Mick Jagger: The 83-Year-Old Rolling Stone Who Rewrote the Rules of Aging

In the late 1990s and 2000s I saw the Rolling Stones in concert many times, more than I can reliably count. The most recent was a gig at London’s 02 Arena in 2007, when they were so on fire, so majestically sparky, that it made me oddly mournful, because the whole time I was watching I was thinking that this would surely be the last time. Why? Because Mick Jagger, without whose shamanic energy-transference skills the show simply could not go on, was 64, an age that then seemed impossibly old and that The Beatles had designated, in song, as the very essence of pipe-and-slippers. It seemed a miracle — almost a mirage — that Mr. Jagger was not resting in a rented cottage in the Isle of Wight but was instead strutting across a stage with that buoyant bounce of his; high-camp yet with an edge of stuttering threat. He had, if anything, an excess of energy, rather than a lack of it — especially, as I recall, on a shimmering version of “Miss You,” one of the show’s delicious random moments within the parade of greatest hits. But how could he go on like that? This was what I kept asking myself, in a way that disrupted my pleasure. It was freakish. When I first became a Stones fan — a lifelong affair, fully consummated during night-time drives through London to the soundtrack of “Let It Bleed” — it had been regarded as borderline unseemly that he was still scampering about in his forties. Now his defiance of aging had a Dorian Gray quality — open up an attic in one of his mansions and out would surely tumble a painting of a balding spidery-limbed man with immense wrinkled lips. Jumping Jack Flash with incipient arthritis and a hearing aid.Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones performs on stage at Earls Court, London, on 25th May 1976. Via Watal Asanuma/Shinko Music/Getty ImagesThat, as I say, was almost 20 years ago. Since then, not much has improved in our world, but one advance has most definitely been made. Ageing is not what it was. With luck and money and a certain mindset, the mid-sixties need not be about decline. They can be a goddess-like Julianne Moore in couture, Nigella Lawson with skin like milk-filled silk, and Brad Pitt still as hot as hell. Clichés may be periodically rolled out about “invisibility” past a certain age, but the fact is that people who looked old, when I was growing up, are now climbing the Matterhorn and fitting into Levi 501s bought around the time of Live Aid.And my contention as to why this should be so is very simple. They owe it to Mick Jagger. At his last birthday — his 83rd, on 26th July 2026, I posted on Instagram an image of him promoting the Stones’ latest album, “Foreign Tongues,” along with the words: “The man who killed old age.”I don’t, incidentally, mean this to be taken too seriously. It is a line, not a philosophical tenet. Nevertheless I think there is something to it. Of course there are numerous explanations as to why some people — the moderate, the fortunate — age differently today, from bio-hacks to Botox. The multi-faceted fight against aging is an industry to rival the development of AI. Good, I say. Like most of us, I dislike the idea of decrepitude and illness, and take steps to avoid it. But aging, in itself, no longer worries me. And that mental shift is because Mick Jagger, a man who it seems really will die before he gets old, made it all seem possible. Mick Jagger performs during the Rolling Stones’ Hackney Diamonds Tour at Met Life Stadium on May 23, 2024 in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Kevin Mazur/Getty ImagesAfter I had got over the melancholic aftermath of the O2 evening, I found myself thinking — hang on a minute, perhaps that wasn’t a mad last hurrah. Perhaps, to Mick Jagger, being 64 is an irrelevance. Perhaps he regards that vaudevillian Beatles song as a challenge: Keep lifting weights, having children, and outdo Paul McCartney as the last rock star standing. Now — nineteen years, a headlining gig at Glastonbury and several albums later — my thinking has shifted to the point where even 83 does not sound to me that old. Objectively, of course, it is. But then I see there’s Mick, striding into the British Museum for a party to celebrate the arrival of the Bayeux Tapestry, or vigorously cheering on England at the World Cup, or doing promotional interviews for “Foreign Tongues,” in which he claims, with the ageless mockery that he has always deployed, that he stays young by gardening, and I think, so what if he is 83? He doesn’t seem to care. Why should anybody else? Mick Jagger, second left, and family watching the FIFA World Cup 2026 Quarter Final soccer match between Norway and England at Miami Stadium on July 11, 2026 in Miami Gardens, Florida. Via Jean Catuffe/Getty ImagesGiven self-restraint, hard work, and some judicious interventions — given, of course, that one can be bothered to make the considerable effort — what Mick Jagger says to us is that one can carry on with one’s life very much as before, with one’s actual age a mere bagatelle. Quite a lot of people now do exactly that. Women like Joanna Lumley, aged 80, and Isabelle Huppert, a mere 73, look like slightly older versions of their gorgeous young selves. And Mr. McCartney, who still does the leaning-back head tilt that once beguiled the Cavern Club, is indeed a rival claimant to the eternal youth crown.But it was Mick, I believe, who moved the goalposts. Something in his character — that unique cocktail of calculation and bravura — led him to realize that he could change the rules, and I love him for it. Of course one can be a Keith, not a Mick, and do the whole ageing thing in a very different way — the one that is usually described as “graceful.” The natural-ageing camp is likely to celebrate Keith Richards’s shrugging, cackling, “I’m-just-an-old-bluesman” persona rather than that of his hyperactive partner, who has always been cast in the role of nagging shrew to Keith’s torn and frayed charmer.At gigs, the appearance of Keith generated a richer, warmer kind of cheer than Mr. Jagger could command, although even in youth I was always a Mick girl. I worshipped him because of the Stones, because what underpins the whole dynamic package is the music, and if the band had only recorded “Moonlight Mile” — from “Sticky Fingers” and the holy Mick Taylor era, very much a collaboration between him and Mr. Jagger — I would accord them artistic immortality. Aside from that, however, I found Mick Jagger aspirational — inspirational. What would Mick do, I sometimes find myself thinking, when life goes wrong, and the answer is always bracing, demanding, in a way that says aging is not worth worrying about but time is not on your side. Don’t waste it. Mick Jagger and Melanie Hamrick at the launch of L’interdit Elixir at Mount Street Restaurant on September 16, 2026 in London, England. Via Dave Benett/Getty Images for Givenchy x 10 MagazineI also liked him for the fact that he always seemed to bother people, and didn’t care about that either: His flagrant love of high society — Princess Margaret on Mustique, Gettys at the cricket; his narrow-eyed CEO aspect; his Boris Johnson-like fecundity; his shameless embracing of age-gap romances, such as with fiancée Melanie Hamrick, who is not quite 40. And, now, his airy refusal to do the decent thing and act like an old man, whatever that means. What it really means is: Please stop showing up those of us who want to eat, drink, watch Netflix, and not feel bad about it. Please stop being Mick Jagger. Which he shows absolutely no signs of doing. As a fellow Gen X Mick fan said to me recently: I sometimes now think he is going to outlive us.

Mick Jagger: The 83-Year-Old Rolling Stone Who Rewrote the Rules of Aging

Mick Jagger: The 83-Year-Old Rolling Stone Who Rewrote the Rules of Aging

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