“I don’t feel connected”: The one band Mick Jagger never enjoyed watching playing
You haven’t truly experienced Mick Jagger unless you’ve seen The Rolling Stones in a live setting.
He is a phenomenal singer on record, but looking at any of the videos that the band have done throughout their half-century together, Jagger truly has mastered every single move that he ever made whenever he got the crowd whipped up when singing tunes like ‘Satisfaction’. He was born to be onstage in many respects, but having that much experience also means knowing when someone wasn’t giving it their all like they were supposed to.
Then again, some bands need to take some liberties whenever they perform live. The Beatles had left the road because they couldn’t play their songs live anymore, and even when Queen was playing some of the greatest songs of all time, there was a good chance that they weren’t going to be playing the entire operatic section of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ whenever they got to that portion of the show. That’s understandable, but Jagger was still going to have problems with those who took too many shortcuts.
For instance, the idea of using backing tracks wasn’t exactly the worst thing in the world, unless they weren’t used sparingly. Most people in the 1980s had already made some of the greatest synth-rock records ever made, but when Jagger looked at a band like Frankie Goes to Hollywood, there was no reason to think that they were going to light up the stage the same way that Jagger did.
He came from the school where bands still played their instruments and gave the audience a show, and for a brief moment in time, it looked like rock was going back in that same direction in the late 1970s. Disco was rearing its head, but punk was also on the other side of New York and London, reminding everyone what made rock and roll so visceral when it began in the pre-Beatles days.
But even though the Sex Pistols had a lot more flash behind their delivery, the Clash seemed to be on a mission whenever they made a record. They wanted to show the world what really mattered in rock and roll, but as far as Jagger could tell, all they were doing was playing the same kind of music that he had heard when he had first started putting tunes together with Keith Richards.
The Clash definitely had a few retro tunes in their catalogue like ‘Brand New Cadillac’, but that wasn’t enough to impress Jagger, saying, “I don’t feel connected with bands like the Clash, the bands that still play every night. I can only see them as repeats of everything that happened before. I think it’s a bit unfortunate, too, but I think that no one would disagree with me. I mean, I saw bands like that in 1959. It’s the same old thing done slightly differently.”
Jagger had even more choice words for the likes of Elvis Costello and The Specials, but it’s not like The Clash were in the music business for all of the flash, either. They wanted to prove that music could mean a lot more than a few chords, and considering how many chances they took on their records, they were willing to push themselves in any genre they wanted to, whether that was going back to the old days of rock and roll or embracing everything from dub to reggae music on Sandinista.
Nothing was off the table, and that was far more adventurous to them than worrying about livening up their stage act. There were no frills on anything that they ever played, and while Jagger saw that as a sign of weakness whenever they played, all that mattered to them was to find converts at their shows who were convinced to pick up guitars of their own because of what they did.
