HE is as famous for his sexual conquests as for his youthful strutting on stage . . . despite being 64.
And Mick Jagger reckons that sex and rock ‘n’ roll have something in common – you can have too much of both of them.
The Rolling Stones legend says: “Rock ‘n’ roll and playing live is very addictive. But you have to really be careful, because you don’t want to do it all the time.
“It’s like when you are young and you think if you are not having sex you’re wasting your time.
“But as you get older you realise everything has its place. It’s the same thing with performing.
“You don’t want to be thinking if you are not gigging, ‘Why am I not performing? I’m just going out to dinner with my friends, how boring is that? I should be out on stage’.
“Performing is a great thing to do but you don’t want to have to be doing it every night.”
Mick and the rest of the Stones are about to be seen performing by a whole new audience as the film Shine A Light goes nationwide at cinemas tomorrow.
The movie, shot by legendary director Martin Scorsese, captures the band playing live in the small Beacon Theatre in New York.
I try not to think about when I can’t do this any more. I say ‘don’t look at the clouds of tomorrow through the sunshine of today’
It includes live performances with Christina Aguilera and Jack White of The White Stripes and goes into the back-story of a band that has seen and done it all.
Throughout the film Jagger remains the youthful one of the outfit. His energy on stage would put a performer a third of his age to shame.
Beautiful … Christina Aguilera with Mick Jagger in the movie
So how does he do it? He reckons it is moderate workouts, a wartime diet and – a bit of partying.
Mick, who turns 65 in July, says: “It’s kind when people say how fit I look but there is no secret, I’m afraid. You have to do some work when you go over 30. Then you have to go to the gym.
“So I do some training, but not much. No marathons. If you do that the next day you don’t want to do too much running about.
“I enjoy life too. When this film was finished we stayed in and partied. I didn’t go to bed until five o’clock. I raided the minibar.
“I try not to think about when I can’t do this any more. I say, ‘don’t look at the clouds of tomorrow through the sunshine of today’.”
On stage Mick has often been described as a man who looks like he is making love to the microphone.
And though he admits to often reaching a high while performing, he says his stage appearances can’t match those in the bedroom.
Mick goes on: “Is there an orgasmic moment? It’s a different thing. Often on stage you have to be more calculating about what you are going to do.
“I don’t mean that in a sly way – you have to work out how you should approach the show because it’s not the same for every performance.
“You know what you are going to do, more or less, but there is also a whole pile of not knowing what you are going to do.
“There are moments, some really joyous moments on stage, transcendental moments.
“I’ve talked about this to singers. It’s akin to singers in church.
“They get moments where you don’t know where you are. You couldn’t function like that all the time. It’s very intense.
“You also can’t be a performer all the time.
“When you are at the dinner table at home you can’t be that person.”
Shine A Light was filmed in conjunction with the band’s Bigger Bang tour of 2007.
Mick and bandmates Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Ronnie Wood are already millionaires many times over.
Bigger Bang made the band more than £200million, going into the record books as the highest-grossing tour in history.
All this week, as part of our great Rolling Stones series, we will be streaming two different tracks from the movie soundtrack – just click the video links above.
But the film nearly never happened. When Mick and the band went to see Taxi Driver director Scorsese about making a live movie, he said no.
Mick explains: “We got a list of directors and one of the first guys I went to was Marty (Mick’s name for Scorsese) because I know him really well.
“You can never usually get Marty because he goes from one movie to the next.
“So I went to him and pitched him the idea of the Rio concert movie, but he didn’t like it much.
“We were going to get someone else but Marty came back to me and said he would like to do a concert movie after all.
“Then we started talking about it and we had to move to a smaller place. We had to cancel bits of the tour and shuffle them around to get the New York theatre because it was not booked in the tour.
“It was so great we got Marty because he uses a lot of Stones music in his films. He is familiar with it all.
“This is the first movie where he doesn’t use Gimme Shelter!”
So are any of today’s bands worthy of inheriting the Stones’ crown?
“There are plenty of people as wild, as cool, as beautiful as we were,” says Mick.
“I see them all the time. There are tons of bands still doing what we did, though not exactly musically.
“The spirit of rock ‘n’ roll is very much alive.”
