Today: the long and winding road. Oops, sorry ... wrong band

Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Aug 31, 2003 | by Tom Shields

IT is predictable, I know, but age will be a leitmotif in the following observations on the Rolling Stones. Take the Hell's Angel outside the Stones' concert venue in Rotterdam. He is in full uniform with the leather jacket, the soiled jeans and the hankie roon the heid (or bandana as I believe it is called). He is kinda grizzled and looks as if he could well have been one of the Angels who guarded the Stones so vigorously and fatally that day at Altamont in 1969.

His long beard floats gently in the wind as the Hell's Angel motor- cycles slowly through the Rotterdam crowd. But his bike is no Harley Davidson. It is a three-wheeler scooter, the kind that are supplied as a mobility aid to the less-abled. What a drag it is getting old.

This disability biker is only one of a large community who are determined not to fade away and who will follow their rock heroes for as long as the Stones continue to take to the road, which could be forever. The followers of this band are so devoted, I suspect they would pay money to watch Jagger and company on stage sitting in armchairs, wearing those two-foot slippers, and trying to remember the lyrics of Gimme Sheltered Housing.

Wilhelm of Rotterdam, with his tattoo of the logo of those lascivious red lips, is typical of a man of a certain age who should know better. But he has sent his wife and children to the Costa Brava so that he can concentrate on attending the six concerts in the Netherlands as part of the Stones' Forty Licks tour.

It is the band's 40th anniversary, a kind of ruby Tuesday occasion. "I am crazy," Wilhelm tells me, although I had come to this conclusion independently since he keeps referring to Kirsty, our young lady photographer, as "your wife, the fotoman".

"But he is crazier," Wilhelm says, pointing to his brother-in-law Tony. "He has come all the way from Crete for the concerts and he has brought his family. Crazy."

Also qualifying in the crazy category, is the Glasgow man at the concert in Rotterdam who confesses that he has now remortgaged his house three times to finance his Rolling Stones habit. This chap will remain nameless in case his building society manager is reading this.

Tickets cost (pounds) 100 for the seated area at the Ahoy centre, a Dutch SECC with better seating. The Glasgow fan is also in possession of a (pounds) 35 ticket for the Stones' intimate concert at the Astoria in London. The Astoria tickets were selling for (pounds) 2300 on Ebay and he did consider, but only momentarily, selling this brief to pay off part of his Rolling Stone debt mountain.

There are quite a few very unquiet Americans about. Charlie the Cherokee has followed the Stones to Rotterdam from Alaska. Charlie tells me he is two-quarters Red Indian and one-quarter Scottish. I try to find out what the last quarter is but he is too busy trying to persuade Kirsty the fotoman to send him copies of her snaps. His garrulousness could be explained by the fact that as well as Cherokee and Scottish there is a wee dash of Heineken in his blood.

Also in the crazy American category of Rolling Stones aficionados is the lady from LA wearing her own four-foot-square foam version of the aforementioned lascivious lips logo. A Yank called Ken is busking. Or, to be more exact, he and his band are extracting money with menaces from the queue outside the venue. "We're Americans. Give us money or we'll kill you." Ken and his pals are certainly murdering a large repertoire of Stones and Bob Dylan standards.

It is at this point that I must risk the wrath of Stone-Agers by saying the buskers' contribution is not the only disappointing musical performance of the night. I tried very hard to be impressed by the Rolling Stones.

I willed myself to be under the thumb of the Stones magic and for at least half an hour I am quite transported by my first live sighting of Mick Jagger. The man who has put sex into sexagenarian is dressed in a tight, bright green leather jacket that showed off a taut midriff any teenie would die for. He is strutting, pouting, shouting, prancing, dancing and doing all the Jagger stuff you expect of a rock star who seems to have done a deal with the devil to have time on his side. I then come to suspect that the vague stirring of euphoria I am experiencing is not down to Jagger and friends but to the passive ingestion of intoxicating substances. The waft of the weed inside the Ahoy venue is tremendous.

The effect wore off as I realised I did not know most of the songs the Stones were performing. When they play at football stadia to crowds of 50,000, they give it laldy with their greatest hits. In the more "intimate" venues such as the Ahoy (about 15,000 people) the Stones perform their lesser-known oeuvres.

Over the years I have been more a passive than an active consumer of Stones music, so the more obscure numbers were lost on me. I must admit here that I am not really qualified to comment on the Rolling Stones, which some of you might have noticed by now.

In 1963, my fellow pupils at Bellarmine, an educational correctional facility posing as a school, would debate earnestly the relative merits of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. So deep was their fascination that my coevals would also debate the relative merits of the managers of these popular beat combos, using the nicknames Eppy and Loog to show how au fait they were with the music business. The NME had a lot to answer for.