‘I used to love Mick,’ he wrote, affecting more sorrow than anger, ‘but I haven’t been to his dressing-room in twenty years. Sometimes I think “I miss my friend.” I wonder “Where did he go?”’ His ‘friend’ was then portrayed as an egomaniacal megalomaniac and impossible diva and snob who treated all women abominably and usually left them to cry on his, Keith’s, shoulder. Goddess in the Doorway, his friend’s most recent (and probably best) solo album, was wittily renamed ‘Dogshit in the Doorway’. The coup de grace came in the section about his friend’s relationship with Marianne Faithfull in the late Sixties. ‘Marianne … had no fun with Mick’s tiny todger. I know he’s got an enormous pair of balls, but it doesn’t quite fill the bill.’
Strange vocabulary apart – ‘todger’ being a children’s word, more commonly used by little girls – this hardly sounded like the worldly wise old soul of rock ’n’ roll Life sought to portray. It certainly was not a complaint ever heard from a vast numbers of, er, consumers over the years; in any case, it was extraordinarily catty and irrelevant. The book’s editors had urged for it to be cut, but in vain. According to Keith, Sir Mick had read the proofs and asked for only one excision – not about his private parts but his use of a vocal coach to supplement all those pre-performance workouts in the gym.
Adopting the time-honoured tactics of royalty, which had served him well in the past, Sir Mick made no public response. And silence in this case proved eloquent indeed. Over the following months, as the Stones’ extraordinary milestone drew nearer, he was expected to announce some celebratory event, if not another full-scale tour then a special concert whose tickets would be hotter than any in history. Expectation rose higher when a U2 world tour broke A Bigger Bang’s standing record of $558 million – but still nothing came from Sir Mick. Instead, he was revealed to have put together a band called SuperHeavy, comprising Dave Stewart, Joss Stone, Damian Marley and producer/musician A. R. Rahman, and to be working on an album with them.
As July 2012 approached – the 50th anniversary of the first-ever Rolling Stones gig, at Soho’s Marquee club – it was revealed that the sundered Glimmer Twins had got together in New York and were on speaking terms again. Sir Mick conceded that Keith might have felt left out of running the band during the Eighties and, if so, it had been ‘a pity’. Whether Keith in turn apologized for the ‘todger’ remark was not recorded.
Speculation about the commemorative event was heightened still further after Keith invited Bill Wyman and Mick Taylor to a jam session, seemingly prefiguring some onstage reunion of all surviving Stones past and present. To buy more time, the official anniversary date was set at January 2013, marking Charlie Watts’s final, reluctant absorption into the line-up. But Sir Mick continued to keep his lips firmly sealed and to enforce the same strict omerta on the band’s second rank. When Ronnie Wood innocently observed in earshot of a journalist that a reunion gig might be nice, he was hauled onto the carpet and made to write a letter of apology to Keith and Charlie. In the end, all that marked the July 12 anniversary was a brief photo-op with the band, posing against a mock-up of the old Marquee Club façade.
* * *
Other great partnerships, from Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis to Simon and Garfunkel, have had no problem in splitting up. But for Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, the oldest and wealthiest double-act of all, however much they may snipe and snap at each other, there’s simply nowhere else to go. In all their wild incompatibility, they remain forever joined at the hip.
Keith is the quintessential survivor, a term once used for war veterans but now given to those who did not kill themselves with hedonism in the Swinging Sixties. Other such survivors, it’s true, look better preserved. His face seems literally to have fallen off the bone, giving it the horrific malleability of a ‘gurner’, those competitive grimace-makers peculiar to England’s north country. When he smiles, and his features seem to dissolve like some old-fashioned movie special effect of Dr Jekyll turning into Mr Hyde, one feels a genuine need to cover small children’s eyes. He has also stuck to his Medusa hairstyle of twisty dreadlocks tipped with metal objects resembling women’s suspenders or bound into none-too-clean-looking bandannas.
Yet all those decades of suicidal drug-abuse seem to have left him unscathed, a tribute to a constitution rivalled only by Winston Churchill. (Sad that so many who tried to emulate him, from Gram Parsons to Amy Winehouse, were not similarly armoured.) He claims to be still off heroin and not to have used cocaine since nose-diving from that coconut tree in Fiji, though his voice, and in particular his thoroughly scary laugh, still sound like a thousand unemptied ash-trays made audible. ‘Nice to be here,’ he jokes raspily to live audiences nowadays. ‘Hey, it’s nice to be anywhere, y’know.’ Or sometimes: ‘Nice to see you. Hey, it’s nice to see anyone, y’know.’
Sir Mick, by contrast, refuses to acknowledge the passage of time, still living essentially the same life he did as a boy demigod half a century ago and affecting to remember almost nothing of his past life, even though there are now seven children by four different mothers to remind him. Approaching his 70th year, he retains the physique of a gamine teenage girl, including the flash of bare midriff that still peeps out in his every stage performance. Only his face betrays a grandfather, born at the height of the Second World War – the famous lips now drawn-in and bloodless, the cheeks etched by crevasses so wide and deep as to resemble terrible matching scars.
Under his personal trainer, the famous Norwegian Torje Eike, he maintains as strenuous a fitness regime as ever, with daily running, swimming, cycling, gym work, yoga and Pilates. He drinks a great deal less and exercises those once omnivorous lips on a sensible diet of wholegrain bread, rice, beans, pasta, chicken and fish. He also takes numerous supplements, vitamins A, C, D and E, as well as B complexes, cod liver oil, ginseng and ginkgo biloba. In an age when even celebrity chefs beat a path to the plastic surgeon’s door, he rather impressively sticks to the face he was born with, relying instead on anti-ageing creams and moisturizers – including the £530 per jar Crème de la Mer – to soften the Mount Rushmore peaks and ravines.
As a rule, superstars who drive themselves to such heights, and punish themselves to stay there, are motivated by some terrible trauma or insecurity in their early lives. From Charles Chaplin, through Edith Piaf and Judy Garland to John Lennon, the pattern has been the same. But Sir Mick had a happy childhood, nice parents and a secure home. With such achievements behind him (even if he prefers to forget them), what still keeps him perpetually running, trying, competing? His ex-fiancée, the former Chrissie Shrimpton, has no doubt about that: ‘Money’.
Since 2001, he has been keeping company with the American fashion stylist and designer L’Wren Scott, twenty-three years his junior and, at 6 foot 3 inches, the tallest woman ever to excite his ardour. L’Wren, known in the fashion trade as ‘The Apostrophe’, has apparently seen off all other females around him who might pose a threat (as well as some who didn’t, such as his long-time, super-efficient PA, Miranda Guinness). As a result, The Apostrophe has a new nickname, ‘The Loin Tamer’. But despite the impressive diamond ring she now sports, there seems no prospect of the first Lady Jagger. After they had been together nine years, Sir Mick described her to a London Times interviewer merely as someone he was ‘sort of seeing’, while L’Wren herself says only that they’re ‘kind of dating’.
Bob Dylan apart, no other major pop name has been so obsessed with covering his tracks. While Keith was working on Life, Jerry Hall received a considerable advance from a major UK publisher to continue the story broken off in her 1985 memoir, Tall Tales, when she and Mick were still happy. The project was to some extent therapeutic. As her friends knew, Jerry had been much less buoyant than she seemed after the end of her marriage, and had since felt depressed, even agoraphobic. Despite that ‘very, very generous’ annulment pay-off, she also told friends she needed the money.
She started out writing the book herself, but after a time her publishers persuade
d her to work with a ghost. She remained gung-ho about getting it all off her chest, then suddenly and without warning she cancelled the whole project. There could not but be strong suspicion that she had been bought off. The whole advance was returned to the publishers. And numerous women all over the world must have breathed a sigh of relief, not least Mick’s former lover Carla Bruni, now married to French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Jerry subsequently contracted with another publisher, but this time just for a coffee-table book entitled My Life in Pictures. Its minimal text, however, still gave a full summary of Sir Mick’s post-1985 infidelities, at one point describing him as ‘a ruthless sexual predator’.
Financial considerations, of course, are what mainly keep the Glimmer Twins locked together. Since 1989, the Rolling Stones have earned an estimated £2 billion gross from records, song-rights, merchandising, touring and sponsorship, while the ‘Lapping Tongue’ brand appears on around fifty products, including a range of lingerie by Agent Provocateur. The young Mick’s mouth, The New Yorker recently noted, is ‘a brand as recognizable on the corporate landscape as McDonald’s golden arches’. Over the same period, Jagger–Richards songs are calculated to have earned in excess of $56 million, a significant tranche of this from the computer industry. Microsoft paid $4 million to use Start Me Up to launch its Windows 95 software, and Apple an undisclosed but hardly lesser sum for She’s a Rainbow to market coloured Macs.
Emulating Lennon and McCartney to the last, Jagger and Richards do not control their earliest and best-known work. The copyrights in the Stones’ great run of Sixties hits never belonged to the band, but to their first manager, Andrew Oldham, who sold the entire catalogue outright to their second one, Allen Klein. In the years since, Sir Mick has repeatedly gone to court to reclaim the copyrights from Klein’s ABKCO organization, but has never succeeded. Consequently, the band own their recordings only from after 1971, when they jettisoned Klein, signed with the Atlantic label and set up Rolling Stones Records.
Still, post-’71 was another golden age – and continues to be so. In May 2010, Exile on Main Street was reissued with ten hitherto unreleased tracks. Critically panned on its release in 1972, it was now hailed as one of the all-time great rock albums and became the band’s first simultaneous UK/US number one since Voodoo Lounge. With it came a documentary, Stones in Exile, recounting the escape from the British taxman to France and the album’s chaotic creation in Keith’s basement at Villa Nellcôte. When Stones in Exile was premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, personally introduced by Sir Mick, a queue began to form two hours before the start-time.
This many-sourced treasure all flows into a nest of companies, based in Holland for its advantageous tax system, with low-key names like Promopub, Promotone and Musidor. At the top, rather like some blue-chip law firm, is a partnership comprising Sir Mick, Keith, Charlie and Ronnie. America’s Fortune magazine recently tried to discover if every partner received an equal share but, after extensive quizzing of their financial advisers, had to report that ‘no one will go there’.
And was ever a brand more potent, McDonald’s and even Coca-Cola included? Two men in their late sixties, in their very different ways, are still thrilling to the youngest rock fans; still embody lawlessness and naughtiness like none who ever came after them. The mere mention of either of their names makes beautiful young women, as well as grandmothers, sit up straight and change colour. Every journalist who enters the presence of either – old or young, female or male, tabloid or serious – instantly turns into a drooling fan. In short, they have shown others what the Chicago blues masters, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon et al, showed them so long ago.
You can be old and still cool.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This book could not have been written without the help of its principal characters. I am grateful to the Rolling Stones for the access they gave me during their 1981–82 tour, and for illuminating interviews with Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Bill Wyman. I also have drawn on conversations with them, and with Charlie Watts, Ron Wood and the late Brian Jones, during my years on the Sunday Times and various other newspapers, back to 1965.
I owe a special debt, for their help, generosity and candour, to Andrew Loog Oldham, Marianne Faithfull, Anita Pallenberg, Christopher Gibbs and the late Robert Fraser and Alexis Korner.
Sincere thanks also to: Keith Altham, Shirley Arnold, David Bailey, Dr W. Bennett, Jo Bergman, John Birt, Tito Burns, the late Donald Cammell, Barbara Charone, Tamara Glenny, Giorgio Gomelsky, Brion Gysin, Mary Hallett, Keith Howell, Glyn Johns, Lewis Jones, Tom Keylock, Laurie Lewis, Ken Llewellyn, Lord Lichfield, Astrid Lundstrom, Gered Mankowitz, Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Barry Miles, Molly Parkin, Janey Perrin, Dick Rowe, Ronnie Schneider, John Spinks, Helen Spittal, the late Ian Stewart, Dick Taylor, Dave Thomson, Mike Turner, Keith Vyse, Robert Wallis, Peter Watson, Leslie Woodhead.
My special gratitude to Jack Artenstein, Michael Sissons, Peter Matson, Roger Houghton, Russell Miller, Caroline Taggart and Lucy Sisman.
INDEX
The page numbers in this index relate to the printed version of this book; they do not match the pages of your ebook. You can use your ebook reader’s search tool to find a specific word or passage.
A Bigger Bang 2006 tour 500, 504
A Degree of Murder 212, 226
Abbott, Maggie 258
ABKCO 405, 508
Adderley, Julian ‘Cannonball’ 36
Aftermath 176–7, 188
Alexander, Arthur 94
Ali the Moroccan 204, 205, 207, 209
All You Need Is Love 295
Allan, Elkan 84
Altamont concert 363–82, 385, 411, 415
Altham, Keith 142, 427
America 130–3, 179, 185–6, 348, 349–82
Altamont concert 363–82, 385, 411, 415
Beatles 95–6
first tour 109–16
1965 tour 145–9, 160–4
1968 tour 277–8
1972 tour 403, 407–15
1975 tour 424–6
1981 tour 440–6, 448–63
No Security tour 487
American Forces Network 25, 50
amphetamines 196, 207, 208, 222, 230, 231, 251, 334
Andrew Loog Oldham Orchestra 141
Andrew’s Blues 95
Andrews, Eamonn 202
Andrews, Julian 36, 37, 38, 47, 100, 198
Andrews, Pat 36, 37–8, 47, 100, 198
Anger, Kenneth 292, 293
Angie 418, 448
Annenberg, Walter 425
Apple computers 508
Arandbee Orchestra 190
Arden, Don 68, 86
Arnold, Shirley 79, 104, 190–1, 192, 279, 319, 394, 396
and Bianca Jagger 391, 421, 422
Brian Jones’s death 325, 327, 337
and Helen Spittal 320
Maddox Street 282
and Marlon Richard 402
Arnstein, Bobby 412
Around and Around 31, 93
As Tears Go By 126–7, 176
Asher, Peter 136, 183
Associated-Rediffusion 84
Athens 220
Atlantic 395, 403, 418, 508
Australia 140, 340–2, 417
Avory, Mick 42–3, 45, 48
Back Street Girl 218
Baez, Joan 163
Bailey, David 67, 110, 138, 159, 179–80
Bain, Bob 91
Baldry, Long John 30, 31, 42, 83
Balin, Marty 370
Bangladesh concert 408
Barbarella 218
Barber, Chris 11, 26, 34, 56
Barclay, Eddie 390
Barclay, Michael 89
Barger, Sonny 371, 372, 378
Barrow, Tony 69
Bart, Lionel 126
Baud, Fr. Lucien 397, 399
Bean, George 107
Beatles 53–4, 60–2, 63, 70, 75, 85, 90, 188–9, 257, 348–9
and Allen Klein 150, 154, 265–6, 305–7, 347, 405–6
America 95
–6
and Andrew Loog Oldham 69, 88–9, 90
Apple Organization 281, 305–6, 347, 383–4, 405–6
debut album 108
drugs busts 225
drummer 81
EMI 73, 74, 76
fans 129
first record 44
hair 97
leather jackets 51
Let It Be 383
Magical Mystery Tour 302–3
popularity poll 116
Royal Command Variety Show 88, 91
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band 225–6, 267–8, 273
songwriting 106
split up 383–4
Stones friendship 135–6, 265–7
Sunday Night at the Palladium 87–8
The Times letter 265, 278
With the Beatles 90, 91, 106, 108
Beaton, Cecil 194, 214–16
Beck, Jeff 423
Beckwith, Bob 12, 15
Beggars Banquet 285, 294–5, 302, 386, 396
Belli, Melvin 362–3, 379
Bennett, Dr 9, 10
Bennett, Pete 161, 162, 406
Bergman, Jo 184, 284, 350, 359, 360
and Brian Jones 285, 287, 313
French move 393, 394
Maddox Street 281–2
Berry, Chuck 14, 15, 22, 23, 39, 115, 486
Around and Around 31, 93
Bye Bye Johnny 94
Come On 62, 78
Down the Road Apiece 138
and Ron Malo 114
TAMI show 132
Best, Pete 81
Stones: Acclaimed Biography, The Page 53