Mick Jagger: being a rock star is intellectually undemanding

Rolling Stones frontman says being a teacher would have been gratifying, and he once considered becoming a journalist

Press Association guardian.co.uk, Friday 28 June 2013 10.53 BST


Mick Jagger can't get no intellectual satisfaction. Photograph: Jeff Fusco/Getty Images


Sir Mick Jagger has admitted he finds his music career "intellectually undemanding" and his original idea of becoming a teacher may have been a gratifying alternative.

In an interview on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, the Rolling Stones frontman said he considered a career as a dancer but was put off by the prospect of injuring himself.

Jagger, who was a student at the London School of Economics when the Stones were starting out, said: "A schoolteacher would have been very gratifying, I'm sure. There are millions of things you would have loved to have done, a politician, a journalist … I thought of being a journalist once.

"All these things you think of when you're a teenager, you can think, well, I would have liked to have done that but that's completely pointless but I don't feel frustrated for a lack of control at all and I'm very pleased with what I've done.

"Everyone wants to have done more things in their lives. It is a slightly intellectually undemanding thing to do, being a rock singer, but, you know, you make the best of it."

The full interview will be broadcast on the show on Saturday before the band's headline performance at Glastonbury.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2013/jun/28/mick-jagger-rock-star-intellectually...

The show is on Radio 4 tomorrow. The 'Today' programme starts at 7 am, but will be available on the i-player to listen again for a week soon afterwards

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0366wmn

After 50 years and a couple thousand interviews over the years. I really think Mick is just making shit up now.

He's such an ass hole and he knows it.  If he's so fucking bored, maybe he should use his "intellect" a little more to pick some different songs to put in the setlist.

If he's bored he really has no one to blame but himself.

How you can assume MJ is an "ass hole" or telling fibs from this brief article is completely beyond me.
Of course he is an intellectual - and avid reader of foreign affairs and history, and so on, like Keith. But music operates differently / more instinctually, perhaps. That said, I think Jogger lyrics are often very thoughtful and philosophical and multi-faceted/angled.
("Even" 'Let's Work' was about Voltaire and liberty and world politics and economics and loads more, partly disguised / teased / added to by a child-like singalong.)

MJ doesn't need defending, of course, but all this sniping/sniffiness gets on my titties.

And fucking 4,000 women is sexually ungratifying, which he wouldn't have done as a teacher.