John Roughan: Satanic majesties insist on youth

Every so often I think it's time to grow old - then I hear the Rolling Stones. I wonder if previous generations had this trouble. It's hard to imagine Frank Sinatra or even Elvis, if he had lived long enough, keeping their contemporaries in an illusion of youth. Their music matured with them.

But the Stones are still 24, about 10 years older than I was when the first big bars of Satisfaction came on the radio and bumped even the Beatles aside. The Stones still do terrible things to my dignity.

Late one recent night, after an advertising awards dinner, I was walking through the lobby of the casino when the slow throb of Honky Tonk Woman erupted from a bar in the corner. What can you do? Those chords move your blood to their own pulse.

Those who grew up to the Stones pretend embarrassment now at the sight of their lined faces still in the rock'n'roll pose.

And we are a bit self-conscious about flocking to Western Springs tomorrow to see them in their 60s. But that is not because we are all getting on a bit; the trouble is, we see no need to get on a bit.

The Stones have made no compromises with age. Three of the four touring here have been together for 45 years. All four were here 30 years ago. It is a pity about the fifth.

A rock group, perhaps more than any other musical unit, has an organic life to its fans. Great groups like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones had an appeal greater than the sum of their parts.

They were, in popular perceptions at least, a potent blend of personalities who each contributed something important, not so much musically as sentimentally and dramatically. We came to believe in their chemistry and exclusivity.

Many other musicians might accompany the group in performances, even play vital roles, but they were not part of it. The group was central.

Members disregarded each other like brothers. They seemed hardly to exchange a word but knew precisely what to do.

Whenever a member left one of the great groups it was like a death; worse than death in a way, for that happened too.

A falling out, or an ambitious departure, betrayed the brotherhood, diminished the organism, destroyed the illusion.

Last year in England I went along to the Cambridge Student Union to hear Bill Wyman. He, as just about everyone knows, is the only original member of the Rolling Stones to have voluntarily retired. He was going to talk about his life afterwards.

Well, he tried. Wyman was the serious bass player who always stood stock still on stage and looked barely interested while the others jumped and strutted in the style imitated by every rock and roll performer then and ever since. If anyone was to step out of the limelight you'd have picked it would be him.

He arrived in a little moddish blazer and black trousers, stood with one hand in the blazer pocket and smoked cheroots with the other. He spoke quietly and steadily; smiled gently.

His wife sat nearby; not the woman he notoriously began seeing when she was 13. Their two young daughters flitted about the benches among the students and tried to ask him giggling questions. He ignored them for a while, then gave them a stern word.

These days he lives a stimulating life, by his own account, waking up each morning to decide which of several projects he will pick up that day. He writes books, studies archaeology, goes out metal detecting. He fossicks and digs. He has his own band too and it makes records.

The students didn't have any questions about those pursuits. They wanted to know about life in the Stones.

He took us back to London in the early 1960s, mentioned names he was playing with before he was heard of - three young guys trying to form a blues band. He auditioned for Mick, Keith and Brian Jones and they wanted his amplifier.

As he describes them, Jones was the leading light in those days. It was Jones who coined the name Rolling Stones and remained the dominant force when they started to make records. But he must have been a pain in the proverbial. Wyman, with the sadness of a long-suffering friend, said you never knew what mood you would find him in.

Jones' demise, he said, began when the group came under the management of Andrew Loog Oldham who brought Jagger and Richards to the fore. Jones was eventually ejected, not long before he died.

Wyman had not much to say about Jagger and Richards or Jones' replacements, Mick Taylor and Ron Wood. But he delighted in telling us about Charlie Watts, an obsessive character who would not close a door, he said, without turning back at least once to check that it were closed.

And if during a recording session someone, usually Wood, dropped a cigarette butt on the studio floor, Watts would stop drumming, stand up wordlessly, walk over, pick it up and toss it in a bin saying, "I can't work with that thing there."

Wyman described the crazy years when girls screamed through concerts and flung themselves from balconies, and the early tours when the Stones had to concede top billing to soft-pop stars who had more hits but nothing like the live power.

The hit-singers would send the Stones out first and "we always blew them away", Wyman said matter-of-factly. That would be an understatement. The Stones live were the epitome of rock's magic when they were here in the 1970s. Their studio recordings have never matched their stage power.

I'll bet nothing important has changed. The set will be bigger, the sound better and the music may even have improved with age. The crowd will have wrinkles, jowls, paunches and bald spots, but so what? We're still fit and feel forever young. Just don't look.