A full revolution brings you back to where you began

Julie Burchill

MICK JAGGER: PRIMITIVE COOL by Christopher Sandford Gollancz, £16.99, pp. 319 Whenever I am sent a new book on the lively arts, the first thing I do is look for myself in the index. Usually I am sand- wiched between Anthony Burgess and William Burroughs — which, you may take it from me, is not the sort of place a girl likes to get sandwiched.

In Mr Sandford's book, though, I find myself stranded between Mr Paul Buck- master and Mr Tito Burns; I have not come across them before, socially, and feel that this bodes ill for the entertainment value of the publication. Because so much of the Rolling Stones Story is boring; the pokey childhoods in the Home Counties (so dif- ferent from the Beatles' amphetamine- fuelled barnstorming around Liverpool and Hamburg; they always were the real bad boys), the half-hearted swotting at the LSE, the boring white blues clubs where spotty English teenagers pretended to be old, oppressed black men with names like Blind Lemon Shandy and sang phoney songs about waking up this morning and 'dusting my broom' — when you just know that the nearest they ever came to it was dusting their room.

No, the Rolling Stones Story never gets good until they're picked up by Andrew Loog Oldham — managers of pop groups are always weirder and smarter than the crooning cretins they boss — and he gets them to tart around in makeup and frocks long before Boy George was ever thought of. But he was only with them for three years, leaving in 1967; after that it's the same tired old bad marriages and inter- minable wrangles with managers and accountants who just might have done Mr Jagger out of 50p sometime in the Seven- ties.

A while ago I was sent Victor Bockris' biography of Keith Richards to review, and I remember leaving the proof closed on my desk until the last possible moment — not through dread, but because I knew that once I picked it up I would do nothing else for days but read it. The richness and strangeness of Keith Richards' life is so extreme that he now seems barely human. He is like the living earth, rich and loamy (and no doubt full of worms), layer upon volcanic layer of self-imposed suffering, relentless expertise and survivalism — like one of the ancient black blues players he loves so much. What is Mick Jagger by comparison? — a collagen car crash, a bank balance and a season ticket at Lord's. Well, he's so ancient now that it will take a miracle to keep him leaping around to 'Jumpin' Jack Flash'.

So I found my quote — a good one, too — and I defy any writer not to feel well- disposed towards a book which follows her words with, 'She was right, of course.' But this really is quite a good book, and does as much as it can with a stringy sort of story which only really holds up in the context of ensemble Stones pieces.

From Satanic Majesty to Princes Trust, it is striking how little Mick Jagger has actually moved on. He still lives, for a large part of the year, in a south London suburb, and he still chases girls of 22, just like he was doing a quarter-century ago. From the obedient little boy who acted in his games-teacher father's P. E. films to the bloodless troubador described thus by his brother in his last official tour programme -

Mick is basically about fun and he's never seen the music as anything much more. He likes to smile and laugh. He's worked hard on the preparations for this tour and the reward is seeing a lot of happy faces out there

— we are witnessing the career of a highly conservative Englishman whose exhibition- ism was somehow mistaken for rebellion. A 'Hi, it's me. Listen. It's David's birthday, so a few million of us are going out for a meal. Are you interested?' common mistake made in the Sixties, I believe.

Still, he had a shrewd eye for an original personality — as he would later have for antiques — and made a point of picking friends and lovers who added to him: Loog Oldham, Richards, Brian Jones, Mar- ianne Faithful!. Sandford comes alive when writing about them and shows, with his collaborator Tom Keylock (a Stones tour manager in the Sixties), a light and often comic touch. Here they are on Faithfull: Sanford: A restless soul, doomed to wander forever down vistas of triteness, her only salvation the unconsciousness foretold by altered visions of reality.

Keylock:

A right raver.

Further hilarity ensues when Jagger is elaborately courted by that old phoney Tom Driberg, the famous friend of the Little Man who loved tormenting servants. Like an Edwardian masher, Driberg laid siege to Jagger for months, flattering him with suggestions of a political career (a new twist to the stage-door Johnny's 'You're too good for the chorus, my beauty — you belong on a bigger stage!'). Never one to turn down a free meal, Jagger bore the bore gamely through long lunches at — where else? — the Gay Hussar:

To the direct question 'Why not stand for the local council', Jagger gave him a look of with- ering scorn. When next Driberg appeared for dinner at Cheyne Walk it was to be told by Faithfull that Mick was 'unexpectedly detained'.

On another occasion at the restaurant, Jagger interrupted a long monologue on the post-feudal acceleration of the means of production to ask for a glass of port. Albert Clinton, who waited at the Gay Hussar for 20 years, remembers 'the elder gentleman doing the talking, the younger one the eating'.

While International Times urged him to join the revolution, Jagger joined the Country Gentleman's Association. While all around him were out of their heads, Jagger

could always sit down to dinner and remem- ber three hours later who had the scampi and who had the prawn curly.

Still, there were moments when his lack of couth had its comic side; on hearing of Brian Jones' death, he commented, 'I feel a bit shocked . . . but the guy was unbear- able.' I hope Mr Jagger finds it easy to for- give the frankness with which his ex-nearest-and-dearest talk of him here. It is Marianne Faithfull, always a woman wasted on the worlds she chose, who really sums it up. How did she feel when Keith first told her that Mick was in love with her? 'Disappointed. I preferred Keith.' Didn't we all? And this, above all, is Jagger's tragedy.