I've lost my sympathy for the old devil

Creative figures don't need knighthoods. When the Stones are headed up by Sir Michael, the game is up

Rock musicians are so regularly stuffed by the approval of the Royal Family, you wonder why it's taken them so long to get round to Mick Jagger. Perhaps, after all, they are all secretly rather keen on the old thing. Certainly, for many years now, the Prince of Wales has been happily killing off promising careers with a hint that in his with-it groovy funkmonster moments, he likes nothing better than to slip a particular combo's latest offering into the Highgrove hi-fi. And 10 seconds later, the poor Three Degrees or the Spice Girls or whoever can expect to find themselves in the remainder bins at HMV. Can someone encourage him to say something nice about that boring Moby, please?

When you consider that, it's distinctly odd that Mick Jagger has been openly touting for the knighthood he is anticipated to get this week. By all accounts a cultured, intelligent, thoughtful man in private, he would, you might have thought, have taken into account the possibility that a knighthood is not going to do a great deal for him. I mean, it's a bit hard to imagine anyone going: "I must go and buy that Sir Mick's new record, now that he's a knight of the realm and all." Mr Jagger has millions in the bank; his achievements over the years ("Satisfaction", "Sympathy for the Devil" and, not least, the celebrated Mars Bar story which, se non e vero, e ben trovato) will live in glory forever more; and from now on, we're going to have to put his records on the shelf reserved for crap CDs by KBEs.I don't know what he was thinking of.

Satie cruelly said, when he heard that Ravel had refused the Croix d'Honneur, that no one could be impressed by the gesture, since "all his music accepts it". There are certainly some rock musicians whose entire work seems to have been planned with the aim of getting on the stage at the golden jubilee and the chance of telling the Queen to her face that no, they haven't had far to come at all, ma'am. The stratagems employed to acquire the knighthoods have been ingenious, but not very edifying. Sir Elton John obligingly took Diana Wales off their hands; Sir Cliff Richard unflinchingly subjected any crowd at a rained-off sporting event to a morale-raising chorus of "Congratulations"; Sir Paul McCartney was so keen to get his knighthood, he actually wrote an oratorio.

By contrast, Mr Jagger has, apparently, done nothing at all calculated to recommend him to the Honours List Committee; his spawn is scattered across the globe (you wouldn't want him as your UN Goodwill Ambassador), he dumps his wife and then denies she was his wife at all, and if he works hard for charity, he keeps jolly quiet about it. In short, he has remained true to the hell-raising cause, and when, last year, he started to make unsubtle noises about when his K would arrive, it took a moment to realise that he was talking about a knighthood, and not the livestock tranquilliser currently popular on London's dancefloors.

The basic truth is that rock, if it is any good, and royalty, if they are any good, don't mix at all. I happened to see the jubilee concert and fireworks in Australia, and perhaps you needed to be 12,000 miles away from the scenes of wild enthusiasm to see how very peculiar it appeared. When "Help!" started up, it sounded rather like the Queen apologising for not being nicer in the past. "Bohemian Rhapsody" made you want to reassure her that everyone sometimes feels that nothing really matters, and it all looks rather different after a good night's sleep. Many people enjoy the Royal Family as showbiz with better diamonds and worse frocks; it was unnerving, however, to hear "Let Me Entertain You" so frankly admit it.

The truth is, however, that the sentiments of good rock and the principles of power are not very compatible. Ronald Reagan somehow turned Bruce Springsteen's savage "Born in the USA" into a song for an election campaign, and Her Majesty found herself listening to the Beatles' "Her Majesty", but it must have involved a certain effort of will not to hear the irony in either case. The high point of the whole day, however, was the sight and sound of Buckingham Palace booming out M People's "You've Got to Search for the Hero Inside Yourself". I admit, however, that it is difficult to imagine a rock song more accurately entitled "You've Got to Have George VI as Your Dad".

Creative figures don't, on the whole, need honours, and their works speak for themselves. Rock musicians, however, are unusual in that they enter into a pact of peculiar inequality, and it is odd that they don't see that the award of a knighthood is a clear exchange of benefits. For a moment, the government seems as hip as Mrs Guy Ritchie; in exchange, the new knight of the realm sacrifices the appearance of cool. When the Rolling Stones are headed up by Sir Michael, the game is up. You might as well have bands called Alastair Darling and the Backbenchers of Funk.

p.hensher@independent.co.uk