ABSTRACT
This chapter sets the Rock and Roll Circus project in the specific historical contexts of British popular music and the emerging cultural underground. The Stones' television program, The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, filmed in December 1968, aimed to one-up the Beatles in capturing rock performance on film. The success of the Beatles and other British rock bands merely repeated an already established practice of British popular music-making in the 20th century. The circus idea must have seemed a way to provide an authorizing British context that countered the new celebrity image of the rock star, one more in keeping with an older, more insular, but also more cohesive, working-class culture. The contradictions of Jagger's radical moment may be the logical outcome of a politics primarily based on stylistic associations with "the outsider", specifically the identification of British suburbanites with character traits they associated with Black America.
