They have played more than 2,000 gigs across the world, their fans shaking their heads along to the stomping music.
But the Rolling Stones, whose drummer Charlie Watts died this week aged 80, sometimes left people shaking their heads in confusion.
The first time Charlie appeared in the Daily Mirror, our middle-aged reviewer was not sure what he was witnessing.
It was June 13, 1963, when “Mirror DJ” Patrick Doncaster wrote about the “five long-haired lads known as the Rolling Stones” after seeing them whip hundreds of young fans into a frenzy in a hotel.
It was five months after they played their first “official” gig at a blues club in Ealing, West London.
By June 13, they had just dropped the apostrophe from Rollin’, had released their first single Come On a week earlier, and were making waves as they toured Britain.
But our Patrick was astonished not only by the music but also a form of dancing he’d never seen before. Under the headline Twitching the night away, he wrote:
In the half-darkness, the guitars and the drums started to twang and bang. A pulsating rhythm and blues. Shoulder to shoulder on the floor stood 500 youngsters, some in black leather, some in sweaters. You could have boiled an egg in the atmosphere.
They began to dance. And it was no place for Victor Silvester.
They just stood as they were. Their heads shook violently in what I can only describe as a paroxysm. ‘A sudden attack,’ says the dictionary of this word. That’s what it looked like in a sweating jazz club that meets in the Station Hotel, at Richmond, Surrey. Their feet stamped in tribal style. If they could, the dedicated occasionally put their hands above their heads and clapped in rhythm.
Suddenly there would be shaking figures above the rest of the on-the-spot dancers, held aloft by their colleagues, thrashing and yelling ‘Yeh, yehs’. No one needed a partner. It was simply shake, rattle and roll on your square foot of the floor.
In its fervour it was like a revivalist meeting in America’s Deep South.
Responsible for this extraordinary scene in suburban Surrey are five long-haired lads known as the Rolling Stones.
Their names: Mick Jagger, 19, studying at the London School of Economics; Brian Jones, 19, who used to be a lorry driver and lights up 60 smokes a day; Keith Richard, 19, who used to be a Post Office worker; Bill Wyman, 21, who likes poetry as well as rhythm; and drummer Charlie Watts, 21, an advertising agency man, who collects pocket handkerchiefs. He has 100.
What do the fans call this dance? (I am told it happens nowhere else in Britain). Nobody seems to know or care. They just do it.
It could well be the Parox… or the Twitch… or the Sudden Attack. If you wish to try it out, all you need is a lot of people in a crowded room and the Rolling Stones’ first record ‘Come On’ (Decca).
The Stones’ first single reached No21, their second I Wanna Be Your Man got to No12, then Not Fade Away went to No3 in early 1964.
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They weren’t yet untouchable rock royalty when the Mirror wrote about them in April 1964: “They are called the ugliest group in Britain.”
But by 1965, helped by their first US No1 (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, the “five long-haired lads” had reached stratospheric levels of fame.
Many shows on their US tour that year ended in riots as delirious fans stormed the stage. Officers shut down a gig in Rochester, New York, halfway through when girls went wild after, according to the police chief, “one Rolling Stone took off his jacket”.
By then, the whole world knew their names.
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