It is 37 years since the Rolling Stones more or less single-handedly invented the latterday mega-tour. Huge artists had toured huge sports arenas before the Stones’ 1981 jaunt around the US, but not on that scale, not with that profit, and not with corporate sponsorship – courtesy of Jōvan Musk, an aftershave one suspects Mick Jagger was no more likely to wear than he was to spray himself with manure. There were also pay-per-view tie-ins and the early 80s equivalent of live streaming to cinemas: all the stuff one now expects when the rock aristocracy hit the road.
The best part of four decades on, with umpteen tours that make their 1981 outing look like the apotheosis of understatement, you might imagine the Stones’ stadium show to be a thing of perfectly drilled slickness. In a sense, it is. You get a lot of what you might expect to get at a Rolling Stones show in London, from Mick Jagger reminiscing about a long-lost local venue, Dalston Baths (or, as he puts it, “a place near ear called Dalston Barfs”), to footage on the big screens that evokes their past – when they were Britain’s premier exponents of tough Chicago blues. And there’s the way the rock-solid drumming of Charlie Watts is augmented by the various facial expressions of Charlie Watts, every one of which somehow communicates that this nonsense is all a bit beneath him.
But in a sense it isn’t slick at all. “Well, we made it frew,” sighs Jagger after a shaky version of Under My Thumb, a song he suggests the band play rarely these days, for obvious reasons. It displays what you might tactfully call an attitude to male-female relations that hails from a different era – but which the public have apparently voted they return to their set, in an online poll. Jagger himself sounds in pretty good shape for a man of 74, the only evidence of time’s passage on his voice is when he drops out of the falsetto in Fool to Cry. But said shakiness is what’s really gripping about the Stones live. Performing without the safety net of backing tracks – as much a part of the mega-tour these days as sponsorship deals – the band still occasionally feel shambolic, as if they’re just clinging on to the song by their fingernails: a ragged version of Street Fighting Man, a leaden plod through Paint It Black that carries none of the original version’s amphetamine paranoia.
And then there are moments when everything suddenly gels and they achieve liftoff. Tonight, it happens first during Ride ’Em on Down, one of the old blues numbers they resurrected for 2016’s Blue and Lonesome – even though an audience here for the hits react to its announcement as if Jagger’s just informed them where the nearest lavatory is – and then again during Sympathy for the Devil, which kicks off a ferocious home run of songs. Miss You sounds suitably humid and intense; Midnight Rambler rages along, its nastiness fully intact. You’re struck by the sense that they probably sounded not unlike this back in Dalston Barfs, flaws and all.
In a world of stadium rock shows where every note seems perfectly choreographed and nothing is left to chance, it’s authentically thrilling and raw. The Rolling Stones have still, to borrow their old phrase, got live if you want it.
