(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Thu 29 January 2026 22:21, UK
Anyone who needs to know the first thing about stage performance should just watch anything Mick Jagger has done onstage.
He may have inherited a lot of his early moves from the likes of Tina Turner and James Brown, but whenever he steps onto the lip of the stage with The Rolling Stones, it’s insane to think that someone with that many miles under their belt still has that much energy. But even if Jagger turned himself into a well-oiled machine half the time he played, he wasn’t going to look the other way when he thought someone else wasn’t giving 100% to their audience.
Then again, it’s not like anyone can afford to phone it in whenever they hit the road. There are fans who have paid God knows how much for a ticket to see you up close, and even if there are days that are better than others, any performer needs to find the strength inside them to pull off the impossible whenever they perform. But Jagger’s outlook on stage performance has to have changed a few times.
Back in the days of the British blues boom, The Stones practically left everything they had onstage whenever they were finished. If The Beatles brought excitement to the stage when they shook their long heads of hair, The Stones were intended to be a more dangerous version of that, bringing a sinister edge to all of their songs and having the gall to actually sing about sex and recreational drug use.
But when the radio stations got replaced with MTV, though, there was bound to be a bit of a shift. Jagger’s flamboyant stage presence was going to work like a charm whenever they started venturing into the world of music videos, but there were also synth bands like Frankie Goes to Hollywood that were making a mockery of what rock and roll was supposed to be. Jagger had no time for that, but it’s not like The Beach Boys were much better when they took to the road without their leader.
Granted, the California rockers had practically become a shadow of themselves without Brian Wilson at the helm. He was behind some of the finest melodies in rock and roll, and yet after suffering from being under the watchful eye of Eugene Landy, seeing Mike Love turn the band into a nostalgia act made them seem like a parody of the fun-loving surf rockers that they used to be.
So whenever they took to the road without Brian with them, Jagger wasn’t going to waste his time watching their shows, saying, “I hate The Beach Boys. If you saw The Beach Boys play, you wouldn’t believe it. The drummer can’t seem to keep time to save his life. I think Brian Wilson is a great record producer. But I think he could vary the sound of the voices. The sound – not the harmonies- grates on me a bit.”
Admittedly, some of the band’s greatest songs can sound the same after a while, but that shouldn’t be a mark against them by any stretch. It’s hard to think of a song like ‘I Get Around’ being any more perfect than it already is, and as long as Mike Love didn’t sound like he had a clothespin over his nose every single time he sang, maybe the band wouldn’t have been seen as juvenile every single time they went into the studio.
Still, there’s no one arguing that Wilson wasn’t one of the greatest musical geniuses of that time. He wanted to make music that would make the rest of the world happy, and even if they had a few annoying moments without him, that wasn’t going to take any of the shine off of records like ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ or ‘God Only Knows’.
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