Mick Jagger. Philip Norman. 2012.

Throughout five decades of fronting the Rolling Stones, Mick Jagger has been seen as the ultimate arrogant, narcissistic superstar, whose sexual appetite and cavalier treatment of women rivalled Casanova’s and whose supposed reckless drug use touched off the most famous scandal in rock history. Now a grandfather and a British knight of the realm, he still remains the model for every young rock singer who takes the stage.

Philip Norman’s masterly biography shows this most notorious yet enigmatic of rock icons to be far more complex than the cold arch-seducer of myth. Here at last is the real story of how original pop Svengali Andrew Oldham transformed  a shy economics student named Mike Jagger into a modern Antichrist……of Jagger’s unpublicised heroic role at the Altamont festival that brought the swinging Sixties to a horrific end……of the cavalcade of beautiful women from Chrissie Shrimpton to Jerry Hall he has bedded but not always dominated…..and of the enduring but ever-fraught creative partnership with his ‘Glimmer Twin’, Keith Richards.

Here also is Jagger’s long-overdue recognition as a songwriter whose ‘Symphony for the Devil’ is one of few truly epic pop singles, and as a harmonica player fit to rank among the great blues masters, who inspired the Stones before money became their main source of Satisfaction.