Rock: Rock legend and Stones frontman Mick Jagger turns 78

The corona pandemic has also ordered Mick Jagger to take an unwanted break. Now the Stones should go back on tour.

“I’m so excited to be back on stage and want to thank everyone for their patience,” said Jagger a few days ago. On September 26, the “No Filter” tour is to be continued after a corona-related interruption in St. Louis on the Mississippi. Before that, the Stones frontman can celebrate his birthday: on July 26th, the rocker will be 78 years old – and not a bit quiet.

How he fared in the pandemic, Jagger expresses with the recently released song “Easy Sleazy”, which he recorded together with Foo Fighters front man and ex-Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl. In the piece, the musicians target life in the pandemic as well as shrill conspiracy theories in a satirical and critical way. And it shows: The rock veteran is still bursting with energy today.

Mike Jagger was born on July 26, 1943. The mother worked occasionally as an Avon consultant, the father was a physical education teacher at a school and allegedly a fanatical fitness guru. His incomparable career as a musician began in a sense with a train ride from the small town of Dartford in Kent to the pulsating metropolis of London in the early 1960s.

At the train station Jagger, at that time already a student at the London School of Economics, met Keith Richards, who was initially only interested in his Chuck Berry records. But there was one thing that connected the sheltered Jagger with the lower-class boy Richard from the start: The music that flowed mainly from the USA at the time – Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley and the blues of Muddy Waters, which created a whole new subculture among the people Adolescents grew up.

The common train ride brought the two together – and marks the beginning of an amazing band career to this day. Jagger already had a small band at the time, Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys. Richards impressed with his Chuck Berry solos, which he played perfectly on the guitar. As “Rolling Stones” they finally had their first appearance together with Brian Jones on July 12, 1962 together with Alexis Corner at the Marquee Club in London. Drummer Charlie Watts also joined shortly afterwards.

The first joint song compositions, such as “I Can’t Get no Satisfaction” in 1965, finally shaped the Stones’ profile against the Beatles – and achieved a huge success that reached as far as the USA. It quickly became clear that Jagger would become the flagship and front man of the Stones with his extroverted stage appearances.

Unlike his band mates, however, after a few attempts with LSD and hashish, he largely stayed away from drugs. He preferred self-control. The discovery of amphetamines, which allegedly belonged to Marianne Faithfull, brought Jagger and his bandmates to prison for a short time during a raid.

The fact that the music scene changed radically in the 80s with Madonna or Michael Jackson was what Jagger finally took as an opportunity to go his own way. “She’s the Boss” was his first solo album in 1985, followed by his own tour in 1987, in which he also appeared with Tina Turner. That brought the antipode and sworn companion Richards completely angry. He saw the solo efforts as a serious attempt to bury the Stones, he describes in his biography. But two years later, the two finally left even this very serious argument behind.

It was far more turbulent for Jagger, who meanwhile also romped about in the film business, in his private life. The former scandal rocker and later ennobled Briton had a total of eight children; he was married twice. There were also supposedly thousands of lovers.

Daughter Jade comes from his first marriage (1971 to 1980) with Bianca Pérez-Mora Macías. Jagger has four children from his second marriage (1990 to 1999) to Jerry Hall, with whom he had lived since 1977 – and who in her memoir a good ten years ago settled accounts with the “Schürzenjäger”. She would have got her husband off drugs, but Jagger would have replaced cocaine with sex, she writes.

Jagger became a father for the eighth time at the end of 2016, together with the 40-year-old ballet dancer Melanie Hamrick. For her 34th birthday, Hamrick just posted one of the very rare family photos with four-year-old son Devereux on Instagram a few days ago.