They just keep rolling along

At the end of 1969, teenage Rolling Stones fans reading the new Fab 208 annual could be forgiven for thinking that time wasn’t on their side:

After five years as Britain’s most controversial group, how much more moss can they gather before they call it a day? Will we ever see the world’s most exciting group ‘live’ again, and where do wicked Mick and Co. go from
here on?

Mick Jagger himself spoke of the dietary measures he had adopted to fortify his supposedly ancient 26-year-old body: ‘If you eat any old rubbish like lots of potatoes and take no exercise, then you end up looking like a potato — all knobbly knees and bloated.’ In the event, tubers notwithstanding, the Stones are still treading the boards half a century on from that chaotic year which provides the focus for Patrick Humphries’s excellent new book.

It was the year that saw the death of Brian Jones, the concert in Hyde Park, a US tour ending at Altamont Speedway, the single ‘Honky Tonk Women’ and the album Let It Bleed, which included ‘Gimme Shelter’ and ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’. Jagger also spent time in Australia playing Ned Kelly in Tony Richardson’s ill-advised film of that name, while his 1968 work in Nicolas Roeg’s and Donald Cammell’s unfinished Performance still sat on the shelf.

These events have been analysed many times, but Humphries — who first saw the Rolling Stones that year as a teenager — brings an engagingly fresh perspective, delivering his narrative in an amused, clear-eyed and balanced prose, using the prism of one key year around which to range forwards and back through the band’s history. He is also mindful of the inherent contradictions in a tale of Kent schoolboys singing the Delta blues, and that Jagger, who studied business at the LSE, could easily have wound up working in the City.