Rock byRichard Cook

How much longer can they go on? Will Mick still run round like a yearling? Can Keith stand up for two hours? Could this really be "The Last Time"? Every time the Rolling Stones decide to play again, the tired old questions are asked. For the beloved geriatrics, it's merely business as usual. Why do they go on? Well, it's easy. They can't think of anything else to do.

The Rolling Stones should properly have stopped "working" many years ago, but in an age when every old-time rock act is reforming and trying to live off the fat of their antiquated back catalogue, it would be unthinkable for them to quit now. They have been challenged about their age and relevance for at least 25 years already. A favourite riposte was always, hey, if old bluesmen such as John Lee Hooker can still be credible about their mojo hand and crawling king snake, why can't we? Fair enough, yet the Stones stopped being a blues band decades ago and their posturing seems to have little of the grace and lived-in wisdom of their original influences.

Questions about their enormous wealth are tempting to ask, but not really the issue. Mariah Carey makes at least as much money these days and nobody asks why she bothers to continue. The sad thing is that these now benign old men have declined so comprehensively, not simply into irrelevance but into a poverty of imagination that hindsight suggests is bewildering. The Jagger-Richards songwriting team was still sharp and fecund when they made Tattoo You a mere 18 years ago, but the majority of the populous crowds that will go and see them on their latest tour would struggle to name even two or three of the songs they've written and recorded since then.

When Jagger and Richards came up with sovereign tropes such as "Tumbling Dice" and "Gimme Shelter", it seemed astonishing that such English art-schoolers could have vitalised and reshod the traditions - of blues language and rhythm - that they started out by worshipping. Those roots are so far removed from their recent records that the band's later material seems as faceless as snow. It wouldn't matter if they were no more than an oldies band, though: so are most of their few enduring contemporaries. But the Stones, once a fearless, driven entity, can hardly muster a single spark as a performing group.

One can't judge on the kind of noise actually heard at the stadium events that are their ungenerous gift to their paying audiences now, partly because you need to be sitting in the right place - never easy - and partly because it's not entirely clear just what music is being performed live at any one moment. Yet it's evident from such ho-hum souvenirs as the recent live album No Security (Virgin) that, no matter what can be done to the raw matter after the event, there has to be some germ of necessary life there to make it happen to begin with. Instead, their reunions are more like board meetings for R Stones plc. Tabloids have encouraged far more interest in Jagger's marital strife than his vocal decline, and even Charlie Watts, their eternal heartbeat, now seems wan and distant from the idea of the group as something that needs to exist.

The Rolling Stones are kept alive by a nostalgia healthy enough to create an income stream that even such a wealthy man as Michael Jagger is reluctant to let slip. But with a solo career that has gone nowhere, an acting resume that reads poorly and an ambition that he doesn't know what to do with, maybe Mick knows that life after the Stones won't amount to more than a comfortable retirement. If ever a group needed to get back to basics, it's this one.

The Rolling Stones get it up one more time at Edinburgh (4 June), Sheffield (6 June) and Wembley (11-12 June)

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