The Rolling Stones’ resilience is hard to get one’s head around. In a world of fleeting cultural phenomena, they just keep going… and going… and going. Earlier this month, under the pseudonym ‘The Cockroaches’, the band released 1,000 copies of a vinyl-only single (their 124th in their 65th year of rocking) ahead of a new studio album which will come out this summer. The combined age of the three surviving principals Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood is 242. The band are so venerable that even jokes about their age are getting old: their ‘Steel Wheels’ tour was dubbed ‘Steel Wheelchairs’ back in… 1989. 

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Full disclosure: I’m hardly a Rolling Stones fan. My dad forced me to listen to his treasured copy of ‘Rolled Gold’ when I was about eight and promised it would be mine if I liked it. But, as the final bars of ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ faded away, to his stupefaction, I shrugged my shoulders and shook my head. ‘It’s all right,’ I think I said.

That’s pretty much my opinion now, almost 50 years later. But, even so, I have always been fascinated by the Stones’ longevity – not just for their ability to endure but to do so with a reassuring sense that, like the royal family, they will always be with us. So how have they done it? What has kept the Stones rocking and........

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