Paper Monitor
15:35 UK time, Monday, 26 November 2012
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
They've had 50 years to hone their craft.
Music journalists reviewing the Rolling Stones, that is.
That craft is on display as the venerable rock band begins its 50th anniversary tour, aka "the greatest survival story since the cockroach", as puts it.
The Stones have kept going for so long, surviving everything from drug busts to ex-wives, that they have passed the wrinkly rocker stage, passed even the national treasure stage, and become an indestructible inevitability.
There are finely honed similes:
"[Keith] Richards and Ronnie Wood look like a pair of cadaverous buzzards" - Neil McCormick in Daily Telegraph
And counter-intuitive digs, such as this from :
There's something perversely admirable about the way the self-styled "greatest rock'n'roll band in the world" seem openly intent on celebrating their golden jubilee by making as much money as possible with the absolute minimum of effort.
While not a music critic, the Daily Mail's Jan Muir pens a
For that kind of money, I would have expected Mick himself to serve the pre-show drinks - and personally drive me home afterwards...
Even from here, Keith looks like a tortoise who has suddenly woken up from a coma to find himself playing geetar on stage with a silver sash around his waist.
And there are more numbers. Big numbers, as befits a big band:
- "sprightly legends who average 68 years of age" -
- "No new album, just a couple of new tracks to generate interest in what a conservative estimate suggests is the 36,734th Rolling Stones greatest hits collection" - Guardian
- "It wasn't so amazing when the band played Out Of Control, one of the many awful songs from the band's 1983-2011 wilderness years" - The Times
The 
