No matter how many times you’ve read it before, MICK JAGGER is so goddamned skinny -- and tiny too, to those of us over six feet. You could almost fold him up and sneak him into a concert in your jacket. But then there might not be enough room for the stash, so maybe we’ll just leave him upright, and be content to carry him around in our hearts.

After a lifetime spent chasing him around the world, and one or two brief encounters along the way, it was something of a relief to sit down formally with him. Ideally, I’d prefer to interrogate him for three days, so I was a bit concerned that a 25-minute chat would be an anti-climax. But nothing about Mick is anti-climactic.

The interview took place at Chicago’s Ritz Carlton - Four Seasons Hotel about 4:30 p.m. on Saturday, September 20 in the 25th floor suite of his longtime assistant MIRANDA PAYNE.

I was chatting to her and to tour publicist CHERYL CERRETTI when Mick’s publicist TONY KING led Mick in. I ambled slowly over to Tony first (we’ve had a few run-ins over the years). Tony was beaming, he introduced me to Mick, and we engaged in some witty three-way banter.

Mick was very groovy, dressed in a tight-fitting purple suite with an open-necked orange shirt and multi-colored socks. The suite looked as if it could have been made by MEREDITH HUNTER’s tailor, but I didn’t feel it was appropriate to ask. The laugh lines are deep, but his hair is very fulsome. He looks younger than Keith, but maybe that’s not the greatest compliment.

Mick sat on a coach and I faced him sitting in a chair about two feet away. Everyone else left, leaving me and Mick together. Alone. At last. But let’s not get carried away.

As I set up my tape recorder, he poured himself some Evian and initiated the small talk. This threw me off a bit, as I’ve spent a lifetime constructing the perfect small talk dialog I’d have with Mick. And in a few seconds, all that preparation went out the window. He moaned that he’d just come in from an interview with Spanish TV and it was a drag. I asked him how his Spanish was these days, and he said, not very good, but he was helped by a translator. I think my small talk plan would have been better, but it will have to wait for another day.

I’d prepared about a zillion questions, but had to cut it down to the bare essentials, particularly as I was writing a story about the album and tour. Fascinating digressions for my own personal interest had to be kept to a minimum. He puts a lot of thoughts into the interview. He gives apparently honest answers. And the cost of his undivided attention is that he’ll make it clear when it’s time to call it a day. And he’ll be out in a flash. Still, it was all fun. He laughed a lot (as shown in the text by "!!!"). Try as I might, I couldn’t make out if he still had that diamond in his right upper molar. Most important tip: treat an interview like a conversation with a friend, cut the rock star crap and he’ll talk to you just like a regular bloke.

So what follows on the next pages, is the exclusive interview with Mick...

DG: You’re beginning the tour a week before the album comes out. Doesn’t it undermine the album, almost makes it redundant?

Mick: "Perhaps. No. I don’t think it does. The upside of it is that it gives the whole thing a kick-start, that you’re on tour and that the record comes out. It keeps a tremendous amount of momentum. If you come out with a record, say, two months ago, cold, it wouldn’t been as good as having it now, to be honest."

Does that mean you’ll play fewer new songs on tour?

"Oh, definitely."

Will the set list be similar to the ones from the two secret gigs?

"No, it won’t be the set list. I wish it was only 15 songs!!!"

Those shows, you played "Anybody Seen My Baby" and "Out Of Control"...

"That’s what we’ll play at the first show. Of the new ones. As it goes on, by the time Christmas comes, there will probably be a lot more. But there’s no point really. Not in a stadium. If it was in a theater and you were doing more of a showcase, then you’d do loads. U2 came out and they played loads of new numbers, and it really didn’t work. It doesn’t work, it just doesn’t work. I mean, I’ve done it so many times. You get allthese blank faces. It’s all right a couple of times, blank faces. But you don’t want to be every number, like everyone looking at you going, ‘What the fuck is this?’"

You’d think audiences would be braced for new songs?

"I’m not in the audience, I don’t know what they think. Generally, it’s puzzlement usually, I get the vibe!"

From an artistic standpoint. You have lumped Steel Wheels and Voodoo Lounge together. What was the plan for ‘Bridges Babylon’?

"Steel Wheels was made very quickly, but it doesn’t sound any more rushed than the other one. I just wanted to make sure that this record was a different kind of sounding record than ‘Voodoo Lounge’. You could have easily gone and done it again"

I get the impression that you didn’t have a close attachment to Voodoo Lounge?

"Well, I don’t want to trash it because I think it’s got some good sounding things. I wasn’t really passionate about it. I try to be at the time, but in retrospect... I always love them when I do them. I always think they’re the best thing ever."

"It (Bridges To Babylon)) is pretty savagely, eclectic. But right from the get go, I said to everyone, ‘Well, it’s not long since we did the last studio album and we’ve had another album since’ -- which is called Stripped’, which was of course a very retro album. There’s nothing wrong with that, that was the whole intention. It was a live, y’know..."

Souvenir?

"Yeah, souvenir. So I said. ‘We’ve done that and now we’ve got to go into another direction, y’know. We’ve got to go into the studio with another conscious direction or way of looking at it.’ How would that be? What would make it different sounding? You can approach it from all kinds of ways. The songwriting’s slightly different, the melodic content different, the song lyrics different, just sonically different and just take a few chances, don’t worry about it so much. It should be like the Rolling Stones, whatever that means."

"I said, ‘It’s always going to sound like the Rolling Stones, we’ve done so many albums and so much time together and so much work together, but if you play a song, people will automatically or subconsciously will pigeonhole it into a category. ‘Oh, this will be like Let It Bleed, I’ll play this.’ And then it becomes a rerun of Let It Bleed... So that’s how it can happen, so you’ve got to be a bit aware of it."

A lot of songs sound as if they could have come out of Wandering Spirit. Is this your record vs, say Dirty Work, which was Keith’s?

"I don’t know. I had written a lot of songs coming into this project that I’d already done -- I’d written them and they were all finished and completed. I didn’t really necessarily know we were going to do a Stones record at that point. It was always a possibility..."

So what are yours?

"What I wrote coming in?"

Yeah

"Anyone (sic) Seen My Baby, Saint Of Me..."

Gunface, it that your’s?

"Gunface, Out Of Control, Might As Well Get Juiced."

And Keith wrote his three solo ones?

"Yeah, I started off playing the drums on ‘You Don’t Have To Mean It’. That was my contribution!!!"

That’s cool. Didn’t Ronnie play drums on Sleep Tonight?

"Yes. Well, I didn’t play on the actual track. In the writing session I was playing the drums."

I hear Keith didn’t get along well with the Dust Brothers?

"He doesn’t really get along with people very often, y’know. He takes a stand against people... He worked with Don a lot."

I thought he hated Don -- Well, at least put Don through the wringer before hiring him for Voodoo Lounge?

"No, he wanted Don on board. He was the one that wanted Don on board (pause). I wanted Don on board as well because he can help me not only produce some of the tracks but coordinate the project. You need someone to help you. I could have done it, but it would have been a lot more work for me. We’d coordinate together -- we’ve got the Dust Brothers this afternoon, and then we ended up with this, and what are we going to do with the Dust Brothers rhythm track, and so on. Just coordinating the thing is quite complicated."

Are you a bit disappointed with sales of Voodoo Lounge?

"No, not at all. I think it sold pretty well really."

But given the fact that it was supported by the biggest tour in planetary history...

"Well, it sold five million tickets on tour and we sold five million records. There’s no mystery to me... I don’t think that’s disappointing after 34 years. I think to sell five million records is pretty good, don’t you?"

The Stones have always been more of a visual thing than a record-selling thing. Haven’t they? Not to ignore the fact that you have sold zillions of records...

"I think they’re both. Honestly, to be fair, if you sold five million records of the last two studio albums... I honestly don’t think that’s a bad thing. Who sells more than that as a consistent thing? Of course, bands sell more than that. But it’ll just be for one record, and after that, they’ll go back to a certain plateau. Which we’re obviously on -- some albums you go below, and some albums you go above. But the plateau of that amount of sales, I think, is very good. OK, the Pink Floyd, I think, they might sell a few more. But I don’t know, I have no idea, to be very honest."

(.... continued in IORR 31...)

It's Only Rock'n Roll no. 30 - Oct. 1997 - © The Rolling Stones Fan Club Of Europe