Theodora Richards, daughter of Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, at the group’s news conference. (Reuters)

New York, May 11 (Reuters): It’s only rock ’n’ roll but they still like it.

The Rolling Stones, well into their fifth decade of playing rock ’n’ roll, yesterday announced a global tour that will stretch into next year and laughed off suggestions that it would be a farewell tour.

“We never say this is going to be our last tour. We never think about it. We take each tour as it comes,” singer Mick Jagger, 61, told a news conference at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

“I think that’s a trap to try and get people to buy your tickets and say, ‘Well, I’ll never see them again.”

Reminding the cheering crowd that not only are they far from elderly but one of the greatest bands in rock ’n’ roll, the Stones kicked off the event with live performances of Start Me Up and Brown Sugar and a new song Jagger called Oh No, Not You Again.

The wiry Jagger wriggled and strutted, while Keith Richards, also 61, grinned mischievously over his guitar licks in front of Lincoln Center’s Juilliard School.

It was a relatively low-key launch for a band that once landed in a blimp in a city park to kick off a world tour in 2002.

“This is one of the earliest concerts we’ve been to in a while, actually,” Jagger said of the mid-day event. “We’re calling it the cornflakes concert.”

The Stones, who burst onto the rock scene in the early ‘60s in England, are putting together a new album, still untitled, that is “85 per cent” finished, Jagger said. “We tried to make it very wide-ranging and we tried to make it very hard-hitting, but it’s got its sensitive moments,” he said.

“It kicks some ass,” Richards added.

The tour opens August 21 at Fenway Park in Boston and continues in North America through early 2006, said tour director Michael Cohl. It travels to Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Japan and “hopefully” China before heading to Europe in summer 2006, he said.

“There’s a lot of other fantastic bands and a lot of old rubbish out there, and we hope it’s going to be a wonderful summer of rock ’n’ roll and we’re going to be right in there,” Jagger said.

“May God have mercy on your soul,” added Richards.