“Slightly androgynous and very sexy”: The frontman Pete Townshend thought could compete with Mick Jagger
I remember watching a John Mulaney stand-up special once where he talked about his time on Saturday Night Live, and specifically the moment he met Mick Jagger.
As the comic walked up and down the stage, he reflected on how demanding a character Jagger was when it came to writing scripts, and answered the oft-asked, ‘Is he nice?’, simply with the comment that you can’t really judge how nice or not nice someone is when they’ve been removed from the real world for so long, adding, “His name’s Mick Jagger! That’s his name!”
While he was making a joke, he certainly had a point. It certainly begs to imagine what it must be like to wake up as Mick Jagger every morning, to look in the mirror and see an ageing rock legend staring back at you. You would think it’d give you the confidence to take on the world, but it turns out that Jagger gets nervous and intimidated just like the rest of us.
His bandmate and friend, Keith Richards, once said that one of the most memorable times he saw Jagger intimidated was when he was faced with David Bowie, whose flamboyancy, creativity and overall dynamic stage performance rubbed him the wrong way, leaving him worried he couldn’t live up to the Starman’s shine. Richards never understood why the Rolling Stones frontman felt so small next to Bowie.
“He watched what David Bowie was doing and wanted to do it,” he said, “Bowie was a major, major attraction. Somebody had taken Mick on in the costume and bizarreness department”.
The guitarist continued, “The fact is, Mick could deliver ten times more than Bowie in just a T-shirt and a pair of jeans, singing ‘I’m a Man’. Why would you want to be anything else if you’re Mick Jagger? […] Is being the greatest entertainer in show business not enough?”
Because Jagger was such a dominating force within the world of entertainment, there are a lot of people who compare others to him, making him the benchmark, the standard that every good front person is held up against, and so the majority of artists out there will likely have someone they compare to him because he is so universally recognised as the person to beat. Pete Townshend touched upon this once, as he said that while Mick Jagger was the ultimate frontman, there is another musician who he feels comes close to the Rolling Stones’ lead, and this was Ray Davies.
The Kinks were one of the most pioneering bands in rock music, as they were capable of taking the sound of R&B and blues and injecting it with the ferocity that soon became synonymous with rock. In addition to this stellar sound, they also had the stage presence to back it up. Townshend specifically focused on Ray and how much he eclipsed other band leaders, so much so that he may have been better than Mick Jagger.
“Ray Davies was almost as appealing as Mick Jagger, and for the same reasons: he was delicate, slightly androgynous and very sexy,” he said, “The Kinks were playing quite a few of the same R&B songs that we did, and they somehow managed to be poetic, wistful, witty, wry and furiously petulant all at once. Along with the Stones, I will always regard them as a primary influence.”
