One thing that Sir Mick Jagger assuredly will not be worrying about this morning is how he is going to manage on his £87-a-week old age pension.

Still as snake-hipped and rubber-lipped as he was when the Rolling Stones crept into the lower end of the charts in 1963 with a Chuck Berry cover, the grand master of heritage rock turns 65 today, and so officially becomes an Old Man. But he doesn’t look it, even if his face does bear the odd wrinkle of a life thoroughly lived; beside those two wraiths of the undead, Keith and Ronnie, he is the Duracell Bunny of ancient rockers.

Yet he is not the granddaddy - the improbably youthful Sir Cliff Richard is three years older. But Cliff resorts to trickery: he is suspected of having a portrait in his attic, whereas Mick is the picture of Dorian Gray. And there was the true begetter of rock’n’roll, Berry himself, still belting out a tired version of Johnny B. Goode in London the other day at the age of 83.

What keeps Mick’s batteries charged is a secret that we wearier pensioners would like to know. Perhaps it is two wives, seven children, three grandchildren, and a catalogue of amours that have included she who is now the First Lady of France, not to mention his recent squiring of a partner 29 years his junior. “I don’t go out with housewives,” he once said.

Times Archive, 1983: Jagger: a butterfly reaches 40

Is he really a ruthless, scheming, vain, duplicitous, sex-mad, cowardly swine?

• Mick Jagger to face sentence

• Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?

Related Links

• Pot? Mine held a pint of Heavy

• Rolling Stones' back catalogue deal

It is just as likely to be money. The Stones recently completed the biggest-grossing tour in the history of rock, which demanded from their lead singer a phenomenal fitness and stamina. When you see Mick in frenzied action on stage for 2½ hours, you can’t really begrudge him his estimated personal fortune of £225 million.

In the mop-headed Sixties we gilded youth divided into two camps; Beatles music was of the tuneful kind that you could comfortably play to your granny, while the Stones were the earthy, openly sexual bad boys, singing about gin-soaked bar room queens and about not getting, um, satisfaction.

Mick has had his brushes with recreational pharmaceuticals, leading to a memorable Times leading article in his defence of nearly 40 years ago, about breaking a butterfly on a wheel. But at 65 he has become a spicy mixture of ageing bad boy, who once did unspeakable things with a Mars bar, and respectable English gent, with his holiday château and love of cricket.

Yet he has always been canny, neither being cheated by wicked self-serving managers, as happened to Presley, or squandering his loot on drugs, which killed Jimi Hendrix at 27.

The band’s finances are managed by Jagger himself and by astute financial gnomes in Amsterdam; it is estimated that of £240 million earned in recent years, less than 2 per cent has gone to the taxman. When Jerry Hall wanted that French castle as part of her divorce settlement, she didn’t get it.

The lives of the wicked shall be shortened, it says in the Book of Proverbs. In which case Mick is one of the goodies: Elvis died at 42, Freddie Mercury at 45, John Lennon at 40, Marc Bolan at 30 and Brian Jones, the Stones’ original leader, at 27.

Mick is not such a hellraiser as Ronnie Wood, who last week booked himself into rehab after running off with a cocktail waitress. Mick, frankly, has a touch more class; he is, at bottom, a middle-class English boy who studied at the LSE. He’s not daft. “It’s all right letting yourself go as long as you can let yourself back,” he said of his own remarkable survival.

Diffident and rather quiet offstage, he remains a sizzling showman in front of an audience. Now branching out into film production, Mick the pensioner has achieved all the satisfaction he could want, and the Stones’ hit Not Fade Away still holds true.

Explore Music

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

• Classical

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010