Jagger: Stone who likes to roll

Press, 23 September 1987, Page 24

Jagger: Stone who likes to roll

Mick Jagger, who has recorded a new LP, “Primitive Cool,” is a self-confessed wanderer

By PETER HILLMORE Mick Jagger has a house in New York, a chateau in France, a holiday home in Mustique — but nowhere to stay when he comes to England. In England, it is usually a hotel suite or a service flat This visit as he gets ready for the launch of his new solo album, "Primitive Cool,” and a possible tour, it was a rented house in Kensington, a large house with quiet traditional English grandeur on the outside but a peculiarly anonymous, unlived-in transAtlantic look inside: all cream tiled floors, complex telephone systems, new teak and antique, full of shiny marble coffee tables with books to match.

If it had not been for the M.C.C. versus the Rest of the World cricket match playing soundlessly on one of the television sets, there would have been no clue as to whereabouts in the world we were for an interview.

"I don’t have a concept of home, I like to move around,” Jagger says, one eye on the cricket. “Bruce Chatwin has written a book saying that our basic instincts are nomadic, we all have a restless urge, and the desire to settle came later. I don’t like staying in the same place all the time — but nowadays I don’t like to move as often as I did. It used to be only three weeks in one place, now it is three months.” Appropriately enough, Chatwin’s book is called "Songlines,” for it is Jagger’s music that gives him the financial ability to satisfy this primeval urge. Jagger wanted to talk about where we were, about England, as much as he wanted to talk about his new record.

"My musical influences are as much English as American. I grew up with brass bands and English tunes. A number on the ‘Primitive Cool’ album, ‘Party Doll,’ has got English folk-song influences.”

At first, we began with standard questions, which, not surprisingly, elicited standard answers —• “No, this solo album doesn’t mean that the Roiling Stones have broken up; no, I don’t know when or if we’ll get back together again; yes, there have been problems among the group; no, I don’t want to go into them, it’ll only cause grief. We’ve been

together for nearly 25 years, that’s longer than most marriages.” He explained that his first solo album a couple of years ago “was done very quickly. It was very flippant, very tongue-in-cheek; I was coming straight from the Stones album for which I’d written a lot of dark material, so I thought I’d do something very different and very upbeat This one’s different a musical development. I wrote a whole batch of songs quickly, straight off, in a three-month period.” The songs on “Primitive Cool” range from dark, Stones-type pounding tunes warning people not to shoot their mouths off to love songs and pleading laments like “Say You Will,” “which is very supplicant, very pleading, all about asking.”

He wrote them down in a cheap Woolworth’s exercise book, the ones with avoirdupois tables at the back; on the front he has written, in the possessive manner of school children, “Mick’s Album 1986-87.” You almost expect a scrawled instruction at the back, "If this book should dare to roam, box its ears and send it home, to Michael Jagger ...” He’d just been reading, “with the help of a dictionary,” a thesis that a French student at the Sorbonne has written on the influence of Mick Jagger’s clothes — “not my music, just my clothes” — on a post-indus-trial society, so when we got on to the influence of Mick Jagger on popular music over the last 25 years of post-industrial English society, he stopped and laughed scornfully.

“How am I supposed to answer questions like that? Something like, ‘Yes, you’re right, my influence has been so great, so vast and so all-pervading that I can’t even begin to tell you about how important it is, but let me just give you one or two examples of its power ...’ I’m sorry, I can’t do it. I’m still English enough to retain some sense of modesty, and anyway I’ve said it all before, or other people have put words in my mouth for me. Mind you, there are also some people who think the last time me and the Stones exercised any musical influence was way back in 1965.”

Ever since that weird time in the bizarre sixties — a time when he was helicoptered to be

questioned by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the editor of “The Times” (“I’d just come out of prison and I was in a bit of a daze”) — he has been asked about the social role of the allpervading influence of popular music.

“If it does have any influence, it’s just chipping away at the edges of prejudice. I’ve just written music about things I’ve seen, things I’ve done, about picking up girls after concerts (one of the songs on the new album is

about a “common flirty, looks about 30”). It’s not candyfloss, escapist music, but that doesn’t make picking up girls sociologically important” So we talked about England for a while instead, a place he visits • as often as the taxman allows, the place he grew up in, a place that has had an allpervading influence on him. He is inordinately proud that his daughter, Jade, by Bianca Jagger, has just got seven Olevels, and he might well come

back to live in England permanently when his two children by Jerry Hall get to school age (some years off). “Even when I’m abroad, I still feel English. I don’t mean that I affect ‘Englishness’ in New York, the way some people do; I don’t throw English slang at Americans so they have to ask three times what I mean.”

Jagger was in France during the General Election, but stayed up all night to listen to the result, ‘‘on the steam radio.” Like most

other Britons, he wasn’t surprised by the result, “but I can’t say I was overjoyed. All right, Mrs Thatcher’s politics may benefit people in my income bracket; I don’t want to appear hypocritical, but paying more than 60 per cent tax is a bit of an imposition. People might say ‘rich sod,* but it’s still a lot to pay. But I still don’t have to approve of her victory. I don’t think I am a Right-wing person. I was certainly brought up with liberal principles.”

At one point in his career politicians decided that music was sociologically important, or that musicians were electorally important, and Jagger was canvassed “with several lunches at the Gay Hussar” to work for the Labour Party, but he refused. At a later point in the same career he was canvassed by the Tory Party, at a restaurant which he can’t remember.

He turned down these approaches: “I was far too swept up with my own life and my own ego, going to every country I could, getting as much sex as I could. You could say my political awareness was very slight” He still studiously keeps out of politics. The only political thing he seems to get angry at now is “the way the climate is allowing people publicly to utter opinions and horrid prejudices that they used only to be able to utter privately.”

“I grew up in Dartford, Kent When I was a kid it was a Labour seat It was commuterbelt country, but still pretty safe Labour. It’s Conservative now. When I go back, it still seems the same place, although it’s clearly changed. I couldn’t imagine the Dartford I grew up in ever going Tory, it would have seemed impossible. There had been quite a bit of heavy bombing during the war, and I remember playing on bomb sites, and playing cricket in the streets because there weren’t many cars about”

On “Primitive Cool" there is a line looking back: “Did you walk cool in the fifties, was it all black and white?” Jagger says it’s the most personal line in all the songs, “because that was how I saw life in Dartford, no colour, just blacks and whites. It all seemed so drab. It was even more extreme when the Rolling Stones were touring. —“The Observer”

Flippant

Modesty

Canvassed