The stars were out in force for the London premiere of Martin Scorsese's new Rolling Stones concert film, Shine A Light, shot during the group's A Bigger Bang tour in 2006. But given the increasingly clinical nature of the Stones' live performances, is the movie actually worth all the fuss?

It’s an hour before the London premiere of Shine A Light, the latest in a long line of distinguished documentaries on the Rolling Stones, and the ladies and gentlemen of the press are already jostling along the red carpet.

For all the pomp and circumstance, for all the bustle of the occasion, at least we have a decent view. Across the way there are hundreds of ordinary punters, who, unadorned by laminates, have been staking out spots since early morning.
Desperate to catch the attention of their heroes, each fan has their own schtick. Over here a man is frantically waving his treasured vinyl copy of Mick Jagger’s She’s The Boss.
Over there, a chap who could have been a contender for the Monster Raving Loony Party is lit up with fairy lights and pearly jacket made from Stones badges. From my vantage point I can spy two amateur oil portraits of the Glimmer Twins held aloft.
Right now I was supposed to be curled up next to Keith Richards in a comfy press suite asking him about the meaning of life, and more importantly, about the meaning of the opening riff for ‘Gimme Shelter’. But these are the Rolling Stones. If they feel like cancelling all of their promotional press for Shine A Light in Ireland and the UK, I suspect they can afford to take the hit.
As is always the case with these things, there is a seemingly endless parade of TV starlets, Geldof girls and up-and-coming models. None of them are appropriately attired for this rainy evening. The younger statesmen of orthodox rock file by. Liam Gallagher and wife are fashionably late.
But tonight belongs to the old folks. Anita Pallenberg is one of the first to arrive. Alan Yentob and Charles Dance seem keen to talk Stones with anyone who will listen. Look away quickly so as not to catch their eye.
Many of these older fans and well-wishers are unlikely to be Stones movie premiere virgins. Over the band’s 46-year history, every twist and turn, every incarnation, has been captured and dissected on celluloid.
In 1969, we find the trip going south. Two days after the death of founding multi-instrumentalist Brian Jones, filmmaker Leslie Woodhead shot The Stones In The Park at an emotionally-charged free concert in Hyde Park. There are unmistakably '60s vibes around the event – white butterlies are set free, African tribesmen take the stage for 'Sympathy For The Devil', Shelly is duly read – though it's too frazzled, too fin de siècle to be properly groovy.
One year later and the dream is no longer soured but over. 1970’s Gimme Shelter, a film of the disastrous Free Altamont Concert, provided such a convenient bookend to the decade that proceeded, that Pauline Kael, writing in the New Yorker, charged the filmmakers and the Stones of complicity in the murder of an 18-year-old fan by Hell’s Angels in the crowd.
If the Stones always get the concert film that history demands, we, in turn, get the Stones we deserve. The pre-flower power kids had the True Life Tap antics of Charlie Is My Darling. Shot in a miserable looking Ireland in 1965, Peter Whitehead’s intimate portrait features a drunken Mick Jagger doing an Elvis impersonation and Brian Jones failing to define the word ‘surrealism’. The radicals of 1968 could mull over Jean Luc Godard’s Sympathy For The Devil, a study of that song’s development spliced together with countercultural mutterings from Black Panthers LeRoi Jones and Eldridge Cleaver. Children of the ‘80s were treated to the gaudy, bloated spectacle of Hal Ashby’s Lets Spend The Night Together in 1983.
It should come as little surprise that Martin Scorsese wished to add his own entry to this noble registry of directors. Mr. Scorsese is obsessed with the Rolling Stones in general and one track in particular.
He’s not alone. In the three decades since ‘Gimme Shelter’ was recorded for ‘Let It Bleed’, the song has attracted more mythological baggage than Atlas. The lore runs thus – Keith, in a jealous rage from watching Anita Pallenberg cavorting with Jagger on the set of Performance, pens the angry opening gambit in his car; Merry Clayton, having sung until her voice cracked during recording, leaves the studio and suffers a miscarriage.
The dread and impending doom of the lyrics (“Rape, murder, it’s just a shot away”) has not been lost on Scorsese, who has repeatedly used the track as shorthand for personal apocalypse.
How strange to find that Scorsese’s Shine A Light omits the song that has defined so much of his work. Even Jagger, after the world premiere in Berlin last February, felt obliged to joke about the film being the first by Scorsese to leave it out.
But why was it left out of the set list?
Was Jagger playing a cruel joke? Or was he letting his fellow sexagenarian know who the boss was? In the case for the prosecution, Exhibit ‘A’ would surely be the film itself. Shine A Light is, first and foremost, a testament to the Rolling Stones we deserve – a vast, corporate machine delivering a sleek entertainment product.
In the opening scenes we see Jagger and Scorsese jocularly butting heads over logistics. Tellingly, the film is shot over two nights in late 2006 at the clearly unsuitable Beacon Theatre in New York. Lighting that may have been designed to guide spacecraft ensures a grandiloquent gloss. Looking at the close framing of each shot and listening to Jagger pooh-poohing the need for tracking and crane perspectives during preparations, one wonders if Scorsese wasn’t licked on this production.
“Everything goes wrong,” said the filmmaker at Berlin. “But what’s really happening is, everything is going as planned. By them!”
It wouldn’t be the first time. The history of the Stones on film is a history of litigation and a colloquy to Mick’s flair for micro-management.
Not too long into Robert Frank’s 1972 film Cocksucker Blues, a young American groupie fixes Keith Richards with his heroin shot. TV sets are thrown out hotel windows. Long after Keith passes out, Mick, still on the ball, talks shop with Atlantic Records’ Ahmet Ertegun.
A documentary portrait of some eye-watering candour, it is not too surprising that Cocksucker Blues was never released due to a court order. (The band may have sued the filmmaker to stop its release but that hasn’t prevented a steady trade in bootlegs and illegal downloads.)
Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 1968 film The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus was similarly suppressed for 28 years, allegedly due to Jagger’s fears that supporting act The Who had upstaged them.
Perhaps mindful of this track record, many critics have attended to Scorsese’s uncharacteristically flat presentation. Surely, the argument goes, the veteran behind such influential titles as The Last Waltz and No Direction Home, would have wanted to further the grammar of the music documentary?
Such conspiracy theories fail to notice that Jagger and Scorsese have a relationship that runs deeper than this project. For seven years the pair have collaborated on a film script about the music business. Maybe, just maybe, these commentators have got this the wrong way round. Maybe Scorsese himself has left out ‘Gimme Shelter’. The director, a keen film historian, is after all unlikely to be unfamiliar with the “Stones We Deserve” and the “Stones Film History Demands” rules.
It is certainly true that Shine A Light lacks a punch line and perhaps that’s how it should be. A straightforward run through an average contemporary Stones gig, the archive footage is minimal and extraneous interviews are dispensed with almost entirely.
The only danger of a riot happening in this auditorium, one feels, is if the valet parking service isn’t prompt.
Back on the red carpet I resolve to solve this mystery once and for all. Who is responsible for leaving ‘Gimme Shelter’ off the set list? I want answers. Charlie Watts, though obliging with photographers, is being his taciturn self. Ronnie is running between autograph hunters as best he can. Keith is visibly staggering about.
Finally Mick arrives with current companion L’Wren Scott. Though this impossibly leggy woman is gallantly sporting the tiniest kitten heels while Mick’s got the platforms on, there is just no way around it. Mick Jagger is not a tall man. He is, however, walking right toward me.
I open my mouth to speak when a younger, nimbler blonde girl shoves everyone out of the way.
“What was it like to actually work with Christina Aguilera, Mick?” she cries excitedly.
Oh dear. You can’t win them all.

Shine A Light is released April 11