The most restless, resilient, rapacious rock & roll group in the world is on the move again. Less than two weeks after finishing a routinely Herculean tour of Latin America with an epochal show in Cuba, the Rolling Stones were back in their London hometown, disrupting traffic on the King’s Road as Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Ronnie Wood glad-handed a media scrum at a red carpet event to mark the opening of their latest project, Exhibitionism at the Saatchi Gallery.
Towards the start of this ‘immersive’ odyssey, you find yourself in a room that looks like the set of a Harold Pinter play. Grease-plastered dishes are piled up in a blocked sink; overflowing ashtrays spill over the mantelpiece; a lingering smell of stale fish and chips permeates the air. This is a facsimile of the flat in Edith Grove in West London where Jagger, Richards and Brian Jones lived in 1962 when the Stones got together. It provides a startling reminder of the group’s Bohemian beginnings which stands in stark comparison to the coup de theatre awaiting at the end of the exhibition. Here you enter a remarkably realistic mock-up of a backstage area at one of the band’s recent shows. Passing between flight cases and racks of guitars, you are given a pair of 3-D specs and invited to step out on to a stage, where you find yourself standing alongside the Stones as they reach the climax of one of their shows in Hyde Park in 2013. You can see the walkway stretching out into the crowd in front of you, exactly as Jagger sees it before he sets off on a canter to the far end. You stand shoulder to shoulder with Wood and Richards as they play ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’. Wowsa!
In between the domestic hell of Edith Grove and the rock-god glory of Hyde Park, Exhibitionism takes you on a journey through the Stones long and unyielding career via an impressive stash of memorabilia. Artwork, stage designs, enough musical instruments to open a shop, diaries, lyric books, recording contracts, films, videos, posters and a vast collection of garish stage costumes, mostly belonging to Jagger, are displayed in nine rooms over two floors of the gallery.
While it inevitably prompts an air of nostalgia, there is nothing remotely valedictory about the exhibition. The Stones have been batting away questions about their imminent retirement since they reached their early thirties. Now well in to their seventies, they have greeted the onset of old age with the same thinly veiled contempt they have always shown for the observation of social niceties in general. Still on the lookout for ‘fresh horizons’ as Richards put it, the band took the opportunity on the recent Olé Tour of South America to perform in a string of countries for the first time: Peru, Uruguay, Colombia and, of course, Cuba. These were massive, theatrical, two-hour-plus shows, during which Jagger preened and cavorted in time-honoured fashion. In Havana, where Barack Obama had been dodging the rain days before, a crowd in excess of 1 million people basked in glorious sunshine at the Stones free concert on Good Friday. The Pope’s request that they move the show to a different date or time was brushed aside.
In song, the Stones have long professed their sympathy for the devil. But what supernatural forces are at work here? How can any group of individuals have maintained such a lust for the limelight, let alone the ability to keep hogging it so spectacularly?
Much has been made of the eye-watering prices attached to the Stones merchandise on sale in the Saatchi gift shop – £250 for a shopping bag, £1,390 for a vanity case and so on – and there is no doubt that Exhibitionism will generate substantial revenues before it’s done. But as Jagger himself has observed, making money is pretty level-headed as a motivation. A lot of rock stars are in it solely for the ego-trip and the adulation – not that the Stones are saying no to that, either.
While Jagger employs his retinue of voice coaches and personal trainers to hold back the years and Richards smokes and snorts his way into cheerful decrepitude, the Stones continue to see themselves as contenders for the very biggest prizes. They are recording a new album and making plans to tour again. Meanwhile, Exhibitionism stands as an imperious and, above all, entertaining monument to the group which somehow continues to define a popular music era of untrammelled excess.
Exhibitionism: The Rolling Stones is at the Saatchi Gallery until 4 September
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