My night with the Rolling Stones

That’s another prime minister the Rolling Stones have outlasted.

When the band first plugged in under that name at London’s Marquee Club on July 12, 1962, Harold Macmillan was in No. 10 dealing with the ‘little local difficulty’ of sacking a third of his cabinet. Then came Alec Douglas-Home, Harold Wilson, Ted Heath, Wilson again, Jim Callaghan, Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Theresa May and now the soon-to-depart Boris Johnson. Thirteen administrations, an even dozen US presidents and six popes. And through it all the Stones themselves have just kept rolling along. Not bad for a band of misfits that everyone, including them, thought would last a year or two at most.

When longtime Stones scribes like me come to consider the matter of the group’s most famous, or notorious, acts during their first 60 years together, they’re somewhat spoilt for choice. The hack’s eye might turn to some of the drug-related adventures of the 1960s, or to today’s superbly efficient mobile corporation, which even now continues to pack the sports stadiums of Europe.