Max Décharné

They just keep rolling along

Patrick Humphries celebrates the enduring power of songs written in the 1960s that still effortlessly fill a dance floor

issue 27 July 2019

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.

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