Leave him alone
James Delingpole
The time I most hate being a journalist is when you find yourself doing a piece you don't want to do but the money's so good you can't not. I don't do them that often, or I think I would have topped myself by now, but among those I did do and most regret was a hatchet job a few years back for the Evening Standard on Mick Jagger.
Though it was pegged to the spectacular lack of success of his latest solo album (a lousy peg, really, since his solo albums always do badly), any excuse would have done I'm sure — his social climbing, his age, his relationship with Keef, the creaking Behemoth of his next world tour. But the thing I felt as soon as I'd earned my 40 pieces of silver and the thing I feel even more having watched The One And Only Rolling Stones (BBC1, Sunday) is this: Mick Jagger is God; he has achieved so much and paid his dues so fully that by rights he should be beyond criticism. We should just leave him be, and let him get on with whatever the hell he wants to do, be it pulling birds a third of his age, making dodgy records or doing sherry commercials, if that's where the fancy takes him. Quite simply, we are not worthy.
Probably the only reason I ever doubted this was because the most overplayed Rolling Stones track when I was growing up was 'Start Me Up'. They put it on at every teenage party you went to. Most of the girls would flee the floor while the boys came on to strut their crotch-thrusting stuff in the most hideously embarrassing way imaginable, me especially. But even as I pouted, sweated and jabbed. I do remember this nagging little voice in my head going: 'What the hell are you doing? You don't even like this song. This song is shit.'
And it is shit — all the more so for the way the first few bars tease you with that juicy riff into thinking it's going to be up there with 'Satisfaction', only to disappoint you cruelly seconds later with its mindless, tuneless, going-nowhere chorus. 'I know there's this automatic assumption, imposed on us by the Sixties generation, that the Stones are the coolest thing ever,' I used to think to myself. 'But how can that possibly be so if they're capable of churn
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