Mick Jagger has been writing a lot during lockdown, but it’s songs he’s producing, not prose. He tried prose once, and didn’t like it. Or to be more specific, he started to write his autobiography, and decided it was not for him. Lured by a £1m carrot offered by the publisher George Weidenfeld in the early 1980s, he sat down and began to relive his younger days. He soon regretted taking it.

By that point, Jagger had survived the wildest years of rock ’n’ roll excess, the drug fuelled and manic period in the mid 1960s when he and the Rolling Stones invented the hard-living, hard-working rock god lifestyle that turned them into legends. It also led them close to the brink, and precipitated the death of one of the group.

For three adrenalin-filled years they were on the road. They were chased by record producers, women, and the local constabulary. At one point in the 1970s, as Jagger outlined in his embryonic memoir, he bought Stargroves Manor, a mansion in Hampshire, while under the influence of LSD – probably the least and most printable of his exploits while spaced out.

In a vault in the publisher’s office lies an unfinished manuscript of 75,000 words. That he wrote so much shows he was serious about the project, initially at least. But as he told a BBC Radio 6 interviewer recently, it wasn’t any fun. Abandoning it, he returned the money: “If you want to write an autobiography it is not a process you can do in a week, it takes a lot of you. It takes a lot of reliving, emotions reliving, friendships reliving, ups and downs and all this, and I must say it wasn’t the most enjoyable experience, to be honest. It was inordinately dull and upsetting and there weren’t that many highs out of it.”

READ MORE ROSEMARY: What Prince Charles can teach us

Nobody needs to be reminded that Jagger likes the highs. What he reveals, however, is that there is too much that is painful for him to contemplate when he revisits that foreign country called the past. In common with many of his peers, he is not all showman. He also has a contemplative, introspective side. His road to stardom might look enviable, the stuff of teenage dreams, but for someone who lived it, the frenetic pace and the hedonism, took their toll.

Jagger’s musical soul-mate, Keith Richards, whose memoir Life came out to great acclaim in 2010, had no reservations about looking in the rear-view mirror. This was a rip-roaring, bare-chested war cry from a musical ego so forceful he makes Jagger look self-effacing. As the Rolling Stones guitarist and song writer admitted, thanks to coke and heroin, “For many years I slept, on average, twice a week. This means that I have been conscious for at least three lifetimes.” While it left fellow band members and crew reeling in his wake, it meant he packed a lot into a short space of time.

The Herald: Barack ObamaBarack Obama

The same could be said of Jagger, which is why fans were so disappointed that his memoir never appeared. It might have revealed the secret to his success, what happened behind the stage curtains, and his innumerable liaisons with women, thanks to whom he became a 20th-century Casanova.

Richards’s autobiography was a bestseller, but it has been estimated that if Jagger ever wrote his version of events, it would sell over 10 million copies. Of course, the old adage that “if you can remember the 60s you weren’t really there” could be a barrier to total recall. In this respect many rock memoirs that cover the decade, from Bob Dylan’s Chronicles to Neil Young’s Waging Heavy Peace, ought to be read with that caveat in mind. They probably offer more of an evocation of the era than a rigorous historical record.

And yet, their vivid scene-setting is what makes them read like page-turners rather than souped up appointment diaries. Too many autobiographies are drier than the paper they’re printed on. Politicians in particular seem to feel an irresistible urge to immortalise their careers in this ponderous, self-aggrandizing way. In that respect, they are the literary equivalent of a peerage. Invariably they are guilty of boring their readers to tears. Who among us has ever finished Barack Obama’s or Hilary Clinton’s door-stoppers? Did you reach the last chapter of Tony Blair’s 600-plus page A Journey? David Cameron took so long finally to produce For the Record, it seems he thoroughly bored himself too. Or perhaps it was just too much like hard work.

And there’s the rub. As Jagger, whose mantra was that “anything worth doing is worth overdoing”, learned to his cost, excavating and untangling the past is exhausting. It is a gruelling process requiring stamina, honesty and courage. That, however, is only the beginning. After all this material has been gathered, it has to be turned into a readable narrative. This is not a cool or thrilling endeavour. It is more like labouring at the coalface. It’s impossible to imagine a rock icon carefully mapping out each chapter, let alone slaving at a keyboard for hours at a stretch. Quite apart from the commitment it entailed, for Jagger it clearly did not provide the frisson of joy and self-expression he finds in his day job.

Despite honourable exceptions, it’s fair to say that the sort of person who can sift through decades of experience and turn them into a coherent chronicle is often not the kind who swaggers onto a stage and electrifies the crowd with their magnetic presence and music.

READ MORE ROSEMARY: Lockdown lambs lift the spirits

Jagger, now 77, fully understands the gulf between who he is, and what writing a memoir demands: “What I did not enjoy was reliving my life to the detriment of living in the now.”

While it’s possible he might try again, that seems a distant hope. He did once say, “I am not a librarian of my own work. It’s a good thing not to be too involved with what you have done.” Whether or not he changes his mind, he has already left a rich account of who he is and how he thinks. The opening bars of his greatest hits are all that’s needed to remind us of him.

Our columns are a platform for writers to express their opinions. They do not necessarily represent the views of the Herald.