Adelhard Roidinger has been played on NTS shows including An1ma, with Kontrabad first played on 31 January 2021.

Even the writings of the most dedicated Mick Jagger scholars don't have much to say about Adelhard Roidinger, a pseudonym supposedly used for a brief period by Jagger during the mid 1980s. Heavily influenced by the work of Donna Harraway, Jagger worked with programmers from IBM in an attempt to create an interface with a computer via which the user could play and have the computer accompany them, an interface which Jagger described in a Melody Maker interview at the time as "unadulterated, pure and decidedly funky." When the technology proved unable to meet Jagger's stringent demands, IBM pulled out of the project, redirecting their staff towards the development of a computer controlled skateboard, leaving Jagger alone to commune with the machines in a small room of his house full of expensive hardware.

Unperturbed, Jagger turned once again to the Satanic/mystical influences that he had drawn on extensively during his work in the early 70s. One evening, while flicking through a compendium of Aleister Crowley's writings, turning pages at the behest of the i-ching, and at the perfect still point that comes at the very apotheosis of a peyote bender, Jagger received a vision which told him what to do. By taking on a new personality, that of Adelhard Roidinger, a swarthy, mitteleuropäische saxophone player, and entering the computer room with the benevolent flair that such a personality would entail, the computers would rise up from their machinic dullness and, when Jagger put the horn to his lips, they would play with him, and create a new, as yet unheard of music. He could play with the machines without intermediary, with no technological accoutrements. The link would come from himself and would be psychic in nature.

As the third stage of the peyote trip began to kick in, the stage in which the range of movement available to the body is distorted, so that the arms hands and neck appear to the user to be akin to those of the inflatable sky dancers that adorn the forecourts of used-car dealerships, just as this stage began to kick in, Jagger, holding tremulously a very nice saxophone which had once belonged to Coltrane and which Jagger had picked up eighteen years previously at an auction which, however much he looked the horn over, he could not for the life of him remember buying, he entered the computer room. He had never played the sax before, and never would again, but on this occasion, trails of lights from the computers playing across his field of vision like sparklers waved in front of a camera lens set to a long exposure, he did play, and did hear the computers playing with him. At some point during the four day session he thought to press record. His axe wailed, bellowed, wept, gesticulated. Wherever Jagger went, the computers followed. Jagger stood in the middle of the room, towel round his head, bent down, kimono hanging open, and heard a music that was as grass growing, as shadows moving over rock, as rain making its way slowly down from leaf to leaf toward the ground, to give succour to the ground; music that recalled gamelan, bikutsi, sea shanty, slave chant, recalled Moroder, Bach, James Brown, The Rolling Stones, Caruso, Hank Williams. Music which, if it could be called anything, could only be called fusion.

Six days later, having slept off the inevitable hangover, Jagger retrieved the tapes from the session and, without listening, immediately sent them to CBS. Thinking they were new Stones demos, several executives gathered to listen to the tapes. They were disappointed to find that they consisted of seventeen hours of the sound of spittle gathering in, and being expelled from, the bell of a saxophone, occasional indecipherable mutterings and the distinctive sound of a computer keyboard being hammered by a fist in a crude approximation of a disco rhythm, with no evidence of any accompaniment, computer or otherwise, whatsoever. However, in an attempt to placate a man who was still a big earner for the company, they agreed to release an album culled from the session (though on one of their minor imprints), which Jagger insisted was put out under the name Adelhard Roidinger.

The events described above are related in much more detail in Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett's lengthy chapbook on Jagger's activities from 1984-86. However, other Jagger scholars, most notably Lucy Mangan and Alexis Petridis, have disputed her account, citing evidence that the Roidinger recordings were in fact the work of a disgruntled IBM employee and failed jazz musician who, after working with Jagger for several months, became so frustrated that he concocted the Roidinger story, calling in a favour from a friend who worked at CBS to have the record put out on one of their subsidiaries and then putting it about that Jagger was responsible for it.

The truth remains obscure. If the album 'Computer and Jazz Project' was recorded by someone other than Jagger, it is a very convincing approximation. There is a muscularity to the playing, crude though it is, which, even to the trained ear, suggests Jagger, and there are even snatches of the melody to 'Dancing in the Street', a song which Jagger would not record for another eight months. In a recent podcast, Mangan relayed a very interesting new area which she is currently researching. In 1997 an American named Gary Bushell appeared on the UK show 'Stars in their Eyes' impersonating Mick Jagger. His performance, all hip thrusts, pouted lips and a vocal melisma that elided all differentiation between words suggested someone who had come to bury Jagger, not to praise him. The backing music for what supposedly was a version of 'I Can't Get No Satisfaction' was, yes, played on the saxophone. Mangan's research has revealed that in the 1980s Bushell worked for IBM on a number of still-classified projects. Bushell died in 2009.