Jagger keeps on rocking as the lyrics roll up his auto-prompter
T’S hard not to feel sympathy for the old devil. Sir Mick Jagger has succumbed to an on-stage Autocue in the battle against rock’n’roll amnesia.
A screen secreted among the 63-year-old rocker’s onstage monitors scrolls through the lyrics to the Rolling Stones’ classic songs in time with Jagger’s delivery. The prompt, used during the band’s £250 million-grossing tour, even tells him the name of the city where he is performing, and cues his between-song ad-libs.
Representatives of the band said that the screen was simply a prompt, allowing him to keep up the high-energy performances for which he is famed.
“He’s running all over the stage but if he gets a memory blank he can get back to the screen quickly,” a Stones source said. “He rarely needs it but it’s a back-up.”
A technician keeps pace with Jagger’s delivery, but after 40 years on the road, the screen may require close reading. He sang the same verse of Ruby Tuesday twice at last week’s concert in Glasgow during a show broadcast across the world by BBC Radio 2.
The Autocue allows Sir Mick to greet overseas crowds in their own language at prearranged breaks. The script suggested “Good evening London” at last month’s Twickenham shows.
The revelation cast new light on the lengths required to keep ageing rockers on the road. Oxygen masks are on permanent standby for Ozzy Osbourne, while the Beach Boys require backstage deep muscle massage from a licensed practitioner.
Autocues are a guilty secret. “Everyone uses them, from Macca to Elton,” said Brian Larter, managing director of Autoscript UK, which provides prompts for BBC newsreaders and rock stars. But discretion is vital. “Singers like to hide them in a front-of-stage monitor,” Mr Larter said. “You don’t want cameras to pick them up or let the audience see them or the gig can turn into karaoke.”
Like Jagger, most frontmen use the cue to cover for a brief mental blank or to prompt them to announce the next song on the set list. Reliance on a prompt, however, would seem to rise in proportion to career intake of drink and drugs. Brian Wilson, the Beach Boy who suffered mental illness through his experimentation with LSD, can perform only by sitting at a piano and reading the lyrics from a screen.
Axl Rose, of Guns N’Roses, has three cues placed strategically along the stage, alongside the band’s flame-throwers and explosives. Shaun Ryder of Happy Mondays also requires onstage assistance.