Perhaps no other band has waved the "sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll" banner for as long as the veteran bad boys of British rock, The Rolling Stones.

And while we know who's got the drugs and rock 'n' roll covered in that group -- guitarist Keith Richards -- we also know who's got the sex part down pat.

That would be singer Michael Phillip Jagger, who recently celebrated his 59th birthday as a single man in Toronto -- where the Stones rehearsed this summer for six weeks leading up to their tour -- and shows no signs of retiring as the group's resident lothario despite his advancing years.

Recently divorced from second wife and longtime love Jerry Hall -- his first marriage was to the equally glamorous Nicaraguan model Bianca Perez Morena de Macias -- Jagger doesn't seem all that upset about being alone.

Maybe because he's got seven children between his two ex-wives and dalliances with two others -- Marsha Hunt and Brazilian model Lucina Morad?

"I don't think that being in a full-time relationship is necessarily for everybody all of the time," he told The Sun last year while promoting his latest solo record, Goddess In The Doorway.

"It's not necessarily some state of grace that you're in, you know, but I think it's great and who knows what will happen in the future?"

Maybe, too, it's because Jagger has other things on his mind.

A onetime student at the London School Of Economics before he got really serious about rock 'n' roll, he's always been acknowledged as the brains behind the Stones operation, which has been going strong now for some 40 years.

But Jagger, featured on the cover of the current issue of Fortune magazine alongside Richards, plays down his mind for business.

"I don't really count myself as a very sophisticated business person," he told the magazine. "I'm a creative artist. All I know from business I've picked up along the way. I never really studied business in school. I kind of wish I had, kind of, but how boring is that?"

With money comes power, and so too does sex.

There are very few frontmen in rock who know how to seduce a room in the primal way that Jagger does.

He has said that if he wasn't a singer, he would have been a dancer.

But early on, not everyone was enamoured of the untamed performer, whose first famous girlfriend was Marianne Faithfull.

When the Stones performed their first single, Chuck Berry's Come On, in 1963, the producer of the British rock TV show Thank Your Lucky Stars told then-manager Andrew Loog Oldham to get "rid of that vile-looking singer with the tire-tread lips."

Thankfully, the advice wasn't taken.

Jagger has also tried to his extend his charismatic presence on stage to the silver screen with usually disappointing results, starting with 1970's Ned Kelly.

His attempts at recording as a solo artist, beginning with 1984's She's The Boss, haven't fared much better.

It's his songwriting partnership with Richards where he's truly excelled creatively -- they've released more than 200 songs -- in what has to be the most complicated relationship of his life.

"We've known each other since we were four years old," Richards told The New York Times recently. "We are very different people in many ways. It's strange. We know when to stay apart and when to let things bring us together. We can't get divorced. You can get rid of an old lady, but I can't get rid of Mick, and he can't get rid of me."

Jagger's first meeting with Richards stretches back to Dartford Maypole primary school where they were both students. (Jagger's father, Joe, was a physical education teacher while his mother, Eva, who died last May, sold cosmetics door to door. He has a younger brother, Chris, who is a songwriter.)

However, it was when the future Glimmer Twins ran into each other a decade later in 1960, that they realized they had a mutual love of American blues and R&B.

Before long they were playing in a band together (Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys), and eventually lived together -- with guitarist Brian Jones -- in a tiny apartment in London.

Their staggering songbook would begin, most famously, with 1965's Satisfaction .

Certainly they've had long periods of estrangement over the years, and most recently, Jagger's much-publicized knighthood threatened to disrupt the latest Stones trek.

"What did I feel when I heard about the knighthood?" Richards said in the October issue of Mojo. "Cold, cold rage at his blind stupidity. It was enraging. I threatened to pull out of the tour -- went berserk, bananas! But, quite honestly, Mick's f----d up so many times, what's another f---up?"