Part of what made The Rolling Stones so shocking to audiences in the 1960s was Mick Jagger’s voice. Largely, until that point, music was meant to serve a genuinely technical purpose whereby its performers were supposed to inhabit some sort of traditional skill. Well-crafted voices were primarily on order, so that dreamy and inoffensive lyrics could be sung without any real danger.
Of course, Jagger was so much more than a simple voice, and that was essentially what was at the root of the band’s brilliance. It may not have been technically crafted and well polished, but it was brimming with character, charisma and an energy that was completely irreplicable. It may have been offensive to the older, pearl-clutching generation, but to younger music fans, it was exactly what the landscape needed.
Those idiosyncrasies have always been the key to great live performances. The rough edges, which are ordinarily smoothed out in the studio, are instead left to hang on stage, splintering your listen with vitality and nuance, making each performance unique. Something that the squeaky clean tradition of studio television has never quite grasped over the years. Music shows have run on slick production timings that have removed the possibility for any performative spontaneity and have shamefully relied on miming.
In the 1990s, we saw it with Top Of The Pops, where alternative bands were bundled into a call sheet with slick bubblegum pop acts, where all of them would be forced to mime their hits on camera. A concept Oasis famously ridiculed when they swapped band roles for a ‘95 performance of ‘Roll With It’, relegating Liam to the guitar slot while Noel fully embraced the ridiculousness of miming his brother’s parts.
But The Rolling Stones were causing television mischief decades before Oasis were even an idea. In 1965, during an episode of that decade’s version of Top Of The Pops, which was Ready Steady Go!, the band decided to satirise the concept of miming by performing someone else’s song completely.
“The thing I miss about Ready Steady Go! is the miming,” Jagger said during his introduction of the band’s performance, continuing, “We haven’t had any miming competitions for a long time, but here we’ve got a new lot from Leighton Buzzard who’re going to do their best for you.”
What followed was a performance of Sonny & Cher’s ‘I Got You Babe’. Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones and Cathy McGowan first appear on screen, tenderly dancing to the ballad while trying not to crack up with laughter, before welcoming Keith Richards into frame.
Richards dominates the shot as he pretends to play the tuba, without a mouthpiece, furiously puffing his cheeks in and out. The chaos continues as the relatively shy member of the band, Charlie Watts, enters, carrying a giant sunflower aggressively snatched by Jones, who stuffs it into Richards’ instrument. The whole thing is refreshingly irreverent and the sort of thing that would be celebrated within internet culture today, but in 1965, it was but another mischievous antic that gave conservative critics a new axe to grind with the band.
