There was one moment, exactly half way through this gig, which gets the Rolling Stones' dilemma down cold. As Mick, Keef, Charlie and Ronnie were off rejuvenating themselves after an arthritic first set, something very stadium-rock indeed happened. From the middle of the stage, a surreal, semi-organic metal structure started to sprout.
Like a prop from the Matrix, it stretched its steel tentacle over thousands of heads, and landed at a point in the middle of the crowd. The Stones strolled over its gleaming length, landing on a carpet-sized stage. And then proceeded to play 25 minutes of ragged-arsed, broken-bottled, rickety old blues numbers.
The critic stares at the giant inflatable Babylon goddess, the 50-ft high flames that erupt at the end of Sympathy For The Devil, the stadium-wide blizzard of golden flakes that heralds the beginning of Brown Sugar - and shutting his eyes - listens to an undistinguished Stones cover-band missing all the cues. Is the fact that they're still trying to get away with it, well into their fifties, the real reason these hordes are here? Are the Stones in a late-Sinatra zone, making a spectacle of their decrepitude, allowing themselves to fade away in public?
This depends whether you ever thought the Stones held together anyway. The press pack CD of the 1971 Sticky Fingers LP - which is, to my ears, a load of not-very-John-Lee-Hooker guitar chintz. So what's new? Perhaps that's why we were warmed up at the start by tracks from Oasis and the Prodigy. Maybe future fifty-somethings will turn up to Murrayfield in 2019, holding hands to Smack My Bitch Up and Wonderwall.
Crude music for a funkless people: it's a long tradition. Yet at least the Gallaghers and the Prodge will avail themselves of the latest digital machinery. Evidently, the Stones feel they must always be "live" (some kind of geriatric therapy, no doubt). And age is withering some of them more speedily than others. Charlie Watts, it has to be said, was appalling, his familiar get-me-back-to-my-country-estate-quick grimace barely visible above the cymbals. Just when you felt that numbers like Honky Tonk Woman or Gimme Shelter were miraculously about to take off (Richards and Wood doing their backwoods bluesmen best, Jagger maniacally aerobic), Charlie's zimmer-frame clunk kept the songs heading for the rest-home.
Still, there was one undeniably thrilling aspect of this gig: the fact that you got to see Keith Richards up close on the running boards at either side of the stage. There's nothing startling about Mick (still the cryogenic man who can get supermodels pregnant at a distance of 40 feet); nor about Ronnie (who still looks, and acts, like a gently charcoaled Rod Stewart). But Keith! Hair like frozen smoke; face made from old rhino hide; still dipping and dancing with his guitar, flicking out the simplicities.
And there he was, on his knees to the merchandise-clients, everyone hoping he'd get up again without a stagger. No problem: Keef fluttered up like a black crow, gave us a big showbiz wink, and sauntered off to his wizened pals. They're human, all too human, the Stones. Maybe the only reason, nowadays, to go and see them.
