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In the vast landscape of rock music history, and perhaps music as a whole, few frontmen hold as much legendary status as Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones. It’s almost like you couldn’t bear a name like “Mick Jagger” without being a sensation akin to molten rock, to borrow a phrase from John Mulaney. If Mick Jagger were to pen down a memoir chronicling his life and its moments in the spotlight, it would most likely become a bestseller. There might even be a biopic produced by Netflix. However, when asked, Jagger himself might simply point you to his Wikipedia page as he doesn’t seem keen on authoring his memoirs.
During an interview with BBC 6 where he discussed his recent collaboration with Dave Grohl, Jagger was inquired about the memoir he was rumored to have been working on for the past few years and if the COVID-19 lockdown had spurred him to make progress on it.
Reflecting on the task of writing his memoirs, Jagger confessed, “I could’ve done that [writing his memoirs], yeah. It was a thing that people started doing, writing. I think in the ’80s I started it and I was offered a lot of money – the money was the seductive part of it! So when I actually started to get into it I really didn’t enjoy it…reliving my life, to the detriment of living in the now.”
“If you wanna write an autobiography, this is not a process you can just do in a week – it takes a lot out of you. It takes a lot of reliving emotions, reliving friendships, reliving ups and downs,” Jagger added.
Mick Jagger Found Writing His Memoir ‘Dull and Upsetting’ April 15, 2021
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Jagger went on to express his lack of enjoyment in the memoir-writing process, describing it as “dull and upsetting, and there really weren’t that many highs out of it.” He even shared, “So I just said ‘I can’t be bothered with this’, and gave the money back to my publisher, and said that I’d do it another day. That was the end of it. I think later I said something stupid like I’d written it and couldn’t remember any of it, but it really wasn’t that: I just didn’t enjoy the process.”
When asked if he plans to complete his autobiography in the future, Jagger gave a succinct response, “Not any moment soon.”
