Jagger is credited with being a trailblazer in pop music and with bringing a style and sex appeal to rock and roll that have been imitated and proven influential with subsequent generations of musicians.

[8] His mother, Eva Ensley Mary (née Scutts), born in Sydney of English descent, was a hairdresser who was politically active in the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom.

[23] While Richards and Jones planned to start their own rhythm and blues group, Jagger continued to study finance and accounting[24] on a government grant as an undergraduate student at the London School of Economics.

[27][28] Brian Jones, using the name Elmo Lewis, began working at the Ealing Club, where a loose music ensemble known as Blues Incorporated was performing, under the leadership of Alexis Korner.

Their songwriting partnership took time to develop; one of their early compositions was "As Tears Go By", a song written for Marianne Faithfull, a young singer Loog Oldham was promoting.

[43] A reporter who contributed to the story spent an evening at the London club Blaise's, where a member of the Rolling Stones allegedly took several Benzedrine tablets, displayed a piece of hashish, and invited his companions back to his flat for a "smoke".

[29] At the beginning of the Hyde Park concert, Jagger read an excerpt from Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem "Adonaïs", an elegy written on the death of John Keats, after which thousands of butterflies were released in Jones' memory.

[53][54][55] On 6 December 1969, the Stones performed at the Altamont Free Concert music festival, in which Meredith Hunter was stabbed to death by a member of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club after drawing a revolver and approaching the stage, which was seen as a threat to the band.

[63] Jagger and the rest of the Rolling Stones moved to Southern France as tax exiles in 1971 to avoid paying a 93 per cent supertax imposed by Harold Wilson's Labour government on the country's top earners.

[77] In 1972, Jagger, Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman, Nicky Hopkins, and Ry Cooder released Jamming with Edward!, an album recorded during the band's Let It Bleed sessions.

[101] Released on 19 February 1985,[102] the album, produced by Nile Rodgers and Bill Laswell, features Herbie Hancock, Jeff Beck, Jan Hammer, Pete Townshend and the Compass Point All Stars.

[116] On Wandering Spirit, Jagger used Lenny Kravitz as a vocalist on his cover of Bill Withers' "Use Me" and bassist Flea from Red Hot Chili Peppers on three separate tracks.

The subsequent Bridges to Babylon Tour, which crossed Europe, North America, and other destinations, proved the band remained a strong live music attraction.

[135] Along with Eurythmics member and record producer David A. Stewart, Jagger wrote and performed the soundtrack to the 2004 romantic comedy Alfie, which included the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song-winning single "Old Habits Die Hard".

"[138] Two years later, in October 2009, Jagger joined U2 to perform "Gimme Shelter" with Fergie and will.i.am, and "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of" with U2 at the 25th Anniversary Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Concert.

[145] Jagger hosted the season finale of Saturday Night Live on 19 and 20 May 2012, doing several comic skits and playing some Rolling Stones' hits with Arcade Fire, Foo Fighters and Jeff Beck.

In August 2021, it was announced that Charlie Watts would undergo an unspecified medical procedure and would not perform on the remainder of the No Filter tour; the longtime Stones associate Steve Jordan filled in as drummer.

[179] That same year, Jagger co-wrote and performed "Strange Game" for the television series Slow Horses after being emailed "out of the blue" by composer Daniel Pemberton, whom he did not know;[180][181] it was subsequently nominated for an Emmy award.

[184] Jagger launched his own line of harmonicas the following January in collaboration with whynow Music and Lee Oskar, expressing a desire to encourage younger musicians to take up the instrument.

[201][202] Director Alejandro Jodorowsky approached him in the same year to play the role of Feyd-Rautha[203] in his proposed adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune, but the movie never made it to the screen.

The illness of principal actor Jason Robards (later replaced by Klaus Kinski), and a delay in the film's notoriously difficult production, resulted in him being unable to continue because of schedule conflicts with a Stones' tour; some footage of Jagger's work is shown in the documentaries Burden of Dreams[205] and My Best Fiend.

Martin Scorsese worked with Jagger on Shine a Light, a documentary film featuring the band with footage from the A Bigger Bang Tour during two nights of performances at New York's Beacon Theatre.

[222] Alongside Martin Scorsese, Rich Cohen and Terence Winter, Jagger co-created and executive produced the period drama series Vinyl (2016), which starred Bobby Cannavale and aired for one season on HBO before its cancellation.

[278][267] In 1989, Jagger was inducted into the American Rock and Roll Hall of Fame alongside the other Stones, including Mick Taylor and Ronnie Wood as well as Brian Jones and Ian Stewart (posthumously).

[296] In more recent decades, Jagger has been seen as a "poster boy" for healthy living and, as of 2006, was "said to run 12 km a day, to kick-box, lift weights, cycle, and practise ballet and yoga"; he has his own personal trainer.

[300] In the words of British dramatist and novelist Philip Norman, "the only point concerning Mick Jagger's influence over 'young people' that doctors and psychologists agreed on was that it wasn't, under any circumstances, fundamentally harmless".

"[301] Norman likens Jagger in his early performances with the Rolling Stones in the 1960s to a male ballet dancer, with "his conflicting and colliding sexuality: the swan's neck and smeared harlot eyes allied to an overstuffed and straining codpiece".

[302] Musicologist Sheila Whiteley noted that Jagger's performance style "opened up definitions of gendered masculinity and so laid the foundations for self-invention and sexual plasticity which are now an integral part of contemporary youth culture".

[303] His stage personas also contributed significantly to the British tradition of popular music that always featured the character song and where the art of singing becomes a matter of acting—which creates a question about the singer's relationship to his own words.

[305] To express "virility and unrestrained passion" he developed techniques previously used by African American preachers and gospel singers such as "the roar, the guttural belt style of singing, and the buzz, a more nasal and raspy sound".