Forty years after his first drug bust in 1967, Keith Richards is still testing the limits of the law. But, as one would expect of a 63-year-old, the substances in question have changed over the years. So it was that, before an enraptured audience at the O2 Centre on Tuesday night, the pirate-captain of the Rolling Stones smoked a cigarette. Now that’s what I call rock’n’roll.
In an unforgiving light, the Stones of 2007 can look like a collision between delivery vans from a wig shop and a latex factory. But that’s not bad for a quartet with a combined age of 253. When the band formed in 1962, Harold Macmillan was prime minister. Indeed, Macmillan was only two years older then than Charlie Watts is now — although I doubt Supermac would have looked as cool behind a drum kit.
‘It’s taken us 40 years to get from Richmond down to Greenwich,’ drawled Mick Jagger in his shimmering frock-coat. Longer, actually; but nobody was quibbling with a superstar who, at an age when many men are getting hip replacements, still has the snake hips of an ageing Nijinsky, who simply refuses to stop moving, a perpetuum mobile of pop.
From the first, mesmeric chords of ‘Start Me Up’, Richards coaxing the magic from his guitar like a tribal shaman, this was a reliable and familiar set, expertly executed by the best in the business. For many, many years, the Stones have been putting on a show, rather than playing a gig. The difference is essential. This was all about celebration, and immutable continuity, not the generation gaps that used to be so important. Pop was invented to divide father and son: now, funnily enough, it is one of the things that binds them together.
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