According to Patti Smith, Mick Jagger is the best dancer since Nijinsky. Well I ain’t ever seen Nijinsky dance (though I did see him win the Derby) but I saw Mick Jagger for the first time last week and he didn’t even dance as well as Billy Preston, who slid across the stage to humiliate whitey just like JamesBrown on the T.A.M.I. show all those years ago. Patti Smith, meanwhile, didn’t dance at all but stumbled about like a little girl at someone else’s party who wants everyone to look at her but hopes that no-one will notice how hard she’s trying.

I hadn’t intended to go and see the Stones at all—getting tickets involved too many risks. Either I’d get one and they’d be dreadful and that’s what I’d remember all my life, or I wouldn’t and I’d resent even more the gracious way the Stones returned to Britain, kindly benefactors, and expected us mugginses to be dumbly loyal all over again. When the Stones are on tour the hacks crawl round them like maggots round a dead cat and the figures come pouring out: number of tax advisors, cash spent on Keith’s guitar tuner, pints of Mick’s mascara, total loss on the tour . . . We’re awed and honoured and forgot about the boring old album, that noone I knew bought, in the buzz about the tickets. A masterstroke! Everyone who wanted a ticket for anywhere had to send to one central place where Mick himself drew the lucky winners from Percy, his inflatable phallus! Six million applications, wow! And thousands of people wondering why they’d got three tickets for Stafford when they’d asked for two for Leicester and millions more wondering why Princess Margaret is always so bloody lucky in the lotteries of life.