Septuagenarian Mick Jagger still knows how to rock the board. The Rolling Stones singer has had to change his set list in Shanghai after Honky Tonk Women was found to be too strong for the country’s censor. But rather than letting it pass quietly, Jagger made sure the audience knew.
“About now we’d usually play something like Honky Tonk Women … but it’s been vetoed,” Jagger said at the show, reported on the band’s Twitter feed. No reason was given but the lyrics do describe a “bar-room queen” who “tried to take me upstairs for a ride.” A second female, Jagger sings, “blew my nose and then she blew my mind”.
It is not the first time that the Stones have been censored in Shanghai: they have performed there once before, in 2006, with songs including Brown Sugar among the banned tracks. Songs such as Street Fighting Man, meanwhile, remained intact, indicating that sensitive Chinese censors fear sexualised females more than civil unrest.
Jagger was also able to knock historian William Dalrymple off centre stage by attending an exhibition in Shanghai by his wife, Olivia Fraser. She was displaying her delicate geometric paintings with the Grosvenor Gallery in the city.
Fraser came to our attention last year when MOMA director Glenn Lowry bought a work within minutes of arriving at a show in Delhi. Jagger picked up her most expensive artwork, Surya. Had the Stone expressed any interest in Dalrymple’s books, The Londoner asked the historian? The response was silence. But it seems there were no hard feelings: the couple made it to the concert.
