Gathering Moss

 It's difficult to put the boot into something you love - unless you're Justin Lee Collins, in which case it's called "foreplay" - but the new single by the Rolling Stones is pretty crap.
 It's overly long; four minutes when the verse only contains one repeated chord. It's disjointed (it feels like at least three different songs have been cobbled together to create a barely functioning whole, which is coincidentally very similar to how Keith Richards is assembled) and the lyric comes dangerously close to being just an old bloke complaining about the news, if said old bloke were complaining at four hundred heavily-compressed decibels.
 I've actually been a fan of the seemingly endless quality the Stones have displayed. I quite like that they've kept going, and when I saw them six or seven years ago they were fantastic.
 Keith in particular has been very vocal about the group's perpetual aversion to retirement, and his points seem solid. He has always maintained that the reason he keeps playing is that he likes it. "I'm not doing this for you, I'm doing it for me," he says flatly in his recent autobiography. Still, under the harsh glare of a ropey new single, you start to wonder about motivation.
 Firstly, it's not difficult to play guitar to the public. Since the invention of Youtube, pretty much everyone with an ambition to do so has had a crack at it, regardless of whether they should or not.
 So when Keith says he just enjoys playing to people, he should probably be honest and add the caveat that he likes playing to people "in big fucking stadiums."
 These stadiums, incidentally, come equipped with fireworks, massive inflatable props and vast, multi-tiered sets that have to be transported by a veritable fleet of lorries and vans.
 None of which is strictly necessary to the playing of blues rock. You can play it in a local pub if you're any good, and often if you're not.
 So what Keith says and what Keith means seem to be two different things. What he means when he says he likes "doing it" is that he likes shows involving massive spectacle and larcenous ticket prices that add to already bulging coffers. If that's not the case, then why does he keep doing it?
 The other members, meanwhile, never quite seem as keen on the whole "keep doing it" aspect in the first place.
 Charlie Watts, the oldest of the group at seventy-one, has maintained a side-line in jazz drumming, which seems to be his genuine passion in his dotage. He certainly seems to have been little more than a click-track on the recent single, and once again one struggles to ignore the mental image of a rickety, spent force of a band. A group of aging Stooges, still pushed on by Moe's determination even after their bodies and spirits have given out.
 Mick Jagger's voice, already idling just outside a parody of itself, does not bother me as much as the suspicion that he hasn't wanted to be in the band for about thirty years. His frequent youthful comments about wanting to retire before he was forty, coupled with his occasional - but still ocurring - attempts at other, "bigger" projects, give him the aura of someone whose only real opinion of the Stones anymore is a sort of rueful weariness. "Christ, am I still doing this?" his inner monologue seems to mutter in the undertone of every line.
 Ronnie Wood, frankly, has bigger problems than a his jobsworth guitar playing on this single. He recently seemed to express that after he left his wife for a teenage waitress and fell spectacularly, violently off the wagon, he should be seen as the victim when said ex-wife quite understandably sold a lot of his belongings.
 I could be massively, cynically jumping the gun, of course. Not only is that what I'm best at - turns out that whole "Olympics" thing went rather well, despite what I said - but it's only one single, and the second single from the Stones last album ("Rain Fell Down" from "A Bigger Bang") was fucking crap, despite that being a perfectly enjoyable album. The next single might be fantastic, although from here I can't help but expect it to be called something like "Phone It In (We Want More Money.)"
 Nonetheless, with their endless career and apparently diminishing returns, the Stones risk doing through longevity what U2 did through ubiquity: Making everyone wish they'd just quietly piss off.