Sir Michael Philip Jagger (born 26 July 1943) is an English musician, songwriter, and film producer<!--Keep most notable job in lead per MOS:ROLEBIO.--> known as the lead singer and founder<!-- BritEng: founder not founding --> member of the Rolling Stones. Jagger has co-written most of the Stones' songs with lead guitarist Keith Richards; their songwriting partnership is one of the most successful in rock music history. His career has spanned more than six decades, and he has been widely described as one of the most popular and influential front men in the history of rock music. His distinctive voice and energetic live performances, along with Richards's guitar style, have been the Rolling Stones' trademark throughout the band's career. Early in his career, Jagger gained notoriety for his romantic involvements and illicit drug use, and has often been portrayed as a countercultural figure.
Jagger was born and grew up in Dartford. He studied at the London School of Economics before abandoning his studies to focus on his career with the Rolling Stones. In the early 1970s, Jagger starred in the films Performance (1970) and Ned Kelly (1970), to mixed receptions. Beginning in the 1980s, he released a number of solo works, including four albums and the single "Dancing in the Street", a 1985 duet with David Bowie that reached No. 1 in the UK and Australia and was a top-ten hit in other countries.
In the 2000s, Jagger co-founded a film production company, Jagged Films, and produced feature films through the company beginning with the 2001 historical drama Enigma. He was also a member of the supergroup SuperHeavy from 2009 to 2011. Although relationships with his bandmates, particularly Richards, deteriorated during the 1980s, Jagger has always found more success with the Rolling Stones than with his solo and side projects. He was married to Bianca Pérez-Mora Macias from 1971 to 1978, and has had several other relationships; he has eight children with five women.
In 1989, Jagger was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Rolling Stones and, in 2004, into the UK Music Hall of Fame. As a Stones member and as a solo artist, he reached No. 1 on the UK and US singles charts with 13 singles, the top 10 with 32 singles and the top 40 with 70 singles. In 2003, he was knighted for his services to popular music. Jagger is credited with being a trailblazer in pop music and with bringing a style and sex appeal to rock and roll that have been imitated and proven influential with subsequent generations of musicians and entertainers.
Early life and education
Michael Philip Jagger was born into a middle-class family in Dartford, Kent, on 26 July 1943. His father, Basil Fanshawe "Joe" Jagger, was a gymnast and physical education teacher who helped popularise basketball in Britain. His paternal grandfather, David Ernest Jagger, was also a teacher. His mother, Eva Ensley Mary (née Scutts), born in Sydney of English descent, was a hairdresser who was politically active in the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom. His parents were married in 1940 at Holy Trinity Church in Dartford. Jagger's younger brother, Chris (born 19 December 1947), is also a musician, and the two have performed together.
Although he was encouraged to follow his father's career path growing up, Jagger has said, "I always sang as a child. I was one of those kids who just liked to sing. Some kids sing in choirs; others like to show off in front of the mirror. I was in the church choir and I also loved listening to singers on the radio—the BBC or Radio Luxembourg—or watching them on TV and in the movies."
In September 1950, Keith Richards and Jagger first met as classmates at Wentworth Primary School in Dartford, prior to the Jagger family's 1954 move to Wilmington, Kent. The same year he passed the eleven-plus examination and attended Dartford Grammar School, which now has the Mick Jagger Centre performing arts venue. Jagger and Richards lost contact with each other when they went to different schools. The Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters records Jagger was carrying revealed a shared interest in rhythm and blues. A musical partnership began shortly afterwards. Richards and Taylor often met Jagger at his house. In late 1961, the meetings moved to Taylor's house, where Alan Etherington and Bob Beckwith joined the trio. The quintet called themselves the Blues Boys.
Jagger left school in 1961 after passing seven O-levels and two A-levels. While Richards and Jones planned to start their own rhythm and blues group, Jagger continued to study finance and accounting on a government grant as an undergraduate student at the London School of Economics. He had seriously considered becoming either a journalist or a politician, comparing the latter to a pop star.
Brian Jones, using the name Elmo Lewis, began working at the Ealing Club, where a loose music ensemble known as Blues Incorporated was performing, under the leadership of Alexis Korner. Jones, Richards, and Jagger began playing with the group, with Jagger eventually becoming the band's lead singer. Jones, Richards, and Jagger began meeting on their own to practise, establishing the foundation for what would become the Rolling Stones. That autumn, Jagger left the London School of Economics to pursue a musical career with the Rolling Stones. Encouraged by manager Andrew Loog Oldham, Jagger and Richards soon began writing their own songs. Their songwriting partnership took time to develop; one of their early compositions was "As Tears Go By", written for Marianne Faithfull, a young singer Loog Oldham was promoting.
For the Rolling Stones, the duo wrote "The Last Time", the group's third No. 1 single in the UK, based on "This May Be the Last Time", a traditional Negro spiritual the Staple Singers recorded in 1955. Jagger and Richards also wrote their first international hit, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction". It established the Rolling Stones' image as defiant troublemakers in contrast to the Beatles as "lovable moptop[s]". Jagger told Stephen Schiff in a 1992 Vanity Fair profile: <blockquote>I wasn't trying to be rebellious in those days; I was just being me. I wasn't trying to push the edge of anything. I'm being me and ordinary, the guy from suburbia who sings in this band, but someone older might have thought it was just the most awful racket, the most terrible thing, and where are we going if this is music? [...] But all those songs we sang were pretty tame, really. People didn't think they were, but I thought they were tame.</blockquote>
thumb|Jagger is rushed by a female fan during a 1965 performance in West Germany
The group's early albums, including Out of Our Heads, Aftermath, and Between the Buttons, were successful commercially. In 1967, Jagger, Richards, and Jones were hounded by authorities over their recreational drug use after the News of the World published a three-part feature, "Pop Stars and Drugs: Facts That Will Shock You". The feature described alleged LSD parties hosted by the Moody Blues and attended by the Who's Pete Townshend and Cream's Ginger Baker, and alleged admissions of drug use by leading pop musicians. The first article targeted Donovan, who was raided and charged soon after the feature aired. The second instalment, published on 5 February, targeted the Rolling Stones.
A reporter who contributed to the story spent an evening at the London club Blaise's, where a member of the Rolling Stones allegedly took several Benzedrine tablets, displayed a piece of hashish, and invited his companions back to his flat for a "smoke". The article claimed this was Jagger, but it turned out to be a case of mistaken identity; the reporter had been eavesdropping on Brian Jones. Two days after the article was published, Jagger filed a writ for libel against the News of the World.
Jagger and Richards were later arrested on drug charges and given unusually harsh sentences. Jagger was sentenced to three months' imprisonment for possession of four over-the-counter pep pills he had bought in Italy, and Richards was sentenced to one year in prison for allowing cannabis to be smoked on his property. The traditionally conservative editor of The Times, William Rees-Mogg, wrote an article critical of the sentences. On appeal, Richards's sentence was overturned and Jagger's was amended to a conditional discharge, although he spent one night in London's Brixton Prison. The Rolling Stones continued to face legal battles for the next decade. On 3 July 1969, Jones drowned in the swimming pool at his home, Cotchford Farm, in Hartfield, East Sussex. When asked whether he felt guilty about Jones's death, Jagger told Rolling Stone in 1995:
<blockquote>No, I don't really. I do feel that I behaved in a very childish way, but we were very young, and in some ways we picked on him. But, unfortunately, he made himself a target for it; he was very, very jealous, very difficult, very manipulative, and if you do that in this kind of a group of people you get back as good as you give, to be honest. I wasn't understanding enough about his drug addiction. No one seemed to know much about drug addiction. Things like LSD were all new. No one knew the harm. People thought cocaine was good for you. At the beginning of the concert, Jagger read an excerpt from Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem "Adonaïs", an elegy written on the death of John Keats, after which thousands of butterflies were released in Jones's memory. During the concert, they played three new songs from two forthcoming albums, "Midnight Rambler" and "Love in Vain", from Let It Bleed, released in December 1969, and "Loving Cup", which appeared on Exile on Main St., released in May 1972. They also played "Honky Tonk Women", released as a single the previous day.
On 6 December 1969, the Stones performed at the Altamont Free Concert music festival, in which Meredith Hunter was stabbed to death by a member of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club after drawing a revolver and approaching the stage, which was seen as a threat to the band. Accounts of Hunter's reason for drawing the revolver varied. According to The Guardian music editor Ben Beaumont-Thomas, Hunter's death and the overall mood of festival goers "has become symbolic for the corruption of 1960s hippy idealism". Jagger later told Robert Greenfield that he had been "scared shitless" that he "might be attacked on stage" by Hells Angels members who "felt they had been unfairly blamed for the disaster that left a Stones fan dead".
1970s
thumb|alt=See caption |Jagger performing in [[Zuiderpark Stadion in The Hague, Netherlands, in May 1976]]
In 1970, Jagger bought Stargroves, a manor house and estate near East Woodhay in Hampshire. The Rolling Stones and several other bands recorded there using the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio.