Just as--in many ways--Ray Davies and Dave Davies are the Kinks and Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey are the Who, Sir Michael Philip Jagger and Keith Richards (together known as the Glimmer Twins) are the Rolling Stones.

Jagger sang from a young age, but originally intended to be a teacher, doing well at Wentworth Primary School, where he first met Richards; Dartford Grammar School, where he first met future Stone Dick Taylor; and ultimately enrolling in the London School of Economics to study accounting and finance. He dropped out after less than a year, though, to pursue a career in music. He, Taylor, and Richards formed Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys in 1962; soon thereafter, Brian Jones, Ian Stewart and Tony Chapman joined up. Jones renamed the band the Rolling Stones, after the Muddy Waters song; Taylor left to form the Pretty Things, replaced on bass by Bill Wyman, and Chapman, who would later go on to form The Herd, was replaced by Charlie Watts. After Stewart's "demotion" at the hands of manager Andrew Loog Oldham to roadie and sideman, the classic Stones line-up was complete.

In the early days, the Stones relied on covers for their hits (a notable example being Lennon and McCartney's "I Wanna Be Your Man"--the Stones' version being the "original," antedating the Beatles' by about a month), but by 1965 Jagger and Richards had become accomplished songwriters: the list of their subsequent hits as rock composers, including "The Last Time," "Satisfaction," "Get Off of My Cloud," "19th Nervous Breakdown" "As Tears Go By," and "Paint It, Black"--and that's only from February 1965 to May 1966; we haven't gotten anywhere near "Jumping Jack Flash," "Honky Tonk Women," and "Brown Sugar" yet, let alone "Beast of Burden" and "Start Me Up"--may only be matched by those of Lennon & McCartney.

Since the Stones have never really split (although it was a distinct possibility in the mid-1980s), their members' solo catalogues are tiny compared to those of, say, ex-Beatles. Accordingly, Jagger has only released four solo studio albums, spanning the years 1985 to 2001. (He also contributed to the soundtrack to the remake of Alfie in 2004.) Interestingly, Jagger's greatest chart success away from the Stones has been in collaboration with The Jacksons (1984's "State of Shock", No.3) and David Bowie (1985's "Dancing in the Street", No.1). Jagger has also been involved in film, as both an actor (Performance, 1968; Ned Kelly, 1970; Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, 1982, though Jagger had to withdraw from the project over scheduling conflicts); Freejack, 1992) and producer (Enigma, 2001).

Jagger had a performing arts venue in Dartford named after him in 2000--the Mick Jagger Centre--and was knighted in December 2003 for services to music.