Mick Jagger

Sir Michael Philip Jagger was born on 26 July 1943 in Dartford, Kent, the son of a physical education teacher - a detail that stops being trivial when you watch him work a stadium. He and Keith Richards had been at primary school together and lost touch; the meeting that started the Rolling Stones happened on the platform at Dartford railway station in October 1961, when Richards noticed the Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters records Jagger was carrying. Jagger was studying at the London School of Economics at the time and left.

The band formed in 1962 and has been going ever since, which is the longest continuous run in rock. Jagger and Richards wrote almost all of it, and the working relationship between them - collaborative, competitive and frequently poisonous - is the engine of the whole catalogue.

What is Jagger actually good at?

Two things people tend to treat separately. The first is physical: the stage presence is not charisma in the vague sense, it is athletic performance, sustained for two hours, developed and maintained deliberately for sixty years. The second is commercial. He is widely credited within the industry with turning the Stones from a band into a business - taking control of the touring operation, the sponsorship deals and the rights, and building the model that stadium acts have used since. He was knighted in 2003, which Richards found funny and did not entirely forgive.

Jagger is dominant Se, and the stage is the evidence. What he does out there is a continuous real-time read of a crowd of eighty thousand people, executed through a body he has maintained with genuine discipline for six decades. It is not a performance he learned once; it adapts nightly to a room, which is what the function does.

The auxiliary Ti is the part that surprises people who only see the strutting. He is analytical, financially astute and famously cool-headed, and the LSE year was not a detour - the man who negotiated the Stones' business is recognisably the same one who was studying economics. Se supplies the instrument and Ti works out what to do with it.

Why has the band survived sixty years?

Largely because Jagger's tertiary Fe is functional enough to manage a relationship that should have ended in about 1975. He and Richards have spent decades in a state of mutual irritation, and the band has continued because somebody kept making the arrangements work - the tours, the truces, the division of labour. The inferior Ni is where he is weakest and he knows it: the solo albums, the film ventures and the periodic attempts to be something other than the frontman of the Rolling Stones have mostly not worked, because the long-range reinvention is the one move this stack does not have.

ESFP is the most common alternative, and for a frontman of that flamboyance it is the obvious guess. The difference is the auxiliary. Se with Fi produces a performer driven by personal feeling; Jagger is famously guarded, unsentimental and businesslike, and the contrast with Richards - who is the Fi in that partnership - is the clearest illustration available.

ENTJ is occasionally suggested because he built the commercial operation. But he is not a builder by disposition; he is a performer who applied a sharp analytical mind to the business around him because nobody else was going to. The stage came first and the company was assembled to serve it.