Could this be the last time? If recent news reports are to be believed, the end of the road could be approaching for rock’n’roll’s most bankable surviving “legacy brand”.

On the one hand, that shouldn’t be so surprising, should it? As one source put it, “a Rolling Stones tour takes years to plan. Mick and Keith would be in their late sixties by the time they would be ready to rock once more.” We shouldn’t write them off, but, by the same token, your eyes couldn’t help but be drawn to the beleaguered smile that Keith Richards wore throughout this first of three nights at the former Dome.

Looking like a turtle who — at some point during a heavy night — had forgotten where he left his shell, Richards stepped forward and preceded a beautifully crumpled You Got the Silver by informing 30,000 cheering fans that it had been “a long haul”. He might reasonably have been referring to the multi-soloing nine-minute version of Can’t You Hear Me Knocking that his band had just performed. More likely, it was that this was the second anniversary of their A Bigger Bang tour — a prolonged jaunt that not even a high-profile fall from a coconut tree could arrest.

Though Richards is a year younger than Jagger, it is the singer’s age-defying antics that make the notion of the Stones’ demise such a shocking one. If anything, Mick — just a year off qualifying for his free bus pass — seemed more wired than usual. Start Me Up propelled him into the sort of preening high-campery for which mere novices would require some sort of build-up. For the main part of the show he seemed a detached presence from the rest of the band.

While a chipper, teetotal Ron Wood spent much of the show in conversation with Keith Richards, Jagger treated the job in hand like an intense two-hour workout. He seemed rather pleased with his observation that “when you think about it, it’s taken us 40 years to go down the river from Richmond to Greenwich” (a fact that didn’t go unnoticed by Charlie Watts, who followed it with a deadpan rhythmic boom-boom).

Rather more remarkable was the tiny distance — or lack of it — between Jagger’s left and right hips, not to mention how much of it is comprised of groin. But, for all the singer’s efficient rabble-rousing, the Stones were at their most endearing when they were at their most ragged. Rocks Off freewheeled along to a point where it just sort of fell apart, prompting Jagger to wonder aloud exactly how the song ended.

Happily, it wasn’t the only gem resurrected from the Stones’ most hedonistic years. By eschewing almost every song from the lacklustre album that kicked off this tour in 2005, they got down to the nitty gritty of what most people here had paid to see.

A woozy, sun-dazed Tumblin’ Dice sounded better than ever. Sympathy for the Devil and Paint it Black seemed to resound with a dark, delightful portent that even Jagger’s impression of a stick insect possessed by the spirit of Frankie Howerd could not ruin — reminders of a time when this band was briefly and truly subversive.

Those times are long gone, given way to Stones-branded Volkswagens and £150 concert tickets. But the sight of a Keith Richards who surely cannot continue to do this too much longer made you grateful that they were there at all. Furthermore, the crumpled smile on the guitarist’s face as he took his bow suggested that he felt much the same way.

More shows tomorrow and Sunday.

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