World's End, Chelsea, just down the King's Road from the old Drug Store, there's a charmingly delapidated terraced house that serves as occasional management offices to the Rolling Stones.
Up the rickety stairs to the third floor where the walls carry photographic portraits of that once "greatest rock'n'roll group in the world". The Stones – Mick and Keith and Charlie and Bill and the other one looking quaint and "wasted", dissipated and lovely and ill. And portraits of Jagger alone – Jagger with acoustic guitar slung over the shoulder, granting the camera a witchy glance; Jagger as Ned Kelly with bushwacker's beard and decrepit hat – Jagger the swaggerman – Jagger as the strutting gremlin with absurd balloons for lips in an ancient caricature by Trog. A shrine – no vulgar gold records, no flash, just antique memories.
And there he – the person – sits, silver threads and a nice striped shirt, taking afternoon tea and Coldrex. "I've got a fuckin' awful cold," he declares with wide-mouthed grimace and that well-known exaggerated nasality. "I'm not feelin' too sharp. Wanna go to sleep. Hope you don't wanna talk about the Stones. Oh, no, you do, don't you? You want to talk about the Staahns. Fuckin' 'ell..."
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