4:19pm UK, Tuesday August 26, 2003

Veteran rocker Mick Jagger shrugged off a bout of flu to join his fellow Rolling Stones on stage for the first British concert of their current world tour.

180 Mick Jagger Rolling Stones Twickenham

Mick at Twickenham

The tour to promote 40 Licks - a 40th anniversary collection of Stones hits - has been struck on two previous occasions by problems with 60-year-old Sir Mick's voice.

The cancellation of Saturday's concert at Twickenham rugby ground in south-west London because of Jagger's flu, left 50,000 fans now having to wait until September 20 for a rescheduled appearance.

A date in Amsterdam last Wednesday had to be missed because of a sore throat, and a gig in Spain was dropped earlier in the month when Jagger went down with laryngitis.

But on Sunday, Jagger and the core band members - guitarist Keith Richards, 59, rhythm guitarist Ronnie Wood, 56, and drummer Charlie Watts, 62 - showed few signs of exhaustion or sickness as they ran through some of the hits that have kept the band hugely popular for four decades.

Regularly taunted for being far too old to rock'n'roll, the band are in fact now of similar ages to the venerable American blues singers who first inspired them in the early 60s.

And if the band are no longer the musical outlaws known in the 60s as "the dirtiest group in Britain", they do now play a version of the blues which - like that of early heroes Muddy Waters and Howlin Wolf - is steeped in both excess and experience.

Sore throat apart, Jagger himself appears to possess the elixir of youth, bounding around the stage with almost teenage levels of energy.

And it spills from the stage - all around Twickenham, family men of a certain age were seen dusting down dance moves which do not appear to have been in active use for some years.