by Paul Howard
A mile away from Granny’s, on Cale Street, just off the King’s Road, a friend of Tara’s who was also clued in to what was happening in Pont Street was making waves with his own visual style. In December 1965, Michael Rainey, who was sometimes described as the best-dressed man in London, opened a shop called Hung On You, named after the B-side to the Righteous Brothers hit ‘Unchained Melody’.
‘I had no background in the rag trade,’ he remembered. ‘Like Nigel and the crowd at Granny’s, I really wasn’t thinking, “How do I make money out of this?” Make enough to pay the rent and go to a nightclub every night – that was what I wanted to do.’
Hung On You had its own signature style that would set a new benchmark for cool. Like his new rivals at the other end of Chelsea, Michael Rainey also dealt in vintage, military and ethnic clothes, intended to be worn in a subversive or satirical way: tapered guardsmen’s trousers with red stripes down the sides; mandarin-collar shirts; dragoon coats; military bandsmen’s uniforms; kipper ties; floral chiffon shirts; and the soon-to-be-famous high-buttoned Mao jackets, favoured by Brian Jones, the ‘dancing child in his Chinese suit’ in Bob Dylan’s 1966 song ‘I Want You’.
The shop had something of a wild reputation, which Tara loved. Michael would thrash around on a drum kit in the basement, while Jay and Bo, the shop’s two most famous assistants, would sit on a chaise longue in the window, between customers, smoking joints.
‘I suppose it had an energy about it,’ Michael said. ‘The energy of the times. We were learning every day, through acid, smoking dope, going to Glastonbury. We were all full of interests. Open to being influenced. We found this young Irish girl who hand-painted these beautiful ties with designs inspired by the whole Arthurian thing and Gustav Klimt. It was such an exciting time.’
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Paul McCartney was the only member of The Beatles who hadn’t taken LSD by late 1965. John Lennon and George Harrison had first sampled its sensory enhancing effects back in April, when George’s dentist, John Riley, slipped it into their coffee at a dinner party in Bayswater.
Despite their initial fear and their anger with the dentist, John and George didn’t find the drug’s effects altogether disagreeable. John may even have slipped a reference to the experience into the lyrics of ‘Help!’, when he sang about opening up the doors, after Aldous Huxley’s acid-inspired Doors of Perception. They were intrigued enough to at least give it another try. On 24 August, just over a week after they played Shea Stadium, John, George and Ringo had taken it in a rented house in Los Angeles, along with Roger McGuinn and David Crosby of The Byrds and the actor Peter Fonda, who kept creeping everyone out by whispering, ‘I know what it’s like to be dead.’
Paul sat out the trip. ‘Paul felt very out of it,’ John recalled in ‘Lennon Remembers’, his seminal interview with Rolling Stone magazine, ‘because we were all a bit slightly cruel, sort of, “We’re taking it, and you’re not.”’
The prospect of taking LSD terrified Paul. ‘I’d not wanted to do it,’ he told Barry Miles, his friend and the author of the authorized biography, Many Years From Now. However, he knew he would have to succumb to the peer pressure in time. He wanted to do it in an environment where he felt safe and an opportunity presented itself one night back in Tara’s mews. A number of accounts had it happening early in 1966, although Nicki was certain that it was in late November 1965, shortly after her return from Marbella and before the release of Rubber Soul, which The Beatles had recorded earlier that autumn.
Paul was the only Beatle who showed up regularly at Tara and Nicki’s place. John moved in different circles, although Nicki remembered him being there once, drunk, with Peter Sellers. Tara gave John a copy of Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play lampooning, of all things, Britain’s rigid class system. But John was still too class-conscious to ever warm to Tara, or even to let his guard down around him, according to Nicki. ‘I think he really sneered at people from Tara’s background,’ she said.
Martin Wilkinson had observed the same standoffishness in him in clubs like the Scotch and the Ad Lib. ‘John didn’t say much. He was quite aggressive. He was bloody angry. I don’t think he would have allowed himself to be impressed by someone like Tara, but Paul was far more open to people from different backgrounds.’
One night, after closing time, Paul was back at Eaton Row with a party that included Sir Mark Palmer; Patrick Kerr, the dancer from Ready Steady Go!; and Viv Prince, the drummer with The Pretty Things; as well as a bunch of girls who had become attached to them in the Scotch.
Tara was taking acid on blotting paper in the toilet, McCartney remembered in Many Years From Now, and offered him some. McCartney was unsure, but he accepted. According to Nicki, Tara didn’t actually take it that night. ‘Because it was Paul’s first time,’ she said, ‘he felt it was important for him to stay lucid just in case Paul had a bad trip. And what Paul did was he spent his whole trip looking at this art book of mine called Private View. He wasn’t interested in any of the females there. He wasn’t interested in listening to music either. He was just staring at this art book. I wish it had been more fun for him.’
Paul stayed up all night having what he described as a ‘spacy’ experience. He told Barry Miles that he saw paisley shapes and was super-sensitive to the fact that his shirtsleeves were dirty. He had an engagement the following day, but he couldn’t get it together. When Brian Epstein’s secretary tracked him down to Tara and Nicki’s mews, he told her he had flu and asked her to cancel his commitments for the day.
John later said he thought Paul regretted taking it. Paul said it was something that he wouldn’t want to have missed but he would always have mixed feelings about what happened in Tara’s house that night. For all his ambivalence about taking acid, it would have a profound effect on him.
On 3 December, Rubber Soul was released. It was the first Beatles album that Tara really loved. Musically, it was a bolt out of the blue. There had been hints in Help! of a growing maturity in the band’s creativity. Rubber Soul marked the dramatic transition of The Beatles from a boy band, knocking out songs to order on the theme of boy-wants-girl, boy-loves-girl, boy-loses-girl, to a group of musicians who were setting a new template for how a rock and roll album should sound.
It contained no filler. Every song was a potential single, even the ones that went places where no pop song had dared to venture before, from the trippy seduction scene of ‘Norwegian Wood’ to the existential musings of ‘Nowhere Man’, the first song John Lennon wrote on anything other than the theme of love.
Musically, they were exploring too, bringing new instruments, like George’s sitar, into the studio. They speeded up a recording of a piano solo to create a baroque sound and experimented with fuzz bass. And, most seditiously of all, the song ‘Girl’ featured an inhalation of breath that sounded suspiciously like four newly made Officers of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire toking on a joint.
Rubber Soul was the sound of The Beatles deciding they’d seen enough hotel rooms, concert halls and airport lounges. With one or two exceptions, the songs on the album – thoughtful, autobiographical and musically sophisticated – weren’t the kind that drove teenage girls to hysterics in American ballparks. On 10 December, Tara and Nicki saw them play at the Hammersmith Odeon in London, part of what would be the band’s final tour of Britain.
Nicki’s relationship with her mother-in-law had reached such a low point that she decided she wasn’t going to Ireland for the traditional Christmas at Luggala. Tara didn’t go either. They spent Christmas Day in London, then, on Boxing Day, they took up Paul and Mike McCartney’s invitation to visit them in Liverpool.
They left Dorian and Julian with a nanny, jumped into the AC Cobra and – in defiance of the 70mph motorway speed limit that had come into effect a week earlier – tore up the M6 to the mock-Tudor house that Paul had recently bought for his father and stepmother in the Wirral.
Paul had rented a couple of mopeds. That night, after smoki
ng a few joints, Paul suggested that he and Tara use them to visit his cousin Bett, who lived in nearby Bevington. ‘I’d spent some of my allowance on a very nice red and white scarf,’ Nicki recalled of the evening. ‘It was knitted, very long, a bit like a football scarf. They were all the mode at the time. It cost a fortune. Eight pounds or something like that. So they were going off to see Paul’s (cousin) and it was chilly. Paul said he was cold, so I said, “Take my scarf.” He took it.’
A few hours later, they returned. Paul’s face was all swollen and stitched up and Nicki’s scarf was saturated with blood. ‘He looked like he’d been in a boxing match with Sonny Liston,’ Mike remembered. ‘I said, “Oh my God!” and he said, “No, it’s fine.” They’d been taking some sort of substances and he was still high. He said, “You must take a picture! You’ve got to! Michael,” he kept saying, “this is the truth. This is life. This is reality.” It was mind-expanding drugs is what it was.’
Paul had gone over the handlebars of his bike, breaking a front tooth and splitting his lip. The spill would later become the source of an outlandish, but no less enduring, Paul is Dead conspiracy theory.
Paul recounted what really happened in The Beatles Anthology. They were riding along and he was pointing out various local landmarks to Tara. Paul’s attention was snagged by the sight of what appeared to be an especially huge full moon. Suddenly, his front wheel hit the kerb and he found himself falling face-first to the pavement.
Tara helped him to his feet. Paul had chipped his front tooth and split his upper lip badly, but they got back on their mopeds and continued on their journey. His cousin Bett phoned a doctor friend, who came round and stitched up his busted lip.
When they got back to his father’s house later that evening, Paul insisted that Mike go and get his brand new Nikon camera to take photographs of his damaged face. Nicki, meanwhile, was looking at her very expensive scarf, ruined. ‘His stepmother took it,’ she remembered, ‘and said, “I’ll wash it,” and I said, “Well, I really think it ought to be dry-cleaned,” because it was wool and I knew it was going to come out of the washing machine looking like a tie. I said, “Please don’t put it in the washing machine,” and she said, “I have to wash it because it’s got Paul McCartney’s blood on it and you could sell it.” So she did wash it – and, yes, she ruined it.’
The day after the accident, Tara and Nicki sat in the Cobra, discussing Paul’s lucky escape, as they headed back to London, a city in its colourful, optimistic prime. Neither of them dared to imagine that they’d just spent their last Christmas together.
12: A DAY FOR A DAYDREAM
Brian Jones and Anita Pallenberg moved out of Elm Park Mews due to the attentions of the local police and an army of groupies. They set up home in a mansion flat at 1 Courtfield Road in Kensington, a soon-to-be legendary rock pad where they entertained friends, fellow musicians and hangers-on when the Stones weren’t touring or recording. Tara and Nicki became regular members of their court.
‘We had this crazy apartment,’ Anita remembered, ‘which was on three floors, like a house, flat, whatever. There were all these secret hatches, one of which went up to a secret room at the top of the house that we used to call the flying saucer. We’d pull down the metal staircase and we’d all climb up there and take LSD and pretend we were in a flying saucer.’
At that point, the early months of 1966, Tara was about as close to Brian as anyone was allowed to get, according to Anita. Tara would call round after a day at the garage and they’d smoke pot, listen to The Lovin’ Spoonful and talk about life. Or they’d stay up all night at Eaton Row, drinking brandy and watching Tara’s Scalextric cars describe circles and figure eights on the maroon carpet.
‘Brian loved model trains when he was a boy,’ said Anita. ‘And Tara loved these little racing cars. They played with them all night, all the time laughing, like two little boys.’
Anita and Nicki became close, too. The two couples even looked similar: four smartly dressed blonds with his-and-her, Sassoon-style bobs. From fifty feet away, it was impossible to tell them apart.
They went out on long middle-of-the-night jaunts to nowhere in particular, Tara and Nicki in the Cobra and Brian and Anita in Brian’s black Rolls Royce with its infamous number plate, DD 666 – all of them tripping. ‘We had loads of affinity together,’ Anita said, ‘but the main one was acid.’
‘We’d get in our cars and drive to Staffordshire to look for UFOs. All of us, just lying on a hillside, looking up at the sky. We’d stay up all night, then we’d drive back to London. I remember once, we were all in the same car, which Tara was driving up the King’s Road, towards Sloane Square . . . For some reason we all decided to get out. We were tripping all night and we had a sugar lack or something, so Tara stopped and we opened the doors and just left the car standing in the middle of the King’s Road with the motor running and the doors open while we went to this cafe and had a piece of toast with some marmalade on it. Tara would do things like that. He’d be up for it. He wouldn’t say, “Oh, I have to find somewhere to park.” He just left it. That was how he lived his life.’
Brian and the other Stones had recently returned from California, where they recorded Aftermath, their fourth studio album and as seminal a moment in the career of The Rolling Stones as Rubber Soul had been for The Beatles. Aftermath would be their first ‘real’ album, not a ragbag of blues covers rendered in Mick Jagger’s Mississippi Delta via the River Darent accent, with the occasional Jagger-Richards composition thrown in as grouting, but a thoroughly original collection of songs, comprising several very different musical styles, melded together in a way that suggested a coherent vision at work.
Every song on the album was written by Mick and Keith, though many of Aftermath’s best moments were pure Brian. Frozen out of the songwriting process, he went searching for ways to add new textures to the band’s music, as The Beatles had done. He played more than a dozen instruments on the record, including many never before associated with Chicago electric blues: the Appalachian dulcimer, the marimbas, the Japanese koto, the harpsichord and a child’s plastic banjo, as well as the more familiar props of guitar, keyboard and harmonica.
The Aftermath sessions also threw up ‘Paint It Black’, a single in which Brian played the sitar in the manner of a lead guitar, to produce an apocalyptic Eastern sound. He was on top of his game, and, professionally at least, something close to being happy. But his private life was as chaotic as it had ever been. At the start of 1966 he was faced with another paternity case brought by his ex-girlfriend Pat. He failed to appear in court and was ordered to pay costs of £2 10s per week. Shortly after that, Dawn Malloy, a girl with whom he enjoyed a brief fling, brought his fifth child into the world, a boy, and immediately sought a paternity settlement. Brian left it to the band’s management to pay her off: £700 in full and final settlement, the money to be deducted from his future earnings.
It’s perhaps not surprising that he failed to find the inner peace that he admired so much in Tara.
The drugs only made things worse. While Tara’s experiences with LSD were mostly positive, Brian’s were destructive. ‘Brian was a tortured soul,’ Anita said. ‘I discovered that when we used to take acid. I never got a bad trip, but he would go completely mental, get paranoid, all of that. He would get it right away. He had horrible trips. He would go into the cupboards. He thought there was something outside. I don’t know if it had something to do with his mental illness, but that’s when I realized there was something wrong. We used to take acid to have a laugh, but then it wasn’t a laugh anymore.
‘We had a massive row everywhere we went. Caused by jealousy, possessiveness from his side, insecurity from his side. I was more, like, mellow. I’d been to America and I’d been travelling and I was streetwise, so to speak. He wasn’t. So there was a lot of problems. He used to throw me out. He used to get so violent and then he just put me outside the door and I didn’t know where to go and I used to run over to Nicki and Tara to l
ick my wounds. I spent many nights there. Then, the next morning, I would go back home.
‘Once, I went over to Nicki one night after we had this massive row. Tara was out. I don’t know where he was, but I said to Nicki, “Brian threw me out, he’s gone mad – blah, blah, blah.” So Nicki said, “Let’s make a doll of him.” She was talking about voodoo. I said, “No, no, no.” She said, “Come on, let’s do it.” So we made a doll of Brian and she said, “Stick a pin in his stomach,” and I did. I felt better. The next day, when I went back home, I saw this Pepto-Bismol by the bedside and all of that. I said, “Brian, were you sick in the stomach?” He said, “Oh, yeah, I was really sick.” And so I really freaked out. This thing works! I never did anything like that again. It really scared the shit out of me.’
Marianne Faithfull joined Brian and Anita’s bohemian ménage in the spring of 1966. It had been eighteen eventful months since she scored a top-ten hit with ‘As Tears Go By’. There were more hit singles, but Marianne was mostly known as a girl with a knack for being in the right place at the right time, turning up looking fabulous, in a far-out kind of way, at every important ‘happening’.
At eighteen, she married John Dunbar, the co-founder of the Indica Gallery, London’s first conceptual art space, in Mason’s Yard, a few doors down from the Scotch. In November 1965 she gave birth to their son, Nicholas. But by early 1966 she had grown disenchanted with the settled life and fell in with Anita, having determined upon snagging herself a Stone. Brian was already taken, of course, by her new best friend, but the word was that there might soon be a vacancy with Mick, whose three-year relationship with Chrissie Shrimpton was known to be on the skids.