'The Night Of The Living Dead' Comes To Glastonbury

Who are you calling grandad? Mick Jagger's ostentatious dancing dominated the electrifying performance

By Brian Viner 

The last time the Rolling Stones wowed a West Country crowd quite like they did at the Glastonbury Festival on Saturday night was when they played the Stonehenge opening ceremony in 2300BC.

That, at any rate, was the joke doing the rounds on Twitter late on Saturday, not that you could find anyone at Glastonbury making cracks about superannuated rock stars.

Mick Jagger might be a knight of the realm who turns 70 this month, and Keith Richards might now sport something resembling an old man’s paunch, but they, Charlie Watts and Ronnie Wood (at 66, the baby of the band, and also the new boy, having joined as recently as 1975), put on a show that the teenagers in the audience will tell their grandchildren about.

Showing the kids how it's done: The Rolling Stones performed on the Pyramid stage to a euphoric crowd of more than 170,000

Voices of experience: The band has an aggregate age of 276. Front man Mick Jagger (second left) turns 70 this month and Ronnie Wood (left) is the baby of the band at 66

 

The grandparents in the audience –and there were plenty of them, too – probably already have.

Glastonbury has hosted lots of huge headline acts in the 43 years since Marc Bolan, the first of them, set foot a little gingerly on Michael Eavis’s dairy farm.

The admission in 1970 was £1, which included free milk from Eavis’s herd. Tickets now cost over £200, and if you want to drink milk, you buy your own. 

In the intervening years, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, U2 and Oasis have all performed there.

But never the Stones, making this the headline act of all headline acts, before a euphoric crowd of more than 170,000.

Not even Glastonbury had seen anything like it.

By the time the band came on at around 9.45pm, a circus contortionist would have been hard pressed to get within 500 yards of the festival’s main Pyramid stage.

Beforehand, as a glorious Somerset day cooled to dusk, there was almost as much apprehension as excitement among festival-goers.

Could the Stones, with an aggregate age of 276, possibly live up to their own mythology? 

Squeezed next to me, so close that we had to synchronise our jigging like a pair of middle-aged backing singers, was a retired businessman from Croydon, Andy, who first saw the Stones at the Red Lion pub in Sutton, Surrey, in 1963. 

He saw them again at the famous gig in Hyde Park in 1969, two days after the sudden death of Brian Jones, but this was the first time since. Could they possibly be as good as he remembered?

Stamina: Jagger's dynamic performance lasted more than two hours and made some of his fellow band mates look tired

Timeless: Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards entertained teenagers, parents and grandparents on Saturday night

 

Mature: There was no disguising Ronnie Wood (left) and Keith Richard's (right) advanced years as they put in a historic performance on the Pyramid Stage

They were better. In part, because the amplification is so much more sophisticated now.

But also because when these elderly men take the stage, the years drop away as if spirited by a Brown Sugar-loving genie. 

Close up, of course, there’s no disguising their age. Richards looks bizarrely as if he could be John McEnroe’s raddled grandfather, while Watts, the drummer, his grey hair politely coiffed, looks like everyone’s auntie Daphne.

Throughout, like auntie Daphne at a family party, he wore a benign half-smile and seemed relieved to be sitting down.

As for Wood, there are pickled walnuts less wrinkly. But none of these men got where they were on Saturday, without incredible musical machismo and supreme stagecraft.

And then there is Jagger. He pranced, he strutted, he pouted, he bounced, sometimes like a glorious parody of himself, but at all times with the manic energy and enthusiasm of the teenager he hasn’t been for half a century.

Gimme Shelter: Keith Richards looked tired at times but enjoyed solo moments that displayed his renowned guitar skills off to their best

 

Enthusiasm: Jagger sings as powerfully and charismatically as ever and struts and prances with the attitude (and figure) of a teenager

It was a genuinely remarkable performance, made possible by a metabolism – or maybe it’s a starvation diet – that keeps him as skinny and narrow-hipped as a boy.

The celebrated lips have become the emblem of the Rolling Stones, but it could just as easily be the schoolboy hips.

At the end of a set lasting well over two hours, which began and ended with two of their greatest crowd-pleasers, Jumpin’ Jack Flash and (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, Jagger looked as if he was ready for more.

Richards, by contrast, looked as if he was ready for a warm malted drink and a nurse. If a lifetime of drug abuse hasn’t undermined his stamina, maybe the increasing girth finally has.

The poor old boy looked paunch-drunk.

How does Jagger manage it? His fellow knight McCartney has been rather found out in recent years, the passing decades having reduced his more melodic voice to an unconvincing waver. 

But Jagger shouts just as powerfully, tunefully and charismatically as he always did.

His Honky Tonk Women has stood the acid tests of time and of audience appreciation.

Much has been made of Jagger’s comment to John Humphrys on the Today programme earlier on Saturday, that he would have found it ‘gratifying’ to have had a career as a schoolteacher.

Certainly, it is irresistible to think of all those teachers who have fantasised about being rock stars,  playing air guitar with their slide-rules, suddenly learning that, all the while, the Rolling Stones front man would have rather been wielding a board duster than a microphone. 

But he was surely being  disingenuous. How marvellous it must be to send away today’s teenagers, convinced they have just attended the ultimate rock concert, having once chalked up the same distinction with their parents and perhaps even grandparents. 

Could it be, indeed, that there is a generation of fans now in their push-chairs who will yet get to see the Rolling Stones live?

Nobody who was at Glastonbury on Saturday, or who watched on television, would bet against it.