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THE MUSIC MAKER

Simple past

Even if your life has been as extraordinary as Jagger's undoubtedly has, why would you want to be raking over old coals?

Peter Edgerton

Friday, 16 April 2021, 16:14

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Like most pop stars, Mick Jagger has said lots of risible stuff over the years, with "Anything worth doing is worth over-doing," being a prime example. That's a philosophy which might explain - though never excuse - his shoulder pads in the nineteen eighties, but it's a laughable point of view nonetheless. Most things worth doing are worth doing in a somewhat restrained and dignified way, I would aver, but I do admit that, as a soundbite, my assertion doesn't have quite the same impact.

Anyway, if we were to make a list of Mick's daft utterances through the ages, we'd need the whole newspaper for the next couple of months to be able to do so. Imagine my surprise, then, when I found myself agreeing with Old Leatherchops recently, with regard to something he said in an interview. The subject of his autobiography came up and how he'd begun to write one years ago but then gave up. His reasoning was as fascinating as it was prescient: "I really didn't enjoy it... reliving my life, to the detriment of living in the now."

Even better, he described the whole process of writing his life story as "dull and upsetting".

This is, I think, top quality analysis of what must be a tedious and dispiriting process - poring over days long gone. Even if your life has been as extraordinary as Jagger's undoubtedly has, why would you want to be raking over old coals? What's more, if your time on the planet has been rather more mundane, there can only be even fewer reasons to want to look in the rear view mirror.

This is why it's always slightly unsettling at a dinner party or some such, when one of the guests dallies a little too long on the details when recounting a story about when he and some chums climbed a lamp post in nineteen seventy three in order to drop pieces of digestive biscuits on unsuspecting passers-by. As the old cliche, has it, you really did have to be there, and even then it probably wasn't that exciting. Unless they were the chocolate ones, I suppose.

It's always much more interesting and inspiring when someone avails you of the details of a current project or something dynamic they did that very day. I imagine even the lamp post story would be quite fun if it had happened that afternoon.

No, the past is a distant country and, for the most part it should, I think, stay that way.

Or, as Jagger himself drawls on Ruby Tuesday, "Yesterday don't matter if it's gone."

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