He finds it notoriously difficult to get satisfaction, but when he’s got three books on the go Sir Mick Jagger comes remarkably close.
The Rolling Stones frontman and his fiancée, Melanie Hamrick, an author, retired ballerina and fellow book lover, have shared some of their reading habits as they pledge their support for The Sunday Times’s Get Britain Reading campaign.
Hamrick said she read everywhere, including in the sauna: “The spines are really crumbled.” Jagger said he often has more than one book on the go.
Mick Jagger in 1984
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“I read every day. Mostly at night, when things are quiet. I read multiple books, usually a thriller and a history book or something I know little or nothing about,” he said.
Jagger is currently reading: Adam Brookes’s Spy Games, published in 2015, about a journalist who has gone into hiding from Chinese agents who have identified him as a western spy; The Shape of Things Unseen, by Adam Zeman, a professor of neurology, published this year, which examines how imagination works; and Nick Lloyd’s The Eastern Front, a history of the First World War published last year.
Jagger and Hamrick join more than 100 celebrities including Sir Gareth Southgate, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, David Nicholls and Ian McEwan, who have pledged their support for the campaign which is asking readers to read for pleasure for at least ten minutes a day for six weeks; give money to Bookbanks, to put books in the hands of those who need them most; and volunteer to read in schools with Coram Beanstalk. This is in response to a survey by the National Literacy Trust which found that only one in three children and young people aged eight to 18 said they enjoyed reading in their free time.
Jagger, 82, and Hamrick, 38, are keen to instil a love of reading in their eight-year-old son, Deveraux.
Hamrick says she and Jagger enjoy reading with their son
Hamrick said: “Mick and I are both big readers. Mick reads up to three books and has ones for different times of the day, different moods. I can’t do two books at a time, when I’m in a book I’m fully invested. The only books we read at the same time were baby-name books but we will read with my son. We all read Charlotte’s Web together and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” she said.
For Hamrick, who grew up in America, it was E. B. White’s 1952 book, about a pig named Wilbur and his friendship with Charlotte the spider, that first inspired her to love reading.
“After reading that, I could never put a book down. That was my first. It just taught kindness and the importance of it,” she said.
Jagger with students during a surprise visit to his old school, Dartford Grammar, in Kent, last week
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The Rolling Stones frontman presented a trophy to the basketball team
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It’s not always easy to get young people interested in reading, especially in the digital age, but Hamrick has noticed a few things that have helped.
“They did a reading competition at one of [Deveraux’s] schools a year ago and that got him reading. I feel like it’s horrible, it’s almost like bribing but then my son loved the books. He wasn’t necessarily motivated to read on his own but when the school introduced this reading competition, oh he wouldn’t put a book down.
“Maybe schools should introduce some sort of ‘whichever class reads the most books gets a pizza party’,” she joked. “You find the joy and the love and eventually whether it’s through a competition or not you will eventually find the joy,” she added.
Jagger during the band’s 1975 tour
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Hamrick also found reading a book and then watching the film adaptation with popcorn and a group of Deveraux’s friends has been successful in encouraging enthusiasm. She did this with The Wild Robot by Peter Brown, which was made into a film last year.
Deveraux is Jagger’s eighth child. Hamrick met the rock star in Tokyo in 2014 when she was a ballerina and he was touring with the Rolling Stones. Hamrick said that on the aeroplane to Tokyo she stayed up all night reading A Thousand Splendid Suns and continued to read when she arrived at her hotel after the 14-hour flight.
She has since published two erotic novels: First Position and The Unravelling. Hamrick says writing these have influenced her reading habits.
“Since I started writing I feel like I read a little bit less because I don’t want to be influenced by other people’s voices. I still try to read a book a week or every other week. But I have to say, when I am in the thick of writing and editing it definitely cuts down my reading because I’ll be reading someone else’s writing and I’m like ‘they’re so much better than me’. It’s just the comparison. I still don’t feel I have the writing voice that I want yet.”
Mick Jagger reads Shelley’s Adonais in memory of guitarist Brian Jones at Hyde Park, 1969
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Hamrick said she’s “really into thrillers” as she wants to read content that’s not close to what she’s writing herself. “I’m working on an outline now. So I figured, OK if I read like a thriller that’s not in the romance or women’s fiction. So I won’t feel too comparative,” she added.
Jagger’s music has also been influenced by reading. His song Sympathy for the Devil was inspired by Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita. Just as in Bulgakov’s novel, the song uses the Devil as a narrator.
Speaking of books in his childhood, Jagger said: “It’s hard to pick out one book that influenced my life but I think the book that got me started in my reading was Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe when I was very young. After that I starting reading science fiction and I loved reading The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury and A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess.”