MICK Jagger: Primitive Cool & All

He walks into the room radiating presence in an offhand sort of way, and people cower. He just looks so disconcertingly ... well, Jaggeresque.

He’s rich and thin, elegantly scruffy— turquoise T-shirt, black & white striped baggy shirt, black pants. I don’t remember the shoes, but if they’d walked on bloody water, they couldn’t have gotten a more reverential response.

Efficient and self-possessed, he glides into a chair, his pose somewhere between businessman and cat, eyes darting around the suite like guppies taking everything in. They’re a bit red around the edges, the eyes. He was up half the night before—but nothing degenerate. Degeneracy is pretty much out these days, though he still likes the odd nightclub and still loves to dance. He was nursing a cold and rehearsing for a tour.

By the time you read this, Mick Jagger should have started his solo world tour, if he works out some personnel problems. As anyone who’s picked up a newspaper knows, Mick won’t be touring with the Stones. He’s just released a solo album, his second, Primitive Cool. It’s miles more interesting than the first one, and the best thing to have come out of a Stone in years. Jagger is here—a plush rented hotel room overlooking London’s Hyde Park, just around the corner from the even plusher house Jagger, Jerry and Co. have rented for the trip—to promote it. If he has to, he’ll mention the Stones, but he’d rather not. Other than that, he’s charming, camp, street-cred, sophisticated, scornful and petulant—as Jaggery as you could hope for.

He doesn’t look at all middle-aged.

• • •

Have you come across male menopause yet? What’s it like and does it bother you?

(Laughs) No. I’m feeling very grown-up. I’ve been feeling grown-up a long time. It takes some adjusting to, but I think I’ve done it already.

Twenty-five years ago, could you have eve/ thought you’d be like you are today: a health-conscious, drug-free, cricket-watching family man?

I did all those things 25 years ago—I was health-conscious then and I used to watch cricket. I used to play cricket—and I used to play rugby. More physical! (He squirms like a drag-queen.) I don’t know, when you’re 19 you never imagine what’s going to happen to you in 25 years. That was never thought of.

. Would you want to be a teenager now?

(A few moments’ hesitation) I wouldn’t mind at all. The only thing that’s different is you wouldn’t get a job as easily. And the sexual thing is a little bit off. Apart

from that I wouldn’t mind. You don’t find this a for teenagers then, compared conservative fo your time romantic youth?

Was it romantic? No, I think it was rather—well, it was pretty much pushed to the limits, a lot of it, but hasn’t every era got that? You still see people pushing it to the limits. Actually, I think there is a tremendous similarity in this and then, because both periods are periods when people wanted money and wanted consumer goods really badly. It was the first time people were able to get them. People wanted. I still think that’s very much with us, that consumerism. There was a period maybe in the ’70s when people weren’t, but now it’s OK to be. You can do anything for money now. A band will get one hit record, and then they’ll do an ad for sodas.

When you were young you seemed too angry to be out buying color TVs. You always seemed so angry. Was that just a pose then?

No, it wasn’t a pose. I don’t know, when you’re 19 or whatever, that’s the time when you want to kick over everything. And you’d better do it then instead of when you’re 40 because it’s not very seemly—a 40-year-old kicking over things. They’ve got to be the ones who’ve kind of learned from experience, and people who are 19 have got to be the ones who are questing for new experience., You have teenagers of your own, don’t

you?

Yeah, 15 and 16.

And they should be rebelling against people in their 40s, people like their father, for instance! Do you find yourself squirming in the father mode?

Well, you have to get into a bit of a “father mode” because you can’t just let them do everything. You have to kind of channel them a little bit. It’s very difficult being a father because you don’t want to let go of your responsibility and authority and so on—but, on the other hand, they have to find their own feet.

Most parents get to hide more from their kids than you do. You pick up the Sunday newspapers these past few weeks and the magazines have interviews with Marianne Faithfull talking about your sex life and drugs and stuff. So you’re obviously not going to be able to say to your kids, “You can’t do drugs. You mustn’t have sex.”

Yeah, but on the other hand, see, they know they can ask me about certain experiences that some other parents don’t have or some other parents (laughs) might want to conceal from their children. They know they can ask me, or they know that I know, so they can’t pull the wool over my eyes.

What happens when they bring their friends home?

I don’t know. They look at me a bit shy sometimes, some of them. Some of them (insinuatingly) not so shy. It’s a very narrow plank to walk for me as a parent, because, like you say, it’s not really normal. They go to a restaurant, and there’s a video on the wall, and I’m on the video prancing around, and it’s like “Oh, there he is ... ” God, it must be embarrassing!

I don’t really like to talk about them in too many interviews because they read it and they say, “What did you say that about me for?” I say, “I didn’t really say that.” “Yes you did!” So I try to avoid them. Do you keep them up on what’s hip or do they keep you up on what’s hip?

Both. I like to listen to what they do and what they like and so on. It reminds you, you know, of when you were like 15 or 16 and how different their life is. And they’re girls anyway, so it’s very different being a girl than being a guy.

You’ve been called many things in your time, not all of them complimentary. What would you say is the biggest mis-. conception about you?

Well, the earliest one was the great misconception like when you behave really loutishly, people are always surprised when you can actually string more than two words together. I don’t know, I’ve kind of lost track of the misconceptions. And in England, you have to be so many different things. You’re the dope-taking fiend one minute, and you re the loving father the next. And they can never quite make up their mind which one you really are. It’s quite hilarious, really, because they want to keep both angles open. Your life is an angle for the press. They go, “Mick Jagger, dope-taking fiend, was seen walking his two children in Hyde Park. Does this mean you’ve taken on a new—?” You see what I mean? They only see life as angles. They can’t see you as a rounded person.

I remember a David Bowie interview where he said people were surprised that he ate, drank, smoked, farted. They didn’t know what to expect. They expected a Martian.

Yes, well David used to give them a Martian quite a lot. And / used to give them a lout. So you’re your own worst enemy sometimes. It’s much easier to live up to the fantasy, but it’s also very dangerous because you can be in danger of becoming that person.

Normal human beings—I exclude you. . .

Thank you!

... might have the odd snapshot of them in the past, or they might run into an old friend once in a while who might remind them about some past incident, profound or embarrassing as it might be. But your past has been documented exhaustively and keeps intruding into the present. Just this past fortnight I saw an old interview with you on TV, some old clips, heard a panel of celebrities discussing you on a latenight chat show, and read Marianne Faithfull’s opinion of you as a lover.

Yeah, it’s very unsettling.

What does it do to you?

Mostly amusement. (Smiles, then frowns). I find it very hard to take it. See, that’s why I addressed it in that song ‘Primitive Cool’—it was a bit tongue-incheek, but I addressed some of those questions. I saw a show on Channel Four where I kept coming up—who was it kept bringing me up? Germaine Greer. It was hilarious. (He actually sounds embarrassed.) She kept bringing me up, and it was like she was talking about somebody else, you know. One disassociates a little bit. I think that’s the natural way to deal with it. But then I have to be kind of introspective sometimes—when people ask me questions, I have to actually think about them. It really needs a lot of effort to intellectualize them and to give proper, not just glib, answers. But even if we had the whole afternoon, you’d find such different emotions. You might say something, and then think, “That’s a load of crap! I was just having a good time!” You’d find a lot of ambivalent attitudes. This is getting serious! (Laughs)

OK then, what’s Primitive Cool? Is it a kind of hip version of the Noble Savage? Who’s got it, and have you?

Definitely, dear! (high camp voice) In spades! That’s a good one. It is sort of the Noble Savage idea, but it came from the thing about the ’50s and how it was always called cool music or cool jazz. The word “cool” or variations on it like “chill” still remain in vogue today. It never went away. It’s the oldest hip word that I know. It’s just a play on words because one’s the opposite of the other.

I heard that you weren’t that pleased with your first solo album, She’s The Boss, that you thought it wasn’t really distinctive enough, that is, un-Stonesy enough.

Well, you could say that. In a certain way, it was a very quick project, and I didn’t spend a lot of thought on it. I just wanted to go in and do a quite upbeat album very quickly, which I did. Because I’d come off the Stones album which was quite heavy—Undercover and so on— and I wanted to be upbeat, I ended up being a bit too flippant if anything.

It’s all very well you being flippant about an album and tossing off a quick one that doesn’t mean that much to you, but the rest of us expect a meisterwerk at the very least.

(Laughs) I know. That’s very hard. One has to take it as it comes in a way. You can only do what you can do, and I’m a great believer in doing what you do. I like to put an album out every year if I can— I’ve done that more or less for 20 years now. And sometimes (laughs), some years aren’t as good as others. But I’d rather do that than wait, because the more you wait, the more people expect. Like a fan, I waited for that Stevie Wonder album, In Square Circle, and that was five years being made. And when it came out, I was kind of disappointed—not because it was a bad album, but because it had been so long coming. I was going “Well yeah, but it could have come out in a year! I’ve heard all this!”

But the difference is that after 20 years of Stones albums, 20 years of democratic decisions repressing the real, secret Mick Jagger or whatever, your first solo album should have knocked us all off our feet, changed the face of western civilization as we know it, and instead it sounded, well, Stonesy.

Yeah, but like I said, it was very much a learning experience. You’re never really pleased a hundred percent with anything you do. At the time you’ve done it, it seems fantastic mostly. And then afterwards, when time goes by and you get a little bit of an overview, you can see what you did wrong. I played it—I don’t play the record but I played it because I wanted to hear what it was like—and there’s some things OK on it. But I think this is much better. For one thing, it’s much more mature and more thought-out. I don’t think this one sounds like the first one. It’s going to have similarities to what I’ve done before, naturally, because I’m the same songwriter, so the writing style is going to be similar.

And you’re the same singer. You can’t transform into Otis Redding overnight.

No you can’t, unfortunately, metamorphosize. Though having said that, I think the singing is somewhat different. I think that the music is a bit more stretched than, say, on the last Stones album.

Do you find it easy, this making albums business?

It depends what sort of album you want to make. If you just say, “Give me two months and I’ll produce you an album,” it’s very easy. But if you say, “I really want to make this one”—if you’ve a clear idea of what it’s going to be, then that’s difficult. Because that’s like translating the imagery or music in your head onto a finished record and getting people to play what you want but within their terms. Because if they’re good musicians, they’re not just going to play your interpretation. It’s difficult because you’re being a perfectionist because you’ve heard what it should be like. A song like “War Baby”—I heard it in my head completely, so now I have to do it which is very difficult. You’re banging yourself around. Most people who write—if you write a book or you write music or anything—it’s hard unloading this and getting it to at least an approximation of what you want.

I produced this band called Living Color in New York, a hard rock band, four street kids from Brooklyn. But there it’s easy because it’s their first album, they’ve got all this material that’s never been recorded. But you can only do that once. Their second album is going to be much more difficult. So yeah, it is more difficult as you go on. But it isn’t any more difficult than it was last year. I don’t find that I run out of ideas.

So you never wake up in the night in a panic thinking, “I can’t do it anymore! The others were a fluke”?

No, I don’t think so. Like I say, I just do what I do in that year, and it’s either good or bad or indifferent.

What is your idea of a really good song? Something you can hum in the bath or something that changes the world?

You have to do both. I think you want to do songs that are pretty light-hearted, but also then you’ve got to balance that out with something that’s a bit more serious. But pop music’s very transitory, so it’s got to have that la la la-y thing about it, a singable quality.

The Stones’ music used to do both. Certainly your songs were blamed for drugs, violence, sex, crime, the weather, you name it!

I think like all culture, no one sinale

song or band or anything—give the time processes and so on, the cultural influence or different kinds of music—is quite great. But just taking one individual thing, it’s not. You’re part of a movement, if you want, and it’s changing slightly the minds of some people as you’re giving them pleasure or whatever. So you’re adding to the kind of cultural soup. You’re part of it, small or large.

You were large.

Yeah, but then you get people coming along who add large bits and people who add medium bits and those that keep sort of chipping away at it. One can’t all be big fish all the time.

Does pop music nowadays have the importance it had, or seemed to have, back then?

Oh yeah, sure, it’s the same thing. Three of the songs on the new album were co-written with Dave Stewart of Eurythmics. How did you link up, and how was the partnership?

Well, we met at some “do” or other I the work he was aoing, DUI I aian T Know—you never really know with people how much they actually do and how much Annie’s doing and so on! But I liked him very much and we got on—which is important, because it’s nice to work with people you have fun with. And the thing I like about Dave is we work very quickly, like writing the songs, banging them down, and off down to the pub! It was a very kind of instant thing. I think the songs we wrote together were melodically different from what / would write and to what Dave is writing. He’s very pop-oriented, more than me. I’m much more kind of R&B. You find this out when you work with somebody like Dave, you know—how different you are. I find some of Dave’s ideas a bit difficult to take, but when they actually work, they work wonderfully! He’s one of those people that throws 12 ideas at you, and you can’t use all 12, so you have to be the one that picks them out.

So it’s like you’re producing Dave Stewart?

I am producing Dave, that’s absolutely it! I had to be the sensible one. Which is not always a role I relish.

But one you got landed with—-like In the Stones?

Yeah. I got landed with that.

You’re getting ready for a world tour now... (Ed. Note: Jagger’s tour has been pushed back to early ’88.)

Yeah, well I don’t know quite how long it will go on. If I enjoy it it’ll go on. If I find it too much like hard work {laughs). I’ll stop. It sounds great now but after a few months of it you go “Oh God, I can’t go on ... I” We’re going to do some dates in America, but we’ll start off in Europe. They’re going to be quite small gigs though, probably in theatres.

What I was going to ask was, how come you’re touring when Keith Richards has been telling everyone that it’s your fault the Stones is over because you refuse to go out on the road?

Yeah, well I didn’t want to go out with the Rolling Stones because I don’t think bands should go out when they’re in the middle of a big argument. My lesson was learned when I went to see the Who on their last American tour, that period when they weren’t speaking to each other. And I swore that I would never do a tour like that. You have to be in harmony to live on the road together, otherwise it shows on the stage. You can’t avoid each other on tour, and I couldn’t face it. When you’re not getting on and you’re screaming at each other, it’s silly to start. What happened? Did you just wear each other out after so long?

I think we had enough. It’s a long time. Is this it then? Mick Jagger solo artist, no more Stones?

Things will hopefully calm down, and we can do it some more. I hope we will do some more touring—not at the moment, but I hope that we will in the future. Ask just about any current rock singer these days who they impersonated in front of the mirror and they’ll say Mick Jagger...

Yeah, it even comes up in books. I just read this book about a guy who stands in front of a mirror imitating me—a spy book. And there was another one recently.

It’s kind of like you’ve ceased to be a person and entered the language in general. Does it feel odd or what?

Yeah, that really is odd—because it’s not just music, you’ve gone into ordinary parlance. Like, did you know I’m a name in the rhyming dictionary? Not a book I use very often! (laughs) There’s not that many rhymes of it. There’s dagger—and there I am! ®