In August 1968 the Rolling Stones had much to celebrate. They had completed their new album, Beggars Banquet, Mick Jagger had just turned twenty-five, and the Vesuvio Club, part owned by Jagger and Keith Richards, was reopening.
The party they threw at the Vesuvio was a suitably wild celebration of these three events. Moroccan tapestries draped the walls, along with giant photographs of the Stones. A helium-filled zeppelin floated up and down, vast silver bowls were filled with a mixture of punch and mescaline, and tables groaned with plates piled with hash cakes. Hubble pipes were provided, along with dainty dishes of hash, for those who preferred inhaling to ingesting.
‘My only fear,’ recalled the club’s manager Tony Sanchez,1 ‘was the club’s proximity to Tottenham Court Road police station. It was only three hundred yards away, and a couple of inquisitive cops would have been able to arrest just about every superstar in Britain if they had decided on a raid that night.’
Jagger arrived early, having flown from Ireland with the first advance pressing of Beggars Banquet. Sanchez, acting as disc jockey, proceeded to play it. It was an instant success: everyone present seemed either to be dancing to it or saying how amazing it was, or both at the same time. On top of all this, John Lennon and Yoko Ono dropped by, the summer of ’68’s progressive equivalent of a visit from the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh.
Arriving a little later than most of the other partygoers was Paul McCartney, fresh from Trident Studios, a short walk away in Soho, bringing with him the acetate disc of the Beatles’ next single. Having greeted his hosts, he walked through the dancers to the turntables, and discreetly handed the disc to Tony Sanchez, saying, ‘See what you think of it, Tony. It’s our new one.’
Once Beggars Banquet had come to an end, and Mick and Keith were milling about, garnering praise from their guests, Sanchez slipped the new Beatles single onto the turntable.
‘Hey Jude, don’t make it bad, take a –’
Everyone stopped talking. For the next seven minutes eleven seconds, they remained completely silent.
‘It just went – boom! – straight to the chest,’ recalls Marianne Faithfull. ‘It was the first time anyone had heard it, and we were all just blown away … We had a sense of everyone being in the right place, at the right time, with the right people.’
Tony Sanchez felt Mick Jagger’s mood changing: ‘When it was over, I noticed that Mick looked peeved.’ Paul remembers Mick coming up to him and saying, ‘Fuckin’ ’ell! Fuckin’ ’ell! That’s something else, innit? It’s like two songs. It’s got the song and then the whole “na na na” at the end. Yeah.’
Later that night, John staggered over to Sanchez, ‘looking as though his eyes were about to pop out of his head’, and asked him to call a cab. All three doormen went outside to hail one, but they failed to come back. Sanchez was later to discover that the interaction of the fresh air with the mescaline and the hash had rendered the three of them insensible: they completely forgot who they were, where they were, and what they were supposed to be doing. Jagger saved the day by volunteering the use of his own Aston Martin DB6, and Tony Sanchez’s cousin, acting as chauffeur, successfully drove John and Yoko all the way back to Ascot, Surrey.
1 Sanchez was the ‘personal assistant’ of Keith Richards, and has also been credited with the no less onerous role of preferred drug dealer to the Rolling Stones, Robert Fraser and, from time to time, the Beatles.