Mick: The Wild Life and Mad Genius of Mick Jagger by Christopher Andersen, review
It’s not only rock ’n’ roll but lurid tales of gender-bending sex that dominate an explosive new biography of Mick Jagger, says Helen Brown.
Mick Jagger: Gender bender Photo: James Fortune.
‘I think he is like a sex vampire,” concludes Natasha Terry, the sex therapist
Mick Jagger consulted towards the end of the Nineties, after Jerry Hall had
initiated divorce proceedings. “Being with all these different people makes
him feel young and gives him all this energy. He can’t stay faithful to one
woman.” Of course, she ended up having sex with the Rolling Stones frontman
too.
Over the course of Christopher Andersen’s bonk-busting biography, pretty much
everybody does, from bandmate Brian Jones through fellow pop stars (David
Bowie, Carly Simon) and a Who’s Who of leggy young lovelies (Angelina Jolie,
Carla Bruni, Rudolf Nureyev) to the rather overwhelmed nanny Hall hired to
watch their four children.
For 32-year-old Claire Houseman, the experience with Jumping Jack was over in
a flash. While Hall was in bed with baby Gabriel (the smell of Hall’s breast
milk made her husband nauseous), Houseman went to make coffee and Jagger
perfunctorily popped her up on to the kitchen counter, claimed his droit du
seigneur (“The earth didn’t move or anything like that. I just thought to
myself, ‘God, is that it?’”) and dismissed her with a kiss on the nose and a
casual “OK, babe” before returning to his wife, leaving her to finish making
coffee.
To be fair, he probably didn’t put in much effort with domestic minions such
as Houseman as, for Jagger, sex seems to be all about power and conquest. I
don’t think his biographer uses the word, but I began to think of him as
“mounting” people.
Born in Dartford in 1943, beneath the “crossfire hurricane” of the German
bombers, Jagger is the son of gym teacher Joe (from whom he inherited his
unstinting work ethic and obsession with physical fitness) and
class-conscious, Australian-born Eva (from whom he inherited his
social-climbing drive).
He was a fairly well-behaved boy but a competitive prima donna, smashing up
other children’s sandcastles when he felt he wasn’t the centre of attention
and using his younger brother as a punchbag. Although he attended the same
primary school as his future songwriting partner, Keith Richards (he was
popular while awkward, big-eared Richards was bullied), he passed the
11-plus and thrived at grammar school (where he bit off the tip of his
tongue playing basketball, creating that distinctive voice). Richards failed
and slunk into delinquency at the local tech.
While he may have impressed his teachers with the intelligence that would go on to ensure he kept his band grossing millions while paying the minimum of tax, Jagger wasn’t an instant hit with the girls. Although he boasted of cornering them in the school darkroom, Andersen quotes a female contemporary: “We all thought he was kind of ugly, really.” But when he turned 16 his mother became an Avon lady and Jagger found a sure-fire way of luring the ladies back home: inviting them to try out samples from her case. A date from that time has happy memories of painting a delighted young Mick in lipstick and mascara like “one of the girls”.
If Andersen’s biography has any sort of agenda, it is to out his subject’s ground-breaking gender-bending lifestyle and imagery to the fans who may not have clocked this side of the man referred to by Richards as either “Brenda” or “Her Majesty”. He reminds us that Jagger’s wild performances grew out of a “wicked parody of Marilyn [Monroe] consciously mimicking her style – the swivel-hipped walk, the pouty lips, the playful hair toss”. Whereas the Beatles set the girls screaming, the Stones wanted to get the boys revved up too – and they did.
They quickly graduated from the filthy flat in Edith Grove, Chelsea, (where they shared a bed for warmth) to an international jet-set lifestyle. Jagger could play the guttersnipe one minute and hobnob with Princess Margaret the next (much to the chagrin of the Queen, who continually vetoed Tony Blair’s requests to have him knighted and checked herself in for a knee operation when he did kneel before the sword).
It wasn’t all a jolly orgy of sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll. The Stones treated people (women in particular) appallingly. Beyond the heartbreak and misogyny, Brian Jones was beating up girls so badly at one point that the roadies broke his ribs. People were killed at the Altamont rock festival where Jagger thought it would suit his image (and save money) to hire Hell’s Angels for crowd-control duties. The motorbike gang later – allegedly – tried to blow up the whole band.
Making no pretence to be a music-based biography, Andersen’s book concentrates on the lurid tabloid dramas. You have to be fairly high-minded not to be curious. You don’t emerge from this book liking Mick Jagger. But you don’t expect too. “Obviously,” he has said himself, “I’m no paragon of virtue.” He comes across as selfish and vain.
You feel sorry for his children and his lovers. But I’m sure he doesn’t care if his fans “like” him or not. They will still buy their tickets for the next tour (if Richards’s arthritis permits) because we all want to dance with the devil. Even if we don’t all want to go home with him afterwards.
Mick: The Wild Life and Mad Genius of Mick Jagger
by Christopher Andersen
