By Baz Bamigboye
Last updated at 9:53 PM on 09th April 2009

Mick Jagger's such an astute businessman that he has been dubbed the Alan Sugar of rock. The Rolling Stone legend runs the band the way the entrepreneur and The Apprentice ringmaster controls his businesses.



Philip Norman, who wrote a celebrated book about the Stones and is about to embark on a biography of Jagger (covering him from the early Eighties), told me that Mick runs the group like a corporation.

'I suppose the analogies with Alan Sugar are quite strong, except Mick can talk like Alan Sugar and he can also talk like John Gielgud: he has so many different voices to use in different company,' Norman asserted.

He added that Mick was like a supreme monarch, 'particularly when the band's on the road'.
'Lots of people on those tours have the power to say "no", but only one person has the power to say "yes" - Jagger,' Norman added.

But Mick has always been savvy about money, having the wit at the end of the Sixties, when the group's finances were in disastrous shape, to hire a business manager who knew how to make the money go further. Because, in those days, who knew how long the gig was going to last?

Norman made the point that almost 50 years ago, no one would have predicted the Stones 'out of all those British bands would be the ones to last'.
Also, so many younger bands seem to be emulating the Stones and their stagecraft.
'Mick was the first one to stand out there without a guitar and treat the microphone like a phallus,' said Norman.
'There are only two ways of holding a microphone if you are a rock singer: one is the Jagger way, the other is the Jim Morrison way, holding it as if it's a little baby bird between your hands.'

Norman wants to shine a light on longstanding myths such as how come Jagger got busted on the first occasion he ever tried LSD.
'The Establishment was simply out to get him and he was never really wanting to be that outrageous, he was much more interested in social advancement,' Norman told me.
The author will also capture the wives and lovers, and roll into the 'arrogance and hubris and the vanity that is probably bigger than any earthly instrument could measure'.

But he insists the biography, due out in two years from HarperCollins, will be positive in tone overall because, like me, he admires Mick and how he and the Stones have survived to entertain his grandchildren's generation.

'It's gone beyond a question of age; they are a national treasure,' Norman declared


- dailymail.co.uk

i doubt the 10 person line up they have now will change.  it is a good band, so why fuck with it.