M
ick Jagger is sitting on a sofa
wearing a pale grey fleece
and talking about Charlie
Watts. The drummer first
played with the Rolling
Stones in early 1963, after
they had tried six months with a differ-
ent man. Watts was at every gig they
played until he died last August, aged- One month later the band were
back on stage in the US, in St Louis,
and the set list hit the same beats as it
did the last time Watts played. Rock
through Start Me Up, roll into Paint It
Black, end with (I Can’t Get No) Satisfac-
tion. Except Watts was not there. And
Jagger missed him.
“I don’t really expect him to be there
any more if I turn round during a show,”
Jagger says. “But I do think about him.
Not only during rehearsals or on
stage, but in other ways too. I would
have phoned him up and talked
about last night’s Arsenal game
because he supported Totten-
ham and I’m Arsenal. I miss
him as a player and as a friend.
In the show, when we come to
the front and bow at the end,
there’s no Charlie. He’d always
be the last one down. I’d go:
‘Come on, what have you got to
do?’ He’d be fiddling with his sticks
because he always had to have them
in a row before he’d get off the seat.”
I catch Jagger, with Keith Richards
and Ronnie Wood, on a break from
rehearsals for their latest set of live
shows. It is the Sixty Tour, which
marks six decades since the band
formed, and opens next month in
Madrid, with a British run starting in
Liverpool on June 9 and concluding
with two dates at Hyde Park in
London. There are 14 dates in total — a
reduction from their previous tour,
which started in 2017 and was wrapped
up in 2021 because of the pandemic
and had 58 dates.
The homecoming tour was headline
news before Watts died — the Stones
have the fourth highest-grossing tour
in history and these men are of nursing
home age — Jagger and Richards will be
79 this year, and Wood hits 75 in June.
The trio have endured serious health
complications: Wood has had two
stints of cancer; Jagger had heart valve
replacement surgery in 2019, but was
back on stage three months later — he
now travels with a cardiologist; Rich-
ards, off drugs and drinking only spar-COVER STORY
AND THEN
THERE WERE
THREE...
The Rolling Stones are coming home, 60 years after their
first gig. Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood talk
about missing Charlie Watts, drinking less and why they would
never do an Abba and tour as holograms. By Dan Cairns
ingly, had cranial surgery in 2006 after
falling from a tree.
Watts, though, was the first one to
go. He died following as yet unknown
complications after heart surgery. After
Watts’s 58 years behind the kit, the sur-
viving Stones enlisted their regular col-
laborator Steve Jordan, 65, to take his
place. It was a similar situation in 1969
when, weeks after sacking the original
Rolling Stone Brian Jones and two days
after the multi-instrumentalist’s death
aged 27, the band performed at a free
concert in Hyde Park.
For the Stones the show always goes
on, but they have mellowed with age.
After two lengthy periods of estrange-
ment between Jagger and Richards there
is harmony. They first fell out in the
Eighties, when Jagger was devoting
much of his time to his solo
career. They sparred again after
the publication in 2010 of Rich-
ards’s autobiography, Life,
in which he wrote sneer-
ingly of the singer’s “tiny
todger”.
So what’s changed?
“Getting more mature,”
Jagger says, before realising
that’s a rum thing to say
about septuagenarians. “I’m
not joking. It’s true, and it’s
taken a long time. We’re in a
very immature business. I’m
under no illusions about that.
But it doesn’t mean that you
have to be immature.”
Wood, with his Mr Punch-
like features, concurs. “We’ve
matured among ourselves.
The attitudes within the bandare no longer throwaway. It used to be
all ‘Oh, crawl back under your rock’. I
had many years of ‘Shut up, you’re the
new boy’, that kind of feeling, but now
every tour has a changed demeanour.
Mick’s been through so many different
moods and images in his life, and he’s
come back to this really warm person.
Keith too.”
Richards joins the love-in. “I’m
amazed by how tight we all are. Mick
and I are still firmly at the reins.” A
beat. “We still don’t know what the
reins do, though.”
Of course this tour is happening
when anyone from the living (Abba) to
the dead (Michael Jackson) can be
replaced on stage by a hologram. Surely
the Stones are aware of questions being
raised about the spectacle — and
indeed appropriateness — of rockANDREW TIMMS. INSET: GETTY IMAGES4 22 May 2022