He stripped off in Performance, dragged up in Bent and wore a bucket on his head in Ned Kelly. As he lends his glorious voice to new spy thriller Slow Horses, the Rolling Stone relives his greatest roles
Where is Mick Jagger right now? “I’m in Frahhhnce where it’s rather grey,” drawls the 78-year-old singer with exaggerated languor. “I can’t even in my wildest imagination call it spring-like.” Even down a crackling phone line, the voice is hypnotically rich: the dense delicious timbre, the sudden leaps between high and low notes. Then there are those vowels. Maroon 5 had a hit in 2010 singing about his moves, but no one does vowels quite like Jagger.
That much is clear from Strange Game, the grungy theme song he has recorded for the six-part adaptation of Mick Herron’s acerbic spy novel Slow Horses. The series concerns a team of disgraced spooks relegated to an insalubrious office tucked behind the Barbican. Jagger sneers at these rejects on the song, branding them “losers, misfits and boozers” before announcing: “You’re finished, you’re foolish, you faiiiled.”
