The Rolling Stones' Tour DVD, The Biggest Bang

The blues-howling behemoth gives the globe a good tongue-lashingThe title says it all, really. In the 21st century the Stones seem more concerned with gracing the pages of the Guinness Book Of Records, rather than the same publishers' long-running compendium of hit singles. Having last troubled the UK Top Ten in 1981 with Start Me Up, Mick Jagger - one of music's most fertile business brains - has long since realised that today's pots of gold are more commonly located in the enormodomes and baseball stadiums that play host to the evergreen rock 'n' roll circus of the live show.Like the previous 40 Licks tour's DVD souvenir, this newest visual diary spreads across a whopping four discs, and again appears to be obsessed with being bigger and better than anything that's gone before. There's a disc devoted to the Copacabana Beach gig (largest concert crowd ever), the stage set dwarfs everyone else's, the road crew is the size of a small town, and the global ticket receipts make similar jaunts by U2 look like the proceeds of a Tipperary tombola. Just count the number of times Jagger uses phrases like "history-making" or "huge scale" on Disc Four's not-especially-revealing documentary.But for all the singer's puffed-out posturing and declarations of seismic superiority, Keith Richards remains grounded and affable. Referring to the group's performance at the Superbowl, he claims "In a way, we're just the half-time marching band. Still didn't get to meet the cheerleaders, though..." Equally, Charlie Watts seems merely bemused by the mayhem surrounding him, laying down the rhythm at Zilker Park in Austin, Texas, with the same nonchalance as if he was back at Fulham Town Hall with his jazz quintet. That's been the beauty of this set-up for decades. Whereas their erstwhile rivals The Beatles had four distinct personalities as good as foisted on them by a hungry 60s media, the Stones had the luxury of establishing characters much truer to their real selves; Mick the knighted rock god with an ever-present eye on the balance sheet, Keith the ramshackle hobo pirate who still overuses the word "cat" without a trace of irony, Charlie the laconic jobbing muso, and Ronnie Wood the grinning wing-man who became the luckiest - and richest - sub-contractor in the world. Po-faced purists may sneer at the band's apparent lack of modern-day creative clout (yes, it's been some time since the Stones gave us a truly great album), but they've already done more than their share of rewriting the rock rulebook. Let the young pretenders push the outside of the envelope, while Jagger et al embrace the industry side of things. The main reason they've become this record-breaking juggernaut is because people still want to see them, and that's due to their legacy as one of the most important and influential bands of all time. Mick isn't quite right when he says it's "history-making"; The Biggest Bang is history-affirming.*A version of this review appears in the forthcoming issue of the UK music magazine Classic Rock*