How to stay relevant. It’s a question we all face at some point in life. Mick Jagger was thinking about staying relevant. It was 1983. Punk had come and gone. New Wave was still a thing. Electronica and the New Romantics were still fashionable. Where did a rock ‘n’ roll band like the Stones fit into the mix? Jagger was going through what Keith Richards calls “Lead Vocalist Syndrome.” The point where a band’s singer thinks he/she is bigger, better, and more important than the rest of the group.

Richards had quit heroin. He was clean. After years of fucking around, Richards was back and wanted to take up his fair share of the burden Jagger had been carrying. But Jagger had control of the Rolling Stones and wasn’t going to give Keith an inch.

“Shut up, Keith, that’s an idiotic idea,” was how Jagger dismissed Richards.

To keep relevant, Jagger was checking out the competition. He wanted to know what Bowie was doing, what Rod Stewart was doing, what was the latest tune played on the dancefloor at Studio 54, and which bands were snapping at their heels. He was chasing his own tail.

The best way to stay relevant is to be and do.

Jagger and Richards wrote their first song on a kitchen table. They didn’t care what other people thought or who they sounded like, it was their song—that was all that mattered. Now, the relationship between Jagger and Richards was fractious. It was falling apart. Jagger had control and he was taking the Stones where he wanted.

Yet, checking out the opposition, chasing the trends meant sometimes Jagger got it right. He was and still is a shrewd businessman—let’s not forget, he had been a student at the London School of Economics. He had also been very successful in taking the Stones in unlikely directions, like that time he pulled them into disco music with “Miss You.” But sometimes his ideas were as popular as that time Family Guy replaced Brian with the ghastly mutt, Vinny. Still, Jagger was always open to suggestions, always looking for something new, always wanting to be at the front of the crowd.

Jagger had read William Burroughs’ book Cities of the Red Night. It was the book everyone was supposed to be reading. It had received, at that point, the best reviews of Burroughs’ career. Which shows weird only lasts as long as it’s something new. Now Burroughs was an eminent grise living in a bunker in NYC hanging his used condoms out to dry on the washing-line.

Burroughs was the starting point for Jagger writing the song “Undercover of the Night” in Paris around late 1982. As he later explained in the liner notes for The Stones’ compilation Jump Back, “Undercover of the Night” was “heavily influenced by William Burroughs’ Cities Of The Red Night, a free-wheeling novel about political and sexual repression. It combines a number of different references to what was going down in Argentina and Chile.” Though he did deny he had “nicked it.”

The Burroughs’ influence is evident in Jagger’s lyrics:

Hear the screams from Center 42
Loud enough to bust your brains out
The opposition’s tongue is cut in two
Keep off the streets ‘cause you’re in danger
One hundred thousand disparu
Lost in the jails in South America

Curl up baby
Curl up tight
Curl up baby
Keep it all out of sight
Undercover
Keep it all out of sight
Undercover of the night

The sex police are out there on the streets
Make sure the pass laws are not broken
The race militia has got itchy fingers
All the way from New York back to Africa

“Undercover of the Night” is a classic Stones’ track. A brilliant vocal, a great guitar riff, and a memorable hook. It was Jagger’s song, as Richards later recalled:

“Mick had this one all mapped out, I just played on it. There were a lot more overlays on the track because there was a lot more separation in the way we were recording at the time.”

When it came to making the promo for the song, the Stones approached Julien Temple who was the hip, young director with a fine resume of work with the Sex Pistols, the UK Subs (Punk Can Take It) and the promo for “Come on Eileen” by Dexy’s Midnight Runners. He had also famously directed the Pistols big screen adventure The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle.

Temple soon discovered how difficult the relationship between Jagger and Richards had become:

“I wrote an extreme treatment about being in the middle of an urban revolution and dramatized the notion of Keith and Mick really not liking each other by having Keith kill Mick in the video. I never thought they would do it. Of course, they loved it. I went to Paris to meet with the band. Keith was looking particularly unhappy. He was glowering with menace and eventually said, ‘Come downstairs with me.’ My producer and I went down to the men’s room. Keith had a walking stick and suddenly he pulled it apart. The next thing I know he’s holding a swordstick to my throat. He said, ‘I want to be in the video more than I am.’ So we wrote up his part a bit more. That was Keith’s idea of collaboration!”

 

Mick Jagger getting lippy.
 
The promo opens on a hotel complex. American tourists are having a good time grooving to the Stones’ music while militiamen patrol the rooftops and streets. Jagger as the journalist (white knight in a Panama hat and very bad stick-on mustache) watches as Keith and his gang of masked vigilantes or maybe revolutionaries or maybe death squad or maybe just a rock ‘n’ roll group on the spur of some internal wranglings (take your pick) sneak into the hotel and kidnap one of the hotel guests or rather kidnap Mick Jagger watching Mick Jagger on TV. Journo Mick watches kidnapped Mick being spirited away by Keith and co. who all drive off in what looks like a military vehicle straight past a bunch of soldiers kicking the shit out of people down on their luck.

Journo Mick makes his way to kidnapped Mick’s hotel room where he finds a woman hiding under the bed covers (ya see what they did there?). Anyway, one thing leads to another, and journo Mick and his girl under the covers watch an execution and then go off (via the police department) to rescue kidnapped Mick. A shoot-out ensues in a candle-lit church—nothing worse than what any five-year-old could see on The A-Team—and kidnapped Mick is saved. Poor old journo Mick dies from a bullet wound.

What it’s saying, what it’s actually about, is none too clear. It’s a dilettante’s take on Burroughs and the criminal activities of government’s and hoodlums in South America. At worst, it might make a viewer go, “Wow, South America looks a fun place to have a party.” At best, it would get the kids talking about politics and shit.

Jagger has sometimes been accused of being a dilettante. Maybe. To be fair, he’s more, as Richards said in his autobiography, “a sponge” who soaks up whatever’s going on and filters it through his music. Just what every good artist does.

The subject matter of the song and its accompanying promo was a rare outing into politics for the Stones. It was over fifteen years since “Street Fighting Man” but “Undercover of the Night” chimed neatly with the edgy political songs released by bands like The Jam or specifically the Clash and their album Sandinista! from 1980, which similarly dealt with the political turmoil in Chile and Nicaragua. The promo was banned by the BBC or rather the Corporation said they weren’t going to screen it, while the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) were nervous over its perceived violence. MTV was also angsty. It’s difficult to see why the sequences of so-called “violence” caused such concern, as both the BBC and the Independent Television Channels in the UK screened far worse with war films and westerns and TV detective series at peak times. It was more likely the political content—the suggestion that America was in some way sponsoring murderous dictatorships in South America—rather than any bang-bang, shoot-shoot, made “Undercover of the Night” unpalatable. But getting “banned” kept the Stones relevant in a wholly different way.

In 1983 Mick Jagger and director Julien Temple appeared via TV link-up on The Tube to promote the single and defend the video’s politics and violence. They were interviewed by a young presenter called Muriel Gray.

The Tube was the best music show on British television during the eighties. It was launching pad for a variety of young, sometimes unknown artists like the Fine Young Cannibals, Paul Young, and even Twisted Sister who earned a record deal after their appearance. Gray was one of the show’s three presenters, alongside main hosts Jools Holland and Paula Yates. Gray had been selected out of literally dozens, nay hundreds of young hopefuls who attended auditions to be one of the presenters on the show. Gray won out because she had the right kind of attitude, which probably stemmed from the fact her favorite hobby was “arguing—not even discussing” as Gray believed arguing was the best way to find out what a person is really thinking.

It was an awkward interview between Gray, Jagger and Temple. It was almost like a gobby maiden Aunt versus the naughty drunken Uncles. Gray later explained in The Official Book of The Tube, she “wanted Mick Jagger… to justify why he thought the violence in the ‘Undercover of the Night’ video was necessary, what his personal reasons were.” Unfortunately, it didn’t quite end up like that. Television interviewers have a difficult role. They are told by the producer what they have to extract from the interviewee. Their job is a one part sycophant, one part grand inquisitor. Gray later wrote, she thought the interview “dull” probably because it wasn’t her finest fifteen minutes. Alas, the video of this (in)famously fractious interview isn’t currently on YouTube, so I’ve transcribed the interview as contained in The Official Book of The Tube.
 

Muriel Gray doing what she once did: interview pop stars, here talking to the late Pete Burns of Dead or Alive.
 
Gray kicked off with the easy ones, sounding a bit like a miffed junior school teacher who has found one of her charges has stuffed a crayon up his nose.

Gray: Mick, why on earth did you choose to put such scenes of explicit violence into what is, after all, just a promo for your new single?

Rather than deny the accusation, Jagger attempted to answer it, which was a mistake as it meant he was admitting there were “scenes of explicit violence” in the video. However, Jagger is smart and he was quick enough to point out that he and Temple had no idea what Gray was on about as they had only seen her shaking her head at certain points during promo’s screening. What parts? They knew not. Indeed, Jagger and Temple had agreed to appear on The Tube on the agreement “the whole video” would be shown.This did not happen as “the [programme’s] director [had] cut away from the most violent scenes.”

Jagger: It’s a film which goes with our new single which is about political repression, violence. I notice we all got your reactions when the violent bits came. We never got a chance to see them ourselves, we were only allowed to see you shaking your head. We didn’t want to dress the song up in cliches, we wanted to do a video that was about the song.

Gray: But surely we’ve all seen the real atrocities of what terrorists do in South America?

Again, Jagger was too quick to respond with “Have you?” which left him open to Gray responding with:

Gray: Yes, we see them every night on the news. I think we’re all quite aware of them.

Which was also a mistake as it allowed Julien Temple to completely dismiss Gray’s line of questioning with “Well, what’s all the fuss about then?”

This was where the scolding Mary Whitehouse line of questioning should have stopped. But Gray had a job to do and a little common sense wasn’t going to get in her way.

Gray: The fuss is exactly this. That is a video for your single. There’s a great guitar riff over all these awful shootings. Doesn’t that glamorize it? Doesn’t that lessen what’s happening in real life?

Let’s put this in context. This was the early 1980s. Pop videos were relatively new. Most videos were palatable exercises in feel-good entertainment. The Stones had made a promo that told a story, made a small point about politics in South America, and contained some violence—the kind of thing most kids lapped up on TV.

Temple wasn’t to be swayed. He had some scary big facts he wanted to share.

Temple: Let me tell you that the average kid in America when he gets to the age of 21 has seen 65,000 killings on TV and that devalues the meaning of killing. It makes people immune to it. If we’d made a documentary for six weeks in El Salvador, all the kids who might see this would have turned it off. This film is about the song, about what is happening in parts of the so-called civilized world.

Which was only once again confirming there was violence in the video, but hey, violence happens all over the world, kids.
 

Keith possibly showing what he would like to do to Mick at the time…
 
Gray’s rebuttal assumed a pop video audience might be unable to discern between what is real and what is entertainment.

Gray: So, when the kids see killings on television, would you prefer them to go “Oh, that’s just like the Stones’ video,” rather than, “Oh, my God, that’s terrible”?

Temple: No, I’d prefer them to think about it. If you look at the video, it’s based around two kids watching MTV, and there’s an argument between the guy, who wants to turn it off and get on with making out on the sofa, and the girl, who sees something interesting. The film is saying, “How do you react to seeing this sort of thing? Are you immune to it or do you think about it?” The song, which is the best song around and blows out all those wimpy little synthesizer bands that hang around on TV, needs a video that lives up to it.

Gray: I see. But isn’t it a gutsy enough song without having to resort to the kind of violence that we see in this film? Don’t you see that it could be in danger of glamorizing violence?

Jagger: There’s no gratuitous violence in it at all. There’s no slow motion. There’s nothing like that…

Gray: But there’s someone being executed at point-blank range.

Jagger: If you’d let the people see it, they could make up thee minds for themselves.

As the video had been “banned” by the IBA, Channel 4 could not show the promo’s most controversial scenes. (“Big Brother strikes again,” quipped Temple.)

Gray now turned her attention as to why the IBA had banned it—which had really nothing to do with the Stones but rather the tastes of the IBA.

Gray: Surely you’re not so naive to realize when you made it that it would be banned? That’s pretty obvious.

Jagger: That’s not true. This [the UK] is the only country that’s banned it as far as we know. We all have our problems—NBC in America were worried about the Holiday Inn sign, while you’re worried about the violence.

Gray: Do you think that it’s actually going to help the position in El Salvador? Do you think that’s going to be of any use whatsoever?

Temple: The more kids that understand what’s going on there—that people are dragged out in the middle of the night and shot in the back of the head, and actually think about that, the better.

Jagger wanted to get back to Gray’s point about “glamorizing violence.”

Jagger: We’re not trying to glamorize violence—we’re trying to make a point as the song is making a point. We’re not trying to create a scandal in the newspapers. It’s not particularly violent compared to what you see on TV, it’s just not if you’re talking about news or films. People in the press have called it a video nasty. If you’ve ever watched a video nasty, I’m sure you wouldn’t think that.

Jagger had now answered Gray’s question, surely it was time to move the questioning on? But Gray liked arguing and she was not backing down.

Gray: The bit that we’re talking about is the execution from the gun—if you actually saw that in real life, and we have all seen things like the very famous scene from Vietnam of the journalist being shot, you’d be aware that murder isn’t usually accompanied by fantastic guitar music. It’s usually gurgles and screams and it’s very unpleasant. That’s maybe the reason people are worried that this is glamorizing it. Can’t you see that that’s real danger?

This is a fine piece of tabloid TV. Take a pseudo-moral position, tie-in some irrelevant historical point, ensure there’s a compliment (“fantastic guitar music”) which could also be a dig as it’s favoring Richards playing over Jagger’s singing, then reiterate the main accusation while emphasizing the irresponsibility of the interviewees. It threw Temple who went off on some irrelevant rant.

Temple: No. There’s a violence in pumping images of videogenic teddy bears down people’s throats every day. There are a lot of videos that look like out-takes from Bacardi Rum adverts. If kids are forced to watch that all the time, that’s violent to me.

Jagger tried to rein it in.

Jagger: We’re trying to make something that’s interesting and new and has a valid point—we’re not trying to make wimpy pop music. We’re not trying to make “la la la” love songs, though I love to do those from time to time. That song was a political song and we think that this is the best kind of thing to go with it.

But whatever Jagger said Gray was going to counter it with something separate to the subject at hand—an old interviewer’s trick. Let’s get personal shall we?

Gray: Well, if it’s political, Mick, and you feel so strongly about South America, are any of the profits from this single going to help the victims?

Temple: Well, that’s a stupid question.

Which is the correct answer to such a stupid question. It irked Gray.

Gray: Why is it a stupid question, Julien, if you feel so strongly about it?

Jagger: There won’t be any profits from this video and what I do with my money and give to who I want is a matter of privacy.

Gray: But if you are wanting to help, I don’t think this is going to help them very much, do you?

Temple: Well, what does a Duran Duran video do for them?

Gray: But then Duran Duran aren’t saying that they’re making a political point. Duran Duran are just making glossy, glamorous videos. This to me looks the same.

Temple: But there are a whole load of ways of making political points.

Jagger: I think we are making a valid political point and I don’t think videos should just be “la la la” and pretty.

Temple: Let me ask you…

Gray: I’m afraid I’ll have to stop you there, Julien. Thanks very much for joining us and trying to put your point over.

That was a nice little touch, trying to get your point across. So evil!

The interview was a mess. It was bad-tempered. It also seemed that Gray didn’t really believe in her line of questioning. But she had a job to do and she did it.

The following day, Gray missed Jagger “by seconds” at Heathrow airport while she was en route to film an interview, as Gray later wrote:

The crew and researcher met him and he charmingly said that, despite what had happened, he didn’t hate me or the programme—only our producer.

Sadly, we don’t know what Jagger actually thought.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?: That time the Rolling Stones got busted for drugs
Altamont, The Rolling Stones, the Hells Angels, and the Inside Story of Rock’s Darkest Day
Casual snapshots from the Rolling Stones’ 1965 U.S. tour
‘Hot Dogs on the Rocks’: Grody Rolling Stones recipe from 1967