Founder's Day at the Jagger Centre for little performers

Michael Philip Jagger is an unlikely alumnus. But the lure of the old school tie gets to them all in the end, even a one-time Satanic Majesty.

As a pupil at Dartford Grammar School, young Jagger helped organise a school dinner strike, got a dinner lady sacked, loathed the headmaster, suffered "tortures" from other masters, was caned regularly and messed around in a band called Little Boy Blue and The Boy Blues, before hitting on a rather snappier name.

Yesterday Mick was back at his alma mater where he once practised his snarl on the unfortunate dinner lady. He was opening the £2.25m lottery-funded Mick Jagger Performing Arts Centre. Well, Paul McCartney has his fame school in Liverpool, and old rivalries die hard.

But there's something psychologically cathartic about going back to your old school. First, you tend to take the family. And so Mick was accompanied not just by his ex-wife, Jerry Hall - beaming with pride - and three of their four children, Elizabeth, James, and Georgia May (on crutches after a fall from a climbing frame), but also by his octogenarian parents, Joe and Eva.

But it gets much more cathartic, as Mick told me afterwards. He said: "It's very strange. When you go back to school, you're tempted to regress."

And so he did, shifting about nervously as he entered the striking arts centre that was once his school assembly hall, now gleaming with recording and dancing studios.

Worse, as many have found when you take your parents to school, your reputation will never be quite as rebellious again.

Chatting in the foyer, Joe Jagger, 86, recalled: "Mick wasn't a rebellious child at all. He was a very pleasant boy at home in the family, and he helped to look after his younger brother. This is a good school and he wasn't a tearaway. Mick has made a success of his life, and he is a very good father."

Jagger senior confessed he had not enjoyed the Sixties: "There were such sarcastic things written in the papers."

Jerry Hall said she was enormously proud and stressed the conventional side of the alumnus. "Mick is very interested in his children's education and takes an active role. It's good he is giving something back to this community and giving something to children."

Inside the centre, after the Duke of Kent had unveiled a plaque with Jagger's name on it, Mick - still regressing like crazy - mounted the stage where once he endured school assemblies and read a speech to local dignitaries and present-day school pupils. He was a little nervous, very polite and even apologised for recently tarnishing the school's name.

"I hope I didn't give the impression in an interview with The Times a few days ago that this school was a mixture of Blackboard Jungle, Dotheboy's Hall and St Trinians," he began. "I had many wonderful teachers, particularly the English and history teachers, and I have a lot of fond memories of the place. I went a bit over the top."

Apology over, and the present head master smiling at him, clearly in forgiving mode, Mick looked about him and reminisced: "This used to be the school assembly hall where each morning we would sing our hymns and be either praised or damned for our behaviour. The famous words of head masters everywhere were often intoned from here: 'the culprits must step forward now or the whole school will be punished'."

And as he went on, this continued to be an opportunity for him to say all the dutiful things he had perhaps neglected over the years. He thanked his parents for sending him to the school, and advocated the combination of performing arts with maths, science and Latin for a fully-rounded education.

"I know," he added, "there are other sons of Dartford and other ex-pupils of the school who were also in the running. General Havelock, who relieved the siege of Lucknow - though imperial generals are not very PC - and then there is Wat Tyler (a son of Dartford), but maybe revolutionaries are no longer role models. So, anyway, I won the honour by default."

But could Havelock or Tyler have delivered such a classic school oration? Its author grew in confidence as he spoke, exhibiting genuine promise for a career in showbiz.

But even Mick, the Dartford Grammar alumnus, may have too much baggage to win over the feisty sixth formers of today.

Kate Obery, 17, lead singer in the school band, Cherry Sunbursts, greeted Mick with a performance of Brown Sugar. Afterwards, choosing her words carefully, she said: "I respect his music. I respect how far he has gone. One reads about the womanising and the drugs. I am not in a position to judge him as a person. But my dad has all his albums."