David Sinclair

The Rolling Stones’s Saatchi show is clearly a money-spinner – what’s wrong with that?

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.

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