With a collective age of almost 300 — and a staggering 55 years since their first stage performance — the Rolling Stones have just announced a European tour for later this year.

Initially, they are to play 13 shows in 12 different venues, beginning in Hamburg on September 9 and also visiting Barcelona, Paris and Amsterdam, with a possible warm-up gig in the UK being mooted on fan sites.

The question is, why do they still feel the need to work? Mick Jagger, 73, has personal wealth of £285 million. Keith Richards, also 73, has £260 million.

Drummer Charlie Watts, who celebrates his 76th birthday today, is worth £130 million, and Ronnie Wood, whose 70th birthday was yesterday has £72 million.

Guitarist Ronnie Wood and singer Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones performing on stage at Knebworth in 1976

The secret of their indefatigable appetite for putting on grandiose and spectacular events, apparently, can be simply summed up by their touring team. One insider says: ‘Mick likes to make money, and Keith likes to play.’ Another roadie adds: ‘Charlie is relaxed and is happy to go with the flow and Ronnie is always insisting that he’s really broke.’

But the story of their life on the road over more than half a century is a hair-raising tale of drug-taking, sexual debauchery, violence and bitter feuding — not to mention a steady supply of HP Sauce and PG Tips tea bags. Here we present the inside story of what the biggest band in the world get up to on the road.

NAKED DANCERS

The American tour of 1972 was the most debauched of all — a marathon of sexual and narcotic indulgence. An album of their live performances from this tour is released later this month.

Richards said in an interview that they would book a whole floor of a hotel to ensure privacy for them and their entourage.

‘We had become a pirate nation, moving on a huge scale under our own flag with lawyers, clowns, attendants,’ he recalled.

One medical professional known as ‘Dr Bill’ was Jagger’s personal attendant on the tour, and kept them all supplied with prescription pills in return for enjoying favours from groupies.

Mick Jagger pictured along with Jerry Hall (centre) and Marie Helvin after a Wembley gig in 1982

Girls would dance naked in high heels all night in hotel suites. In Chicago, staying at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion in the city, Keith Richards and the late saxophonist Bobby Keys accidentally set fire to a bathroom while getting high.

Robert Greenfield of Rolling Stone magazine was there and said every kind of drug was available including a 4ft-long line of cocaine which was laid out on a mirror and consumed in minutes.

Avant-garde film-maker Robert Frank made a documentary about the tour at the band’s invitation.

The film has been essentially suppressed by the Stones — it may now only be shown a limited number of times a year and Frank has to be present.

What’s in it? Footage of a beautiful young groupie taking heroin as Richards watches. Keith Richards ‘nodding out’ due to heroin use. Jagger snorting a pile of cocaine off a switchblade and also filming himself in a mirror and indulging in a sex act.

'BROKE' MIKE MOANED TO HIS TEAM OF ACCOUNTANTS The Stones toured almost constantly in the Sixties and Seventies because — unlike these days — the gigs did not make their fortune and they often complained that they were all broke. Thanks to the manoeuvres of manager Allen Klein, whom they sacked in 1970, they did not even own the publishing rights to all their big hits, from Brown Sugar to Satisfaction. Jagger estimated once that they made perhaps £2,700 each from a tour, playing 10,000 seat arenas and charging £4.50 a ticket. It had to change. A journalist who joined the band on a 1975 tour of America said that Jagger — by then a tax exile — would pass the time watching the Wimbledon tennis on television and talking on the phone with his lawyers and accountants, always keeping an eye on how the pound was doing against the dollar. Mick complained: ‘They tell me I’ll make a million dollars out of this gig but you know I’ll see $10,000 by the end of it. ‘It’s always like that — you’re lucky if you walk away with a new white suit.’ Advertisement

SCREAMING TEENS

In the early years, from 1964 and their first chart success, to around 1966 things were very different.

The band’s repertoire consisted in part of covers of hits by their blues heroes and Brian Jones (who died in 1969) observed: ‘Basically we just play bad Chuck Berry.’

Keith Richards said: ‘There was a two-year period when the audience were louder than us, all screaming teenyboppers.

‘Brian Jones had this terrible joke of playing Popeye The Sailor Man in the middle of everything because it didn’t matter, no one could hear anything anyway.

‘For Charlie Watts I think that was the most frustrating time. He was a serious musician, a jazz drummer and all of a sudden he’s playing to a load of 13-year-old girls wetting themselves and he’s wondering, “What happened to the Blues?” ’

KNEBWORTH JINX

The Stones’ concert at Knebworth, Hertfordshire, in 1976 was far from their best.

After having observed the state of Keith Richards, who had overdone the narcotics, the roadies deliberately cut through the wires to the speaker system, causing a 90-minute delay which they hoped would be enough to get Keith back into shape. ‘Great, ‘cos I could have a kip,’ he said later.

Keith Richards pictured in 1984. Now aged 73, the guitarist is worth an estimated £270million

When he finally tottered on stage, he struck a magnificent initial wrong chord.

And on the way back home down the M1 he drove his Bentley into the central reservation and then it bounced off the road and into a tree. He had fallen asleep — possibly because of his habit of taking a small snort of heroin at the wheel.

His son Marlon, then aged seven, was in the back.

‘Until five or six years ago there was still my bloody handprint on the back seat,’ Marlon said. ‘And the dashboard still had the dent where my nose hit it.’

Richards was arrested afterwards when police found drugs in his jacket. He mused: ‘I’m a good driver. I mean, nobody’s perfect. At least we didn’t hit anybody.’

THE MONEY-SPINNERS

The Stones 1981 tour of America changed everything. Jagger was determined to prove that, despite the advent of punk, they were not has-beens.

KEITH: DON'T BUST MY CRUST! In Toronto in 1989 the Steel Wheels tour was momentarily delayed in a row over shepherd’s pie. Keith Richards threw a tantrum when he found that someone had sampled a dish cooked for him by the catering staff — and refused to go on stage until another one was made. Mick Jagger was apparently furious. Keith remarked unrepentantly: ‘It’s now famous, my rule on the road. Nobody touches the shepherd’s pie till I’ve been in there. Don’t bust my crust baby.’ Advertisement

And Keith Richards, having split from Anita Pallenberg, who had a heroin habit of her own, was clean of that drug. The New York Times hailed the marathon tour as the most profitable in rock history although exact figures are a closely guarded secret. Stones sources indicate that they made more money in that tour alone than they had in their entire careers up to that point. That’s not to say it was entirely professional. One night Keith and Ronnie went out drinking and only turned up at the venue at 9 pm while the support act were playing. Keith went straight on stage, saw that the band playing were not the Stones, and came off again.

BIGGER BANGS

For a while it looked as if the 1981 tour might be the end of the band. There was a long hiatus until 1989 with no touring as Keith and Mick, who were at war for various reasons, worked on solo projects.

However, the Steel Wheels/Urban Jungle tour of 1989 was even bigger and more successful.

It consisted of a mammoth 116 shows seen by six million fans. Four shows in Los Angeles generated £7 million alone.

Then came the Voodoo Lounge tour in 1994-5 which grossed a record £247 million.

Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones is mobbed by fans at London Airport on his way to fly to New York

It was followed by the Bridges To Babylon tour in 1997 which featured a cantilevered bridge and massive circular screen. All previous receipts were topped by the Bigger Bang world tour which started in 2005 and finally finished in 2007. It took £430 million, which worked out at more than a million dollars per day.

Since then there has been the smaller scale 50 And Counting tour which included a gig at Glastonbury in 2013. One five-night stint on that tour apparently netted a staggering £20 million.

Then came 14 On Fire, which began in Australia but was postponed after the suicide of Mick’s girlfriend L’Wren Scott. Last year the band toured in South and Central America, and included a gig in Cuba, which was filmed.

BATTLE OVER TAX BILL

In 2007, it was revealed that since 1987 the band had only paid £5.5 million in tax on £347 million of earnings, after channelling everything through tax-friendly Amsterdam and the Caribbean at the suggestion of financial adviser Prince Rupert Loewenstein.

‘BROTHERS’ AT WAR

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards met at primary school in the early Fifties and reconnected in 1960 after a chance meeting at Dartford train station. But they fell out at the end of the Seventies and are only barely on civil terms. Richards admitted a few years ago that Mick had not been in his dressing room in 20 years.

Mick Jagger takes a swig of bourbon backstage during the Rolling Stones' 1975 Tour of the Americas

Their PR man described a ‘close as brothers bond that had now been severed to leave only a business relationship.’ Why? Keith explained: ‘I started going my way, which was the downhill road to dopesville, and Mick ascended to jet land. I was living in a different world from him. His jet-setting got up my nose.’

By the time Keith got clean, he found that all decisions were being made by Mick. Asked: ‘When is the bitching going to end between you and Mick?’ he replied: ‘Better ask the bitch.’

And despite being reunited for mega tours, the animosity remained. Richards reacted with ‘cold rage’ over Jagger accepting a knighthood in 2002.

In 2010, he gloated about having sex with Mick Jagger’s girlfriend Marianne Faithfull in his autobiography, and commented on his bandmate’s ‘tiny todger’.

He had to offer a public apology before they were able to be in the same room again.

Richards said though that the sexual infidelities were ‘no big deal’. He said: ‘We had a very aristocratic way of looking at it.

‘Usually these things were one offs. It was kind of like that in those days.’

He added: ‘We’ve had our beefs but who doesn’t? You try and keep something together for 50 years.’

Nowadays, though, life on the road has to be endured without chemical stimulants: since 1981 Jagger has made all performers sign a ‘no pre-show doping’ contract. They also have to pass a stringent medical demanded by insurers.

BACKSTAGE TRIBES

Every member of the Stones travels with their own entourage, has their own rooms on their own floor of a hotel, their own chauffeur, their own fitness team, medical staff and so on.

The touring payroll sometimes tops 230 people — all in support of four Stones!

COKE ON THE AMPS During concerts in the late Sixties and throughout the Seventies, lines of cocaine and heroin would be left on top of the amplifiers on stage, waiting to be snorted during pauses between the songs. The heroin was for Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards only, while the cocaine was for anyone else who wanted it. Ronnie and Keith — an inseparable force — also smoked heroin-laced cigarettes on stage. Advertisement

Mick sometimes travels with oldest daughter Lizzie these days — she is 33. The others bring their wives.

Former manager Nick Cowan recalls that Ronnie Wood’s after-show parties were always the wildest — with Keith Richards only allowing people he had personally invited to come up to his suite.

He said: ‘Keith will spend the night listening to music with a few friends. His suite is not accessible unless an invitation has been issued. When it is, it has the force of a royal command.

‘Ronnie’s suite is known as party central. All night, every night, the door is open to anyone who wants to drink and more.

In every city Ronnie’s party friends come out of the woodwork. ‘Mick and Charlie, who enjoy their sleep, have suites as far away as possible from Keith and Ronnie.’

He also revealed that the band demanded a steady supply of HP Sauce and PG Tips tea bags wherever they were in the world.

MOVES LIKE JAGGER

Mick runs up to 12 miles during the average stadium show and warms up vocally beforehand by singing karaoke.

STRUCK BY TRAGEDY

Jagger’s girlfriend L’Wren Scott killed herself on March 17, 2014, just as the Stones were preparing for the Australasian leg of their tour.

The tour was postponed until the end of the year.

Ron Wood, Mick Jagger, and Keith Richards are set to tour the world once again, 55 years after they first started

A lawsuit followed as the band’s insurers declined to pay out the £8 million claimed by the band.

They said that her suicide was ‘not sudden and unforeseen’ because she could have been suffering from a pre-existing mental state.

They also disputed the assertion that Jagger was suffering from ‘acute traumatic stress disorder’, saying that he had not been examined by a psychiatrist. The case was settled out of court.