stay still.

In the explosive early years of the Stones, Jagger was the sexiest frontman in rock and roll, at once camp and athletic, with an act pitched somewhere between the swagger of James Brown and affected mincing of a drag act, exuding a femininity that made his masculinity more assured.

With fellow stones Ronnie Wood, Keith Richards and Charlie Watts in 2016. — Photograph: Reuters.

Sir Mick Jagger in Dublin last May. — Photograph: Redferns.

Almost every front man ever since has been influenced by Jagger, either pushing his flamboyance further in the style of Jim Morrison, David Bowie, Freddie Mercury and Steven Tyler or finding tough masculine alternatives, from the physical exuberance of Bruce Springsteen and Bono to the threatening stillness of Liam Gallagher.

As Jagger's youthful beauty waned, he compensated with even more physically energetic movement. The first time time I saw the Rolling Stones, at an open air show in 1982, he was wearing bicycle shorts and racing from one end of the vast stage to the other. I didn't know if I was at a rock gig or a marathon. It has been estimated that he was covering up to 10 miles a show during that tour. When I asked Keith Richards about his songwriting partner's health last year, he didn't mention his heart but did say he worried “about his joints from all that jogging”.

Jagger's father was a Physical Education teacher, and it has been reported that even in his seventies Jagger's physical regime involves running eight miles a day, cycling, yoga, kickboxing, meditation and, er, ballet (the latter, presumably, under the influence of his latest flame).

Jagger was made to move. As Richards has repeatedly said, the Rolling Stones will go on until one of them keels over. Jagger will return, and when he does, don't expect him to slow down. You can't sing Start Me Up from an easy chair.

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• Neil McCormick is a music critic for The Telegraph.

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