Years apart, worlds apart, musically apart, and yet Mick Jagger and Stormzy, whose shared birthdays we are celebrating in the Standard today, do have something in common: as young men both rose to become the most iconic stars of their era. Yes, ‘iconic’ is a phrase so overused now it barely means anything, but these two genuinely deserve that term, in that they symbolize their times. Not just by being pretty poster boys either: in different ways they redefined what an artist could be.
Under the early tutelage of his teen genius manager Andrew Loog Oldham – who stumbled across The Rolling Stones and spotted a chance to create the “anti-Beatles” — Jagger paved the way for Stormzy, and many other artists, by creating the bad boy pop star. In uptight post-war Britain, he and the Stones were quickly seen as a threat to morality, decency, and the very fabric of society (‘Would you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone?’ was Oldham’s genius press line), to the delight of a burgeoning youth market of baby boomers. “They were scandalous, but in 1963 you didn’t have to do very much - walk into the Savoy without wearing a tie and you end up on the front page,” says Jagger and Stones biographer Philip Norman.
