Time is on their side

It’s a sobering thought that Mick Jagger, once the embodiment of rebellious youth, celebrates his 80th birthday on 26th July.

Even more shockingly, Sir Mick’s Rolling Stones colleague Keith Richards, once thought unlikely to see middle age, reaches the same milestone on 18th December.

So what happened? How do we explain the strange fact that Mick and Keith have apparently defied all the insurance industry’s mortality tables and made it into a ninth decade?

It doesn’t hurt that, for much of the past 60 years, Jagger and Richards have had access to the very best medical and (especially in Keith’s case) legal backup money can buy.

In April 2019, Sir Mick had to pull out of a major US tour when he was found to need a heart-valve replacement operation. He was immediately flown by private jet to a New York hospital, and was later able to recuperate first at his beachfront home in Florida and then at his château in the Loire Valley, which was also where he rode out the Covid pandemic.

And good luck to him; he’s earned it. But it’s not exactly the six-month wait for a similar procedure on the NHS followed by a convalescence, or lockdown, in one’s suburban semi.

Similarly, when in 2006 Richards fell while relaxing in the branches of a banyan tree in Fiji and hit his head on landing, a full-scale emergency team swung into action. An air ambulance flew the veteran guitarist to the nearest major hospital in New Zealand, where doctors drained blood from his brain, reattached his scalp with titanium bolts and put him on a morphine drip, thought to be a not wholly unfamiliar experience for him. Remarkably, Keith was back on the road with the Stones just nine weeks later.

This wasn’t the first medical intervention over the years for the beloved Human Riff, once famous for his chemical binges and a particular fondness for a tipple he called Nuclear Waste, a pint-size cocktail of Stolly and Sunkist he was known to chug with his morning cornflakes.

But the secret to Jagger and Richards’s longevity lies further back than that. It has its roots in the values with which they grew up in the bracingly austere years of postwar Britain.

In Jagger’s case, this involved a lifestyle at home in suburban Dartford characterised by hard work, service to others, a carefully rationed diet and an exercise regime supervised by his physical education buff father, Joe.

For at least the first 18 years of his life, Mick’s routine took place amid a welter of sporting equipment and barbells, and was punctuated by twice-weekly attendance at Dartford’s medieval Holy Trinity Church, where he was known not so much for his singing voice as for his voluntary work and a quiet determination to make something of himself.

In 1961, Jagger’s grammar-school leaving report called him ‘a lad of good general calibre [with] a quality of persistence when he makes up his mind to tackle something’.

More than 60 years later, it would be hard to quibble with that core assessment of Jagger’s character.

There’s a discrepancy between the raised-by-wolves legend of Keith Richards’s upbringing and the reality, with its emphasis on duty, rank and sound traditional values.

Richards’s paternal grandparents were both well-respected pre-war councillors in Walthamstow, where his grandmother served as the first female mayor. His maternal grandfather was a First World War hero. Keith’s father was among the first to hit the Normandy beaches on D-Day and was badly wounded.

Perhaps there was a touch less emphasis on physical exercise than across town at the Jaggers’, but still Keith grew up with the benefits of a largely fat-free diet, as well as a fundamental sense of patriotism and service.

As a nine-year-old, he was a member of the choir singing Zadok the Priest to the newly crowned Queen in 1953, earning one of his merit badges as a Boy Scout. He later showed a pronounced streak of English romanticism by spending his first songwriting money on the thatched cottage in the Sussex countryside where he still lives today.

As Richards himself once put it, in his inimitable style, ‘I can be the cat on stage any time I want. But really I’m a very placid, nice guy – most people will tell you that. It’s really just to placate this other character that I work.’

A prince of darkness, maybe, but a prince nonetheless.

In the end, perhaps the most shocking revelation about Jagger and Richards – far eclipsing all the stories about Mars bars and drugs – is just how grounded both of them are in the values of the Britain where they grew up.

Not being privy to their inner thoughts, I wouldn’t dare to suggest that both are fundamentally conservative types who might harbour a sort of amused contempt for a younger generation they see as feckless, whiny snowflakes, scared of hard graft and more interested in their social-media posts than in doing anything productive.

But there was always something about the two middle-class lads from the Kentish suburbs that was in it for the long haul. The very idea of Jagger and Richards as OAPs is a joke we never seem to grow tired of.

Remember, though, that when the Rolling Stones first formed, most of their material was written by American bluesmen in their sixties and seventies. It’s only recently that Mick and Keith have approached the status of the originals.