Rolling Stones
caspar.gomez
The smell is like a squidgy hash spliff marinated in hickory-smoked barbecue sauce. There’s an additional top note of tangy, excited human musk and a hint of vinegary organic waste. By the weekend’s end this Parfum de Glaston will have infused everything, from unworn clothes to the tent to even skin and hair. It will take days to shift, permeating the pores as completely as this temporary city of madness sandblasts the mind. But let’s not get carried away before we’ve begun. To peak too early would be a classic rookie mistake.Thursday 27 JuneThings begin, then, on a sunny A303 that turns Read more ...
garth.cartwright
My, my, what a big arena. First ever time I’ve set foot in the O2 Arena. Never before made it down here to view New Labour’s hubris. Another cherry about to be busted involves seeing tonight’s band – I’ve listened to The Rolling Stones for about 40 of my 48 years but never been near a gig of theirs. OK, I once did buy a tout ticket to see Keith Richards at the Town & Country when he toured solo in the early Nineties. And I also caught Charlie Watts’ big band at Ronnie Scott’s a decade ago. Both were great. But the Stones in a stadium? Nah.Never imagined I’d get to this 18,000-capacity Read more ...
Tim Cumming
There’s a shot of the six of them running across a railway line in Belfast, running for their lives, Brian Jones at the rear, "Satisfaction" at the top of the charts, and there he is, the one who set light to the whole thing, between Mick and Keith. For a time virtually a sixth member of the band, the teenage hustler-manager with the vision thing who walked into the Station Hotel in Richmond to see the Rollin’ Stones and said hello to the rest of his life, Andrew Loog Oldham is one of the few of his caste of Sixties svengalis to survive the ensuing five decades."Surely you’ve seen the blond Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The return of The Rolling Stones to the world stage is headline news, but the man who put them there in the first place has decided to reveal the tricks of being an impresario, the hustler that can make or break a band. In this poignant, exclusive extract from Stone Free, their former manager Andrew Loog Oldham contemplates Phil Spector, one of his inspirations with whom he was reunited in the wake of the death of Lana Clarkson, the woman Spector was convicted of murdering in 2009.Stone Free is Oldham’s third book, following Stoned and 2Stoned. Unlike its predecessors, it isn’t an oral Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
What a year for great British institutions. Sixty years of Elizabeth II, 50 years of James Bond, and a half-century of the Rolling Stones. To recycle an even older cliche, we will never see the like of any of them again.Brett Morgen's Crossfire Hurricane is a chronicle of the Stones' career, assembled from a wealth of news, documentary and home-made footage stretching back to their earliest days as a scraggy west London blues band. The commentary, other than that supplied by various interviewers and TV anchormen glimpsed across the passing decades, is provided by the Stones themselves, who Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The final section of The Joy of Disco illustrated how disco music grew into a vast global phenomenon. It had been brought to the popular mainstream by the success of Saturday Night Fever, was enjoyed by grannies at Pontins, and even prompted 70-something showbiz veteran Ethel Merman to make a disco album.But the central theme of the film was the way that disco represented the triumph of social groups who had been deemed to fall outside the prevailing social norms. Blacks, gays and Hispanics flocked to join the scintillating Church of Disco as it blossomed through the Seventies, and it became Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
My most rock’n’roll moment of the last year was probably travelling 120 miles an hour on the wrong side of the road in a black Mercedes as part of Prince’s police convoy on the way out of Lisbon to the Super-Rock Festival where the diminutive star was headlining. The traffic was completely jammed on the way to the concert and it was the only way to get there on time. In the convoy also were Tim Ries, The Rolling Stones’ regular sax player, and Ana Moura - Prince’s most recent protégé and Portugal’s latest and most celebrated young fado singer.We were all slightly astonished to have arrived at Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Mick Jagger is heading up a band named SuperHeavy. Also in on the project are Joss Stone, AR Rahman (composer of the Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack), Dave Stewart (the former Eurythmic) and Damian Marley. It seems outlandish and the product of an overheated PR person’s imagination, but many things in life can be both. Yet, this is real, not an April Fool-type joke.A single, titled “Millionaire”, is supposed to come out in September. The producers are Jagger and Stewart. Rahman has written a song called "Satyameva Jayate”, which Jagger is to sing in Urdu. Presumably, he does speak Urdu. Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Last weekend ballerina Tamara Rojo performed to the largest live audience ever to watch the Royal Ballet, at London's O2 Arena. But what was it like facing 12,000 people, and trying with her partner, the Cuban star Carlos Acosta, to tell the intimate story of two young lovers in Kenneth MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet? She tells us it's a weirdly out-of-touch experience on that vast stage, almost like being in private. And thank goodness for the cameras. See theartsdesk review of the event.ISMENE BROWN: That photo (main image above) that shows you standing on stage looking out at the empty Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The lens loved Mick. Those child-bearing lips, to use Joan Rivers’s ripe phrase, always came up a treat in photographs. Did it ever love Keith quite so much? Ever since he started creosoting himself in eyeliner and crumbling like an oxidising mummy before our very eyes, he has been the incarnation of the photogenic rock wreck. Once upon a time, though, when The Rolling Stones were at their creative zenith, the Human Riff presented a young and even ingenuous mug to the camera. A new exhibition of portraits, to coincide with the publication of his autobiography Life, shows Richards before Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“I was a very good soprano.” Of all the sentences you’d not expect to hear tumbling from the mouth of Keith Richards, that one is up there with "Tap water for me, please, and I do hope this vegan restaurant is non-smoking." He has the addled larynx of a Fag Ash Lil who, when not mopping and dusting, perches on a barstool glugging gin and puffing on Bensons. But once upon a time little Richards did once sing for the Queen. Got a free bus ride up to the London and all, he recalled with a wide-eyed cackle. When his voice broke and he was relieved of his cassock, he was most put out. “We sang our Read more ...