According to Patti Smith, Mick Jagger is the best dancer since Nijinsky. Well I ain’t ever seen Nijinsky dance (though I did see him win the Derby) but I saw Mick Jagger for the first time last week and he didn’t even dance as well as Billy Preston, who slid across the stage to humiliate whitey just like JamesBrown on the T.A.M.I. show all those years ago. Patti Smith, meanwhile, didn’t dance at all but stumbled about like a little girl at someone else’s party who wants everyone to look at her but hopes that no-one will notice how hard she’s trying.

I hadn’t intended to go and see the Stones at all—getting tickets involved too many risks. Either I’d get one and they’d be dreadful and that’s what I’d remember all my life, or I wouldn’t and I’d resent even more the gracious way the Stones returned to Britain, kindly benefactors, and expected us mugginses to be dumbly loyal all over again. When the Stones are on tour the hacks crawl round them like maggots round a dead cat and the figures come pouring out: number of tax advisors, cash spent on Keith’s guitar tuner, pints of Mick’s mascara, total loss on the tour . . . We’re awed and honoured and forgot about the boring old album, that noone I knew bought, in the buzz about the tickets. A masterstroke! Everyone who wanted a ticket for anywhere had to send to one central place where Mick himself drew the lucky winners from Percy, his inflatable phallus! Six million applications, wow! And thousands of people wondering why they’d got three tickets for Stafford when they’d asked for two for Leicester and millions more wondering why Princess Margaret is always so bloody lucky in the lotteries of life.

My friend Kevin got lucky for Leicester and that’s where we went. No famous people there (except Eric Clapton who joined the band on stage at the end and confused everyone, Jagger included—who is this bum?), but the friendliest rock audience I’ve ever seen and everyone, me included, dressed in denim from head to foot. I spent the Meters’ dull set trying to work this out. Like, in England, audiences dress up to look like the stars and I’ve never seen Jagger, or Richard come to that, in slightly smelly jeans. In the end I decided that what we were dressed up as (all of us, and we were aged from ten to forty), was the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll.

We were right about the Stones and Jagger, in his silk pyjamas and general ponciness, was wrong. The Stones were the best rock 'n’ roll band I’ve ever seen and they were hard and harsh and nonsense-free. Keith Richard is back in his chunky lead role and Charlie Watts was wonderful beyond words (I believe, like a lotta Stones fans, that Charlie Watts is over fifty years old and as hard and wizened as a hazelnut. He was playing rock ‘n’ roll before Jagger was born and will be long after Jagger’s gone up to the great gossip column in the sky. He’s my only hero and like Wilson, the super-athlete of my comic book youth, he lives in a cave in Yorkshire and will never die).

And so we sat there in contented gratitude, for most of us the first and only time we’d see such marvels, and Mick Jagger struggled to please an audience that was so pleased already that you could hear it purr. He swung on a rope, took his clothes off, rode his phallus, threw water and confetti and missed the falsetto notes of “Fool To Cry,” which the audience sang for him. He acted the scamp, rubbed arse with Billy Preston and shoved Bill Wyman out of his way. When, you’re fronting the greatest band in the history of civilization there’s only one comparison, and that’s Muhammad Ali and Jagger can’t cut it anymore. He danced on his heels, not his toes and had to take a rest. He hadn’t worked out how to slow down gracefully.

Not that the audience cared. They tolerated Jagger’s antics like his band does and, anyway, Ian Stewart—check trousers and white shirt pumping effacingly away behind the piano—is the Stones’ spirit of rock ‘n’ roll. All the calculations and manipulations that surround the group are forgotten before the innocence of an audience that believes that the Stones stay true. The greater Jagger’s cynicism, thegreater the disarming effect of his audience’s trust. He’s on TV and my wife glows: “Isn’t he lovely?” He isn’t, and he pouts, but there’s nothing he can dp about it.

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This became clear at Patti Smith’s London debut two days later. I’d expeqted New York knowingness and I got the naive innocence of the ultimate Stones fan. She rapped like a California freshman and remembered Keith Relf to an audience that didn’t and couldn’t care less. She honored rock ‘n’ roll and the men shouted “Show us yer tits!” and a woman yelled “Forget your image, Patti, just be yourself!” She thanked “you guys” and the woman booed. Her band was shit-scared and a corrupt European audience, there for the occasion, weren’t about to be saved by rock ‘n’ roll. It wasn’t a good gig but it was a moving one because there was no way that Patti would be disillusioned.

I’m not exactly sure what it is that Patti thinks rock ‘n’ roll will save, just like I don’t know why the Stones' Leicester audience was so pleasant, but it’s to do with the fact that Ian Hunter pours out his confused and unilluminating thoughts and expects us to care and I do and that my favorite record at present is Graham Parker and Rumour’s Howlin’ Wind. Rumour are old pubrockers like Brinsley Schwartz and Parker is England’s answer to Bruce Springsteen, with his intense use of rock cliches as the band flow easily behind. Generous music and suddenly people care about each other and rock really is a means of communication. And so the decadent Patti Smith is a nice young girl on her first British date, and so the Stones’ crowd helps us find a seat together and wonders if we can see.