So how does Jagger explain the enduring appeal of the band that formed in 1963 and has just played to the biggest crowd in history, 1.2 million people on Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil?     

    "People have written essays trying to pinpoint our enduring appeal, it's very hard for me, I don't really know.     

    "A big part of it is basically our longevity, people like us because we are still around after all this time, we're still here so people like that -- we're kind of a connection with the past for them and yet we are still here in the present.     

    "We try to do our bit to avoid being just a nostalgia band. Of course part of our appeal is nostalgia, but not all of it. There's definitely longevity in our songs ¡ª people like to hear them over and over again."     

    Richards expounds: "What's nuts is that in those days (the 1960s) we wrote a song on Monday, on Friday we recorded it and by the next Wednesday it was in the shops. And there it is ¡ª it's stuck for all time and you realize that you hardly know the thing. It's like something that has just broken through the egg and you spend the next 40 years learning the thing you wrote.

    "If I knew what our appeal was, I'd bottle it and I wouldn't tell you ... There's some sort of chemistry that goes on with this bunch, I don't know, maybe it's addictive, quite possibly knowing this bunch. At the same time it's one of those great imponderables. It's a suspension of disbelief," he adds.     

    On the Rio concert Jagger says: "I've been playing these kind of stadium things for a long time now and it takes a lot to faze me but at the end of that gig I bowed and I thought as I was doing it, 'mmm, I've never done that before, bowed in front of quite so many people,' that was an interesting one."     

    Richards puts it slightly more colorfully: "It was just as well we couldn't see all the crowd or we'd just have been running to the john, man!"     

    On the business of performing the famously athletic football and cricket nut, Jagger says: "It's a bit like going out to play in a cup final or something, you soak up the energy from the crowd."     

    As to how long they will continue playing, Richards is candid. "You can actually play this stuff until you croak and you can get better at it," he says. "We just love doing it."     

    Jonathan Krane, the tour promoter, says: "Tickets for this concert have sold not only to fans all over China but all around the world -- Italy, South America, Japan and the United States. This is a real international, historic, milestone event and people want to be able to say they were there when it happened."

    (Source: CRIENGLISH.com/China.org.cn)