When Mick Jagger is performing with The Rolling Stones – which he still does, miraculously, 64 years on from the band’s inception – he has to remind himself to stop moving. “Because not everyone wants to see you moving,” Jagger tells me, as we sit in a pale London hotel suite, with a bout of torrential summer rain pummelling the pavement outside. “When you do a ballad, you stop moving. And I just tell myself, You're not going to move. You're going to stand there. Move your arms! That's all you're going to do.” Stillness does not come naturally to him. If you’ve seen the Stones live, you’ll understand this. Four years ago in Hyde Park, I watched him – at 78! – stomp, strut, point, shimmy and shake his way across the wide expanse of the stage for 2 hours straight. If he did actually stop, I didn’t register it.

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That night, I thought that I was witnessing a farewell tour. The band’s original drummer, Charlie Watts, had died the year prior, breaking up the core quartet rounded out by Jagger’s bandmates Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood. They carried on with their 60th anniversary celebrations anyway, but it felt like a reasonable time for them to call it quits – on top of everything, they hadn’t made an album of original songs in more than a decade.

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But, incredibly, in the following few years, the band has entered a total creative renaissance. Foreign Tongues, the 33rd Rolling Stones album – and that’s only counting the ones with predominantly original material – will come out a couple of weeks before Mick Jagger’s 83rd birthday in July. It’s their second album in three years, and like 2023’s Hackney Diamonds, it is genuinely excellent.e city’s global image as a haven for counterculture, a place where history, DIY art-making and hedonism collide.

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In person, Jagger is warmer and more thoughtful than I'd expected him to be. He laughs easily, too. The core of what I want to ask him is... How does he stay so sharp, on a creative and physical level? Well, he doesn’t think all that much about it, actually, beyond the obvious (exercise, don’t drink and do drugs in excess). “You're just doing the best you can,” he says.

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You and the band have had a creative resurgence in the last few years – two albums in three years after a long break. What do you chalk it up to?

Mick Jagger: Well, I think first of all, we were very lazy and didn't do anything much [for a long time]. I think we got to the point in realising we weren't going in the right direction. And then [we] had a real good sit down before Hackney Diamonds. I said, "Okay, this is really simple. We're going to change producers, and [set]a deadline." And we did it, and we went and did writing, rehearsing, all the right things.

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Charlie Watts is on this album, and he was on the last album as well. But there’s been this period where it’s just been you, Keith, Ronnie. Has Watts’ passing changed your perspective on your time together? Do you take it for granted a little less?

Yeah. I mean, it’s obviously different. Charlie had been in [the band] since the very beginning. I Sometimes you’d see Charlie there almost, when the chair’s empty. But you just get on with it. On a personal level, of course, it’s different. If you're forced to change someone because they're not there anymore, it's difficult. The most difficult [moment] was going out [on stage] when we first did the tour [without Watts]. You've never been out with another drummer in your whole life. That was hard, but that was how we got used to not having him around and still continuing.

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There are some amazing collaborations on this album. I noticed in the credits you’ve got Bruno Mars on cowbell.

We were in LA. I was doing some vocal touch-ups, and Bruno came by and listened to some tracks. I've known him for a while. So I said, "Okay, Bruno, what do you want to play? Your choice of percussion." He's a percussionist. And that was his first thing. “I want to play a cowbell.”

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You’ve worked with loads of contemporary pop stars. Do you find inspiration from many current musicians?

I did a track with Burna Boy. That was hilarious. ‘Cause I’m a real afrobeats person. And I’ve always liked Burna Boy. David Bowie was a great example of someone who only wanted to listen to what was going on now. But it’s such a lot of work to do that. It's so much work. Loads of it is rubbish. So, I don't ignore what's going on, but I'm not a slave to what's going on.

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There’s been a lot of talk over the last few years about rock returning to the mainstream. I don’t know if you know Geese?

Geese, everyone's talking about them. They're very experimental, Geese, really. I mean, for a rock band. I quite like it. I heard all the talk about it, and as soon as the record, [Getting Killed], came out, I was expecting it to be more indie. I wasn't expecting it to be quite that out there, but I admire that.

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I mean, there's also a lot of good women singers who have done great recently. Look at Rosalia's album [Lux]. That was something really conceptual, really interesting. And she really pulled it off, and I really admire her for doing it.

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You’ve also got Paul McCartney playing bass on the album. How has your relationship with him evolved over the years?

He was always the polite one. John and I were the closest friends, but he's the most acerbic one, and George was sort of quiet, but can be very needly, you know. And Ringo is Ringo. But I've always had a good relationship with Paul. We've always been friends. But funny, strangely, I've never played bass with him before those sessions.

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I believe Paul and John did backing vocals on a Stones song in the late 1960s. What do you remember about that session?

I remember doing it in Olympic [Studios, in Barnes, London]. We wanted a lot of harmonies, and they were around and said, "We'll do them, man.

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Do you get that, to me, the four of you – John, Paul, Mick, Keith – all being in the same place making music in the late 1960s, feels like a kind of cosmic event?

Yeah. It was good; we’d hang out quite a lot. But we wouldn't do a lot of work together. It wasn't like now, [when] everyone does features on everyone's records. It didn't happen so much then. Of course, there were duets and everything, but now it's much more… features are something you do all the time. I mean, it wasn't made a big deal of [back then].

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You’ve collaborated with a lot of people outside of the Stones over the years. Is there anyone you feel you learned a lot from?

In the early days, when you were just quite young, you would watch everyone. I would watch everyone, even really terrible people, to see something that I might nick off them [laughs]. But, obviously, you watch really good people. I would regularly go and see James Brown. If he was on for a week in New York, I would go many times just to watch.

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We were on tour in the very early days with Little Richard, and I think that I learned more from him than anyone else. He was very generous in teaching me how to be at one with a crowd. Because there's you and then there's people that come to see you. Richard would make them all welcome and be part of the group.

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I was talking with Chris Martin, and he said, when you're playing a stadium, it's really different than playing a theatre because in a theatre you can really see people – [the] bloke with the leather jacket, the girl with the yellow coat. But in the stadium, Chris and I were saying, you always look people in the eye, actual individual people. Because you can't look at every individual in a 50,000 crowd, but you look at some. You want to see at least some people that you really relate to.

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I went to the last Stones tour in 2022, the Hyde Park show, and I noticed that you didn’t stop moving the entire show.

[Laughs] No.

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You’re walking several miles, probably. How do you train for that?

Well, you walk [laughs]. You take a very large space, which is the same size as the stage, more or less. I mean, sometimes you can't quite get there, but then you do it a lot for a month before. And when you rehearse, the first part of the rehearsal you can just do music, and then when you're confident with that, you can move it to a big space and just do it. I just do the whole thing, and then you realise my fitness level has to go up a lot to do it because when you're singing, you only have so much breath. So you've got to portion your breath between your singing and your moving.

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What is your general training like?

I do– it’s a bit like tennis. You move very quickly and then you stop. And then you walk. High intensity. As you say, you’re always moving.

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Are you familiar with the concept of longevity as a health trend?

Yeah. Everyone’s crazy about that. “This is the way to do it.” No, this is the way to do it!

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Your longevity as a performer is incredible and people look to you like, "Well, he's doing something right."

Yeah. What is it?

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Exactly. What are you doing? Are you doing ice baths?

No, I can’t stand ice baths. It’s awful. I don’t think it’s a fashion that’s gonna last. You worry sometimes about the fad-iness of it all.

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People are seemingly spending more time than ever thinking about how to stay alive longer – do you think about it?

Staying alive – and fit. There’s only so much you can… I mean, you wish there was some new thing that you could [try], but is there really anything? There's nothing really ... I mean, there's lots and lots of upcoming things you always read about, and then did they ever really arrive? Meanwhile, you're in the gym, meanwhile, you're in the dance studio.

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Saunas are big now.

I don’t like being hot for too long.

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So there’s nothing that you can chalk your own longevity up to?

I think, unfortunately, you can't really, after a certain age, do loads of drink and drugs.

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That’s unfortunate.

Unfortunately. Cause it’s a lot of fun. However, if you want to have fitness and longevity, you can't do loads of drugs and drink all the time.

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When did you stop all of that?

I was about 40.

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Okay, that’s good to know. Up until 40, you might be okay.

I mean, you can still do it! But you can’t do it crazy all the time like you used to be able to. Because something will catch you out. It might catch you out anyway. There's no guarantees. You're just doing the best you can. And you might get some terrible illness, and you've been clean, and you've done everything, you've been in the gym, and you might just get some terrible illness. But at least you're doing your best.

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Do you get hangovers?

Yeah, terrible hangovers. [Laughs].

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It gets worse, doesn’t it?

Yeah, it gets worse. It doesn’t get any better.

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Four Beatles biopics are being filmed this year. Would that kind of treatment for the Stones interest you?

Yeah, it interests me. I don't want to impart it to you, but, I know how I see it. There's lots of ways of doing biopics. So most of the time when you do a biopic, you do one small section of someone's life bookended by some other stuff. Take the Bob Dylan movie. You do the moment when Bob went electric. You'd have to think, what are you going to zero in on? And where's your two years of interest? I mean that Bob Dylan one was two years, [the] James Brown one that I produced was slightly more.

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What section would you go for out of the Stones’ history?

I don't know which section, because it's a long period.

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Do you have an idea of someone you’d like to play you?

No.

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What is the biggest misconception about you?

People have preconceptions of everyone. Even if you're not even very well known, people say, [whispering] "She's a bit of a bitch.” Do you know what I mean? Everyone comes with some kind of baggage. But I'm at a disadvantage because a person can Google me and find out a lot, and I can Google them and not find anything.

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In the old days, they would not know about you and they'd be surprised that you could even speak. Because in those days, pop stars were supposed to be ridiculously stupid and [too] badly educated to know about anything. And so they were really surprised when you put a three-syllable word together.

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eople are seemingly spending more time than ever thinking about how to stay alive longer – do you think about it?

Please view the original GQ article via the link provided above.

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