The first thing you need to know about my adventures with the Rolling Stones is that they pretty much all took place once the basic thrill had gone out of the group and their music. Mick Jagger himself would admit as much many years later when he informed an interviewer, ‘To use a cliché, the sixties never really ended until later on in the seventies. I sort of remember the album Exile on Main Street being done in France and also in the United States, and after that going on tour and becoming complacent, and thinking, “It’s ’72. Fuck it. We’ve done it.” We still tried after that, but I don’t think the results were ever that wonderful.’
Still, back in 1973 no one wanted to believe that just yet awhile. After all, back in the sixties the Stones, the Beatles and Bob Dylan had formed rock’s sparkling holy trinity but, three years into a new decade, the Beatles were no more and Bob Dylan was still locked away somewhere in the same state of confused semi-retirement he’d entered back in 1966. By contrast the Stones just seemed to go from strength to strength, reaching an all-time creative peak only the previous year with the aforementioned Exile on Main Street double album. The accompanying tour of America had also sprung them on to a new level of success. More fans than ever passed through the turnstiles to witness them, but backstage an extraordinary media circus had built up populated by Truman Capote and other bored upper-crust luminaries of an older generation. Capote finally hadn’t managed to write a word on the group he’d been following around at such great expense, but a Rolling Stone stringer named Robert Greenfield was supposed to be releasing a book on that tour with some seriously compromising incidents of a sexual and pharmaceutical nature prominent in the text. More alarmingly, all those incidents and more had been filmed by a Canadian called Robert Frank and he’d edited them together into a frankly mind-boggling piece of cinéma vérité he’d entitled Cocksucker Blues.
I mention this as a possible explanation for why, in the autumn of 1973, I was suddenly commissioned by the Rolling Stones office to write a short ‘up-beat’ official account of the group’s European tour that season. I just assumed they intended whatever I croaked up to counteract the murky revelations of these other projects. (In actual fact the Stones owned the rights to the Frank film so its availability wasn’t even an issue, but there was another book to beware of: Bob Dylan’s biographer, Tony Scaduto, was now doing a volume on Mick Jagger and had let the singer know personally that it would be anything but a puff-piece.)
Still, enough with the ‘context’; let’s cut to the chase. After Exile and the US tour the Stones had decamped to Jamaica and duly concocted a set of tracks that ended up being released under the title Goats Head Soup. However, there was something very unexciting about the music on the record, for it had been frustratingly hard to locate Keith Richards’s guiding presence during the sessions.
Jagger and Richards had suddenly started calling themselves the Glimmer Twins on this new album’s credits. They ruled the roost of course, or at least Jagger did, as Keith seemed content generally to exert himself less and less. Those two were a regular case-book study in contrasts. In the flesh Jagger looked smaller and less impressive than one might imagine, so he had to work any room he entered. Which is to say he had to flit around ceaselessly, wave his hands expressively a lot, wiggle his bum a bit, chat with certain people while pointedly ignoring others. He was constantly on the move, his body language like that of an over-indulged eleven-year-old allowed to stay up late and show off at his parents’ dinner party.
He had this other peculiar habit of adopting the dialect and accent of anyone he was talking to, just as he was talking to them. On one occasion I found myself in a room with him, a white guy from the American South, a black guy from Los Angeles and someone from the North of England; and everyone stood quietly aghast as the singer’s voice weaved a reckless path away from his usual faux Cockney intonations to attempt a ‘y’all’ drenched drawl straight out of a particularly arch Tennessee Williams production before slipping into ‘soul brother’ black speak somewhat in the over-excited cadence of Little Richard. When he finally started talking like a Manchester bus conductor, everyone in the room looked utterly mystified because the whole performance was frankly ridiculous to begin with and you couldn’t really tell if Jagger consciously realized he was even doing it or not. But ultimately it didn’t matter because it got him what he wanted, which was to be the centre of attention.
But he’d only stay the centre of attention until Keith Richards walked in the room. At which time all eyes would shift towards the guitarist and pretty much stay that way for the rest of the evening. Keith wasn’t what you’d call a ‘mingler’. He’d lope into a room, often accompanied by a couple of unsavoury individuals who seemed destined to have their faces turning up on some FBI Wanted’ posters in the not-too-distant future, slump down on a chair, turn his back to the milling throng and glower a lot. Talk about drop-dead cool! I thought he was just like Lee Marvin in The Commancheros, only with better hair and a bad-ass pirate earring too. There was also this doomed poetic quality about him that Marianne Faithfull pegged nicely when she talked about ‘how if you’re an over-imaginative schoolgirl who’s read her Shelley and Byron, well that’s what Keith Richards is. This perfect vision of damned youth. Even though he’s turning more and more into Count Dracula.’
Of course, Keith had one over-riding passion at this point in his life. He consumed drugs like other humans consume air, which is to say, unceasingly. OK, it’s true, he slept, but only in brief spasms and only after days and nights of running his body down with endless shots of heroin and snorts of cocaine. His concept of bed-rest seemed to be a couple of hours of being splayed out unconscious on some ratty old sofa and then he was good to go for another three or four days and nights of non-stop carousing. There was talk in the camp that he might indeed be possessed of super-human faculties. Roadies whispered in hushed tones about Keith’s latest hedonistic marathon and several firmly believed he was blessed with two livers. On the matter of his sleeping habits, Ian Stewart told me an instructive tale about the Stones travelling through the Midlands at dead of night in a cramped little transit van, back in 1964, when the vehicle swerved and crashed, sending a large amplifier on wheels that Keith Richards happened to be passed out on flying through the back doors and down a long winding hill. After searching the hedgerows in vain for almost an hour, the other members eventually located the young guitarist still asleep atop the amplifier which had somehow fallen into a deep ditch. Keith hadn’t noticed a thing.
It was always so much fun hearing and collecting these tales of wanton foolishness that it became easier and easier to ignore the other side of the issue, which was that drug addiction was slowly but surely destroying Richards’s talent as a musician. Night after night I’d watch him on stage, and for most of the time he was just coasting, only half there. Dope was making him slow and clumsy too. He’d fall over his guitar lead from time to time and step on the wrong ‘effects’ pedal too often for it to be funny. On a good night he could still be magnificent: he was the group’s motor after all, and whatever flame they were still cooking with, he was its keeper. But hard drugs – particularly in the amounts he was consuming – can only end up blunting creative instinct and stealing all natural reserves of energy and that’s what was happening to him. Watching him on stage, it was like he was lost in this deep dense fog, but there was something so poignant about seeing him still standing because there was always a very real possibility that it could be the last time. But it was also kind of sordid seeing him stumble through his signature tune, ‘Happy’, missing half the lyrics and having Jagger conclude the thing by adopting his most sarcastic voice to remark, ‘Uh, thank you, Keith, that was really amazing!’ As in ‘not’.
Although I remember being in seventh heaven for almost the whole duration of the two-month tour, looking back on it now, most of the images that stand out are distinctly ugly ones. For example, there was the evening in Manchester when Richards and Bobby Keyes sat at the hotel bar having just heard the news that one of their biggest musical allies and drug-buddies, Gram Parsons, had died from a morphine overdose in some cheesy motel outside LA with only some half-witted groupie for company. Their manner was sombre and the muscles in their faces were tensed like a couple of old western hombres who’d just come back from burying one of their gang out by the old corral. Behind the stoned fog they constantly inhabited I could still see they were deeply, deeply shocked and more than a little frightened too, though they’d probably never have admitted it. But it was only natural, really. After all, the thing that had killed Parsons in such an ugly, senseless way was the exact same distraction Richards and Keyes loved to partake in more than anything else in life.
Keyes, at least, should have paid the circumstances of Parsons’s demise closer attention, for only a few days later in Germany his dazed, inert carcass was taken and put in a taxi cab by a Rolling Stones assistant who accompanied him to the nearest airport and placed him on the first available flight back to the States. His big old body had suddenly just packed in on him and it meant he’d also let the Stones down badly in the middle of an important tour. It would be many humiliating years before he’d be allowed to work with them again, years spent adjusting to the fact of having to play half-empty road-houses in the back of beyond for beer money, billing himself as ‘Mr Brown Sugar’.
Then there was the lovely Bianca Jagger, or ‘Bianca the Wanker’ as she was known to the road crew whom she treated despicably at all times. This mutual disdain extended to group members also, principally to Richards, who loathed her with a vengeance. It was all about ‘appearances’ with Bianca: looking beautiful, making the right entrance, being seen with the richest and most elegant people and exploiting any and every circumstance for maximum publicity value. She always cultivated this expression somewhere between haughty disdain and utter uninterest, and looked at people as though she was mentally adding up the cost of the clothes they had on their backs to see if they were worthy of communicating with or not. One time she actually smiled at me and it was almost terrifying to see the blinding whites of her teeth, like Scott Fitzgerald’s description of Daisy in The Great Gatsby whose smile was like an old cash register ringing up a particularly costly sale.
On a more positive note, one of the undisputed highlights of the trek for me was the continued presence of a joyful lunatic from Arkansas called Newman Jones III, who was Keith’s guitar roadie and personal guitar-maker at the time. Apart from his employer Jones, or ‘Ted’ as he was constantly referred to for a reason that always escaped me, was the most genuinely fascinating guy to be around on that tour. He was a wild young kid from the South with blond hair and almost Scandinavian good looks who always wore a beat-up stetson topped off by an eye-catching snakeskin hat-band. If he liked you enough to talk to you in the first place, Ted would always get around to telling you how he’d killed that snake. In great detail. He was amazing, too, because though he worked for Richards he hadn’t got sucked into the drug dependency vortex that others coming into close contact with the guitarist inevitably succumbed to. In fact, he appeared to be virtually drug-free, a condition both Jagger and tour manager Peter Rudge would sometimes silently pray be rectified with a sharp injection of tranquillizers whenever they saw the hyperactive Jones – a self-confessed ‘genius with wood’ – taking out his large Bowie knife at chic European restaurants catering for the band after shows and carving up another expensive dining table in his search for the perfect material for a possible fret-board he was designing.
Ian Stewart, the group’s old road manager, was the other sweetheart in the pack. He was the conscience of the Rolling Stones – the conscience its principals all too often lost in a haze of drugs and ego – and pretty much what was left of the group’s heart as well, even though he knew it was all slowly slipping into a long decline. He told me he thought Goat’s Head Soup was ‘too bloody insipid’ and that Keith’s drug problem was turning him into ‘a walking bloody tragedy . . . a terrible waste of a talent’. He knew that Jagger was-becoming increasingly remote and hard to communicate with, that Mick Taylor was dissatisfied and toying with heroin too, that Wyman was thinking of quitting he felt so frustated with his role, and that Charlie . . . well, Charlie would just shrug and live with it all but that that wasn’t going to change anything, was it now?
He’d been there all along – since they’d kicked him out of the group itself for not looking unconventional enough – and he’d had to witness every dirty deceitful deed the group had ever pulled on one of their own since then. He’d watched Jagger and Richards also become particularly cold and mean in their business dealings with the outside world after the pair had realized most of the money they’d made in the sixties – over 14 million dollars by some accounts – had been pocketed by former manager Allen Klein, who also held the rights to all their music from that era. Yet Stewart still hung in there, dressed like a suburban family man fresh from twelve rounds of golf with his big benign bulldog face and his gruff old voice trying to create a bit of ‘order’ and ‘focus’, gently pricking ‘ego’ bubbles floating above certain members’ heads and – lest we forget – lending his own singular touch to the ivories of a grand piano located discreetly behind Billy Preston from whence honky-tonk trills and arpeggios would ring throughout several numbers per show.
That’s why he was there, of course: for that twenty minutes or so when he could hide behind the PA and hunch over the piano slapping out the kind of strident piano runs pioneered by Chuck Berry’s accompanist Johnny Johnson and commune awhile with the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world. They could still justifiably refer to themselves by that high-handed title in 1973 even though on record they’d suddenly turned a bit flaccid and irrelevant. Live, though, they could still bring the house down even if there were just as many nights when the music sounded stiff and impersonal and the audience looked on the verge of becoming ever so slightly bored. I can remember two or three extraordinary concerts, shows where Keith Richards would suddenly find his bearings and start driving the rhythm along, pushing and pulling it with every motion of his body, shoulders hunched, eyes staring dead at Charlie Watts as the pair locked into yet another murderous groove. This was always the cue for the rest of the band to straighten up and fly right, musically speaking. Mick Taylor would suddenly coax more lethal solos from his guitar, the horns would play with a punchier attack and even Billy Preston would stop his odious Uncle Tom grinning and shuffling to concentrate on just playing his keyboards effectively. It also afforded Jagger the opportunity to stop flouncing complacently around the stage and to start delivering the kind of inspired performance he was capable of. At those moments the Rolling Stones were still something to behold with genuine awe, for the music seemed to drip from their fingers like dark honey. It all seemed so effortless and yet so all-consuming in its intensity. And Jagger knew all about this music, how to inhabit its sharp angles and bleak crevices, how to caress it with his voice and how to ride its terrible momentum like a surfer on a perfect wave to hell. Just such a gig occurred at – of all things – an afternoon concert the band played in Birmingham and also at the last concert of all, in West Berlin, the latter providing yet another study in lurid contrasts.
That was the evening I got to have my first real conversation with Charlie Watts, a frail but lovable soul who dealt with being a Rolling Stone by putting up with as much as he could stomach and trying hazily to ignore the rest. He spoke with the guileless quality of a slightly dazed child and talked incessantly about how he really loved jazz and that rock to him was all a bit . . . well, silly, really. Not the music itself – at least not the Stones’ music, he’d quickly add – just all the brouhaha surrounding rock, all the earnest Rolling Stone reviews, all the sociological guff, all the hype and the bullshit. All . . . this! And he gestured meekly out at the crowd of two hundred or so rich bored-looking Germans who’d come to gawk at the Stones and celebrate the end of their tour in this classy, old, decidedly decadent-looking Berlin hotel the group were all booked into. The music was raging into the early hours of the morning. Mick Jagger flitted around the room imperiously, Keith Richards looked indescribably stoned and glowered at a lot of people, and Newman Jones destroyed yet another perfectly good dining-table in his quest for the perfect guitar frame. At about 3 a.m. the music being played through the sound system came over all Eastern and a bunch of professional dancers duly arrived to perform a soft-core erotic routine for the assembled throng. Once they’d departed, a dark-haired woman entered in a fur coat and performed a strip-tease to some strange Turkish music. Then another woman appeared, also stripped, and the two of them commenced to simulate sexual intercourse on the former’s fur coat laid out on the floor. As the love-making grew more intense, someone from Billy Preston’s backing group decided to register his contempt for the spectacle by tossing a lit candelabra on to the coat, which quickly caught fire. Flames were spurting out but the women were too wrapped up in their performance to notice at first. But what was really shocking was that no one out of over one hundred people grouped around watching jumped forward to alert them. Or even toss a handy beaker of water over the conflagration. Instead, all heads turned to Jagger and Richards, who were seated in two throne-like chairs right at the head of the party. But they weren’t moving one muscle. Instead, they continued to watch with cold, dead eyes as the flames increased until they finally began burning the women’s flesh. They leaped up, screaming hysterically. After what seemed like an eternity someone proffered some water and the fire was extinguished. Then one of the women – naked and humiliated – turned and stalked right up to the two Stones. For a second it looked as through she might hit one of them but instead she stood only a matter of inches away from them both and spat out a series of vicious-sounding German curses directly in their faces. Yet there was no sign of shock. In fact, none of it seemed to register with the pair in the slightest. They just sat there, radiating this numb, burned-out cool, this ‘you-can-never-reach-me’ sense of otherness. Not a pretty sight. It was like their souls had taken up permanent residence in the sentiments of the most sublimely loveless song ever written, immortalized by Peggy Lee, Leiber-Stoller’s Is That All There Is?’
Let’s face it, even though they were kings of the hill, lords of all they surveyed, the hideous spiral of fame they’d both been riding rough-shod over had fucked with their souls badly. As smitten as I was by Richards’s bad-assed buccaneering image even I could see that behind the evil reputation and the sullen scowls there hung a shy, introverted soul whose life, family and talent were steadily turning to shit in front of him, because he was too weak to walk away from the drugs that he loved to take so much for the way they made him feel invincible and helped perpetuate this image he also loved, that of ‘big, bad Keith Richards, Mr “So tough he doesn’t have to prove it” ’.
As for Jagger . . . well, anyone who’s ever known him will tell you what an interesting bunch of guys Mick Jagger can be. During that tour I’d seen him turn into the leering hedonist, the repellent aristocrat, the working-class ‘oik’ with a social edge, the concerned family man, the life and soul of the party, the ‘don’t approach me’ prima-donna, the narcissistic old queen, the ruthless businessman, the loving husband, the rapacious adulterer. There was really no limit to the masks he’d don. Yet in his ceaseless quest always to stay one step ahead of everyone else he’d somehow lost contact with his own humanity, or at least some interconnecting essence that threw all the mystifying contrasts in his personality into some sympathetic relief.
The book, meanwhile, got written but under such circumstances that little of any lasting merit could seep into the text. At first they wanted only 9,000 words to be included with a possible live album the group were thinking of compiling from the European tour, but that project got axed when the Stones returned to the studio later that winter and recorded what turned out to be the backing tracks to a whole new project, an album that would see the light of day late the following year entitled It’s Only Rock’n’Roll. By the time my project was completed it had simply become old news. I was paid well for my efforts but the text never got to see the light of day. It was no great loss to the world.
So then we were into 1974 and suddenly I found myself running with a faster crowd consisting mainly of these young narcissistic scene-makers with loads of ready cash, easy charm and drug connections. Almost all of them had luxury flats in Chelsea and they were well-connected, somewhat spoilt individuals who’d had a little bit too much of a good time during the latter years of the sixties, and now that the general mood was clouding over somewhat they’d kind of sulked off and taken up sanctuary in their well-appointed dimly lit living-rooms hung with drapes and enchanting little Eastern nick-nacks where they’d snort lines of heroin and cocaine one after the other and stare silently at the big colour TV screen sucking up all the energy from the room. These guys had several things in common, but the one common factor they all shared that had me most interested was that they all knew Keith Richards in some capacity. In fact, most of them lived less than a stone’s throw from his Cheyne Walk townhouse and were always brimming with news of the guitarist’s latest escapade. Actually, come to think of it, they tended to talk more about Anita Pallenberg, his girlfriend, and her increasingly skittish moods, but I’d sit there and soak it all up excitedly like some big moon-struck calf-eyed girl at her first disco.
You’re probably wondering at this point why someone like myself, a successful young guy with everything to live for, who’s already claimed he could see through the guitarist’s exotic image, would still bother to walk so closely in his shadow. That’s not so easy to answer. Let’s just say I was free, white and twenty-one and over the past two years my life had turned into some great adventure I wanted to take to its absolute limits. I knew he was going to hell. But it just looked so cool down here that I wanted to check it out for myself. Famous last words. Several years later I was talking to Marianne Faithfull about the Stones and I asked her if they’d really ‘corrupted’ poor old Gram Parsons, as certain sources had maintained. She looked at me as though I was being utterly ridiculous:
‘Listen,’ she said, ‘they didn’t have to corrupt Gram Parsons! Don’t you understand Gram Parsons was already ripe for the picking? He was ready for absolutely anything! He was ripe, just like I was ripe and just like you yourself were ripe for the whole experience. It’s just like what happens when an apple gets too ripe to hang on a tree! Who knows how far it’s going to fall?’
Who, indeed! Somewhere in the late fall of the year, I finally got to . . . y’know, hang out with the guy, just the two of us, mano a mano, so to speak. I’d met him first at a record company office where he was in the process of ingesting enough drugs and whisky to fell an entire herd of water-buffalo. I partook of only one line of some pharmaceutical concoction he was endlessly fashioning on a nearby table, and was so overwhelmed by the consequent sensation that my head was about to explode, I had to grab hold of the sides of my chair so as not to start levitating on the spot. In due course he invited me to accompany him to an interview he was doing with The Old Grey Whistle Test, a BBC TV ‘rock’ programme. That’s when I found out that being the passenger in a high speed Ferrari sports car driven by Keith Richards is a thrill second only to joy-riding down a steep winding hill with Ray Charles at the wheel. Keith didn’t have his own licence. Keith never actually took a driving test. Keith lived a lot in foreign countries and was so stoned all the time he’d always forget what side of the road he had to drive on. But that didn’t stop him from gunning up the motor to between 70 and 90 miles an hour and never letting it drop. Particularly when he was making corners on small provincial roads! I learnt a lot about Keith Richards that night just from watching him drive in this almost unthinkably self-destructive fashion of his. Talk about bravado: it was all about him against the rest of the world and bugger the consequences. I’d see it in his face at clubs and restaurants too, where he’d openly snort lines of cocaine from dinner tables until other customers and waiters couldn’t help but start staring at him. At which point he’d fix them all with this cold, disdainful glare, as if to say, ‘Yeah, that’s right! I take drugs. In fact, I’m a fully qualified drug-abuser. Now what exactly are you going to do about it?’
It was a routine he pulled that night too, after the TV interview, which went unspectacularly but well, considering he’d actually nodded out in the toilet ten minutes before its live transmission was due to commence. His voice had shrunken to a husky croak now and he’d occasionally slip into a state of unconsciousness from which he’d suddenly snap back a full minute later. But he’d eaten some first-rate Chinese food so it was time to move the excitement over to Keith’s current base of operations – a humble servant’s quarters in Richmond. Yes, I was a bit underwhelmed by the location, too, initially but Keith had to lie low from the Chelsea police force, who seemed to view him and his drug-taking as a constant target for busts and bribery. That’s why he’d vacated Cheyne Walk and was living in a modest two-storey building in the grounds of his new pal Faces guitarist Ron Wood’s opulent estate. Once inside, the place looked as dysfunctional as its occupant, which is to say that nothing really worked apart from the heating and the light fittings. Keith had brought me back specifically to play me some music but the record player didn’t seem to work. Neither did the cassette player. ‘Oh dear!’ said Keith, who promptly sent out ‘Frank’, his well-built straight-looking minder who was in fact nothing more than a layabout and a scrounging ‘ne’er-do-well’, to fetch some functioning audio equipment from Cheyne Walk. Frank never returned. So we sat and talked for a long time – most of it about either the Stones or drugs. Or both. He started talking about the old days and Brian Jones, and he made no bid to disguise his loathing for the guy. Jagger he chose to criticize mainly for his choice of wife: Bianca, according to Keith, had been the ruination of Jagger. He’d ‘never been able to handle chicks’ and this one was walking all over him, making him take on all these phoney airs and graces, making him lose touch with who he really was. As for the heroin, well, like all good junkies, Keith was seriously into ‘denial’. He was fiercely critical of a number of mutual acquaintances who’d become addicted to the drug but seemed to think he’d be spared the sorry end he foresaw for all of them. He said he thought that one could never get truly addicted to the drug simply by snorting it, only by fixing, which I was already experienced enough to know was a bunch of bullshit. He also claimed not to be injecting anymore, but an hour after stating this he accidentally overturned a Kleenex box full of syringes and looked ever-so-slightly guilty, before slumping into one of those temporary states of unconsciousness I’ve referred to earlier. Only this one wasn’t so temporary. Instead his head lolled back, his mouth fell open and his face lost all trace of its natural colour, turning instead cold and grey with tinges of blue forming around the mouth and under the eyelids. In other words, it looked like he was over-dosing and I was the only one round to do anything about it. I cradled his head in my arms and slapped him gently several times. I picked him up and tried to drag him around the room on my shoulders. So I asked him to tell me his name over and over again to no avail. After what seemed like an eternity – but which was probably more like eight minutes – he came to long enough to register the fact that he wasn’t actually in a coma and that this was absolutely nothing out of the ordinary, before falling back into his stupor. He had the sweetest little smile on his face as I still held his head in my hands while searching for a cushion to lay it on. Once I could tell he was breathing properly, I left him and passed out in an adjacent bedroom.
The next morning I was awoken by my stomach running out of the room I’d been sleeping in in search of anything resembling a toilet. Finding none readily available, I galloped to the front door and opened it just in time to hurl violently all over the quaintly designed ‘welcome’ mat lying at the entrance of the house. I felt Keith Richards saunter up behind me. ‘That’s a charming way to show your appreciation for last night, isn’t it?’ he remarked with a certain dead-pan breeziness. He looked remarkably chipper for a man I’d thought to be wobbling across death’s very threshold a few hours before. And then he turned all wistful and looked forlornly across to some fields laid to the west over which some crows were swooping. It was then that he told me the strange saga of the kilo sacks of raw opium he’d buried in a barn overlooking those very same fields only a short while ago. He’d left them there for safekeeping, but when he’d returned the barn had been demolished and his drug stash had disappeared with it. He’d searched and searched but no signs were forthcoming. The story clearly still saddened him greatly, and I could see by the way he coldly eyed those crows he felt the ugly black birds might actually have masterminded the heist. The sun was rising in the distance, I was wiping my mouth with the back of my hand and Keith was silently seething at a bunch of crows in a nearby field. Memories are made of this.
But not far from this scene of pastoral bonding Mick Taylor could be found stewing glumly over his situation within the group. I’d seen him a few days earlier and he’d spoken excitedly about some songs he’d written with Jagger and Richards that were to appear on It’s Only Rock’n’Roll. When I told him that I’d seen a finished sleeve with the song-writing credits and that his name wasn’t featured, he went silent for a second before muttering a curt We’ll see about that!’ almost under his breath. Actually he sounded more resigned than anything and that was maybe the real problem. He was too frightened to confront either Jagger or Richards directly, so he famed in private about the miseries of being a junior partner in the Rolling Stones until he’d persuaded himself he ought to leave the group altogether. This did not please the rest of the group, who were all set to fly to Munich for more recording when the news of his defection came through.
I was in Munich when I finally got to see them work in a record studio, albeit as a quartet with old pal Nicky Hopkins back on the piano to round out the sound. Keith had splashed out on a new set of teeth, but his face had become so haggard-looking and his skin so translucent they didn’t really help him look any better than before, when his mouth had resembled a run-down graveyard. The very wretched Bill Wyman was moaning away in a corner putting everybody else down. God, what a deeply unattractive mean-spirited little man he was! And then there was dear old Charlie, who was starting to go bald and had taken to sporting a particularly brutal-looking skinhead crop. ‘So ’ow’s the Prisoner of the Isle de Ré, then?’ Mick Jagger would keep asking Charlie, who looked more and more pissed off whenever he heard the remark, probably because he didn’t know who the fuck Jagger was talking about. Jagger had just come back from Paris, where he’d been swanning around the clubs with Rudolf Nureyev, and so he’d arrived in Munich sporting a large Russian Cossack hat and a more gauchely ‘camp’ exterior than usual. When they finally started making music together, Jagger strapped on a guitar and strummed out a chord progression not dissimilar to the one dominating Martha and the Vandellas’ ‘Heatwave’. Richards played it back alone over and over again for maybe twenty minutes, giving it different punctuation points, shifting the dynamic to his own specifications. Then Watts and Wyman were summoned, along with Hopkins, and the musical spade-work commenced. Soon enough, a backing track was rolling along with Jagger also on piano, providing a guide-vocal by grunting and chanting a vague melodic pattern bereft of intelligible meaning. Then they’d do it again. And again and again. And each time it would get a bit faster until no one seemed to know what on earth was going on anymore. Glyn Johns, their old engineer/producer, was manning the desk and at the time spoke glowingly about ‘how it felt like the good old days again’. But some years later, in an interview with Musician, he gave a more accurate verbal representation of his frustrations regarding those Munich sessions:
‘I must be honest with you, I don’t think Mick and Keith have a clue how to make records. I don’t think they’ve really ever had that much of a clue, if you really want to know. They were enormously frustrating to work with. To me the Rolling Stones was unequivocably the best rock’n’roll rhythm section I’ve ever been in a room with. And to take something as natural as that and work it to death until it deteriorates into something in my opinion quite bland – to take the amazing adrenalin rush that they got together when they were playing well and just dissipate it by flogging it to death the way they did and be so very critical about it – I never understood it, they left me behind. I found it really frustrating. I’ve watched these guys who I knew were just wonderful playing worse and worse until Keith would come in and say, “That’s the take!” For some reason better known to the Lord than anybody else!’
Numerous guitarists were auditioned but you didn’t need a crystal ball to see that Ronnie Wood was ultimately going to get the gig. He got on well socially with both Jagger and Richards and had an infectious energetic quality about him that both Watts and Wyman found stimulating to be around. He had a good thing going with the Faces but he’d lived in awe of the Stones for so long that when he was offered a job in the group he just didn’t know how to say no. So, in 1975, Wood filled in on another riotous American tour with them as well as keeping up his Faces duties, but when Rod Stewart flounced out of the latter combo that winter to go solo, the die was well and truly cast for the guitarist with the profile of a kindly jackdaw. Celebrating his new role as foil for Jagger and Richards at his Richmond home that Christmas, Wood waxed effusive to an interviewer about how ‘I think the Rolling Stones bring out the best in me’. However, in a matter of only a few years, everyone who’d ever known Wood before he made the choice would shake their heads sadly when considering how the change had turned out for him. One of these was Glyn Johns, who’d produced for both the Stones and the Faces:
‘Ron Wood was probably the worst choice they could have made, in my view. I thought it was absurd. I’m sure he got the gig more on his wonderful personality and his friendship and all the rest of it. It was an easy transition for them. But musically I don’t think he fits with the Stones at all. I don’t think the band has benefited from having him and he’s not benefited from being in. He might have benefited financially, he may well have enjoyed being in the band for other reasons, but to me the man was an extraordinary musician and he’s being completely wasted. I don’t think he’s been given an opportunity to grow. He might tell you differently. The guy was wonderful, he had a very individual style. Woody seems to me like the court jester somehow. I think that’s unnecessary and it’s degrading.’
Anyway they put out their weakest album thus far – a bunch of half-assed jams performed while auditioning various guitarists, padded out with a couple of make-weight ballads – entitled Black and Blue in the late spring of 1976 just as they were setting out on another tour of Europe. I caught up with the tour in Paris, where everything was really starting to fall apart for Keith Richards. The level of drug traffic and general drug abuse in and around that tour was very, very intense indeed, and the guitarist was more than ably abetted in the consumption of these pharmaceuticals by both Jagger and Wood, the latter fast becoming like Richards’s second shadow. Everywhere, backstage at Les Abattoirs where they played for three nights, you’d find heroin and cocaine dealers with special laminated passes on their jackets embossed with Keith Richards’s own signature. Even the roadies were scoring off them. The tour manager, Pete Rudge, was going completely haywire trying to keep all this illegal activity under guard, but the more he’d try to impose some kind of order and sanity, the more Richards would work to undermine it. Jagger didn’t even seem to care anymore; in fact, all the group’s principals appeared to believe they were quite simply beyond the law. The shows meanwhile were terrible. There was no mystery and no momentum anymore; just an ill-focused blur of a sound buffeted by Wood and Richards’s frankly clumsy guitar interplay and fronted by Jagger content merely to pose and primp coyly around the stage, utilizing grotesque gimmicks like a giant inflatable penis for cheap effect.
Let’s be honest about it, they were all just coasting along, smug as lords, lost in this vast bubble of dope-fuelled invincibility. Then tragedy struck. Anita Pallenberg had recently given birth to a third child by Richards after a ‘difficult’ pregnancy, but after only two months alive the infant – a little boy the parents had named Tara after Tara Browne, a doomed aristocratic chum from the sixties – expired in his crib over at the couple’s rented home in Switzerland. The grieving mother flew over to be with the guitarist for the final show in Paris and I’ll never forget seeing the couple leaving the venue afterwards. Anita was crying and seemed to be having difficulty moving, Keith was shepherding her along but he was crying too and looked all of a sudden to be impossibly fragile, like a stiff breeze could send him spinning to the ground. No longer the Scott and Zelda of the rock’n’roll age, they looked like some tragic shell-shocked couple leading each other out of a concentration camp. I honestly never thought I’d see them alive again. In a way, it was a blessing what happened to them in Toronto only a matter of months after that.
The facts are all a matter of public record now. The group moved to the Canadian city to record several live shows at a club there in February of 1977 only to have the Mounties catch Richards and Pallenberg red-handed in a hotel suite with more than two ounces of both heroin and cocaine in their possession. It was all very ugly indeed: Keith strung out all alone in Canada, facing the possibility of life imprisonment and being abandoned by his jittery pals Jagger and Wood. But it was also rather inevitable.
‘Are you askin’ if I knew it was gonna happen, like . . . sooner or later?’ Mick Jagger remarked to me with a forced expression of naivety exactly seven months to the day after Keith’s fateful meeting with the Mounties. We were seated in a Vietnamese restaurant in Soho doing yet another interview. ‘Well, yeah of course! Christ, Keith fuckin’ gets busted every year.’
Yeah but it keeps getting more and more serious . . .
‘Until it reaches a head. That’s what you’re saying. Yeah, sure. And then you’ve got to do something about it. But I’m not judge and jury. I can’t morally . . . I can’t go into those sort of details. Christ, I can tell you what I think of the case but I can’t . . . I mean, it’s not even my case. I don’t know how many needles they found lyin’ around. I didn’t have anything to do with it all. I never even went to see the cops.’
But how did you really feel about watching him decline like this?
‘Listen, we shouldn’t be talking about this. Really, I mean, he’s in too much trouble as it is. Afterwards sure . . . but. . . right now anything we say could somehow go against him. I could say right now, “yeah, it was irresponsible, and what happened was totally inevitable,” but what good would that do? It’s not worth it at all and anyway the fact is that I simply can’t and don’t blame anyone for the bust.’
While I had him a bit on the defensive, I thought I’d give it my best shot and pop the only truly relevant question worth asking the guy in the first place, which is, ‘Why the fuck does someone as purportedly rock-solid and all-powerful as Mick Jagger feel this insatiable need to inhabit all these different, often unappealing personalities as often as he possibly can?
‘I just enjoy changing personality,’ he replied after a moment of silent deliberation. ‘Honestly, I feel I’ve got to be very . . . uh . . . chameleon-like just to preserve my own identity. You have to do it sometimes . . .’
But doesn’t it reach a point where you lose contact with yourself?
‘Hmmm, maybe that’s true, but I don’t feel threatened by that possible eventuality. I don’t want to have just one front. I feel like I need at least two just to carry on doing what I’m doing comfortably. It’s acting, sure it is . . . that’s what it obviously comes down to. It just gives me the facility to do practically anything I want, see. And even then the most drastic changes of personality don’t really affect me ’cos I never feel the need to do ’em that often. It’s all part of being a rock’n’roll star, after all.’
At another moment his face twisted itself into a suitably condescending smirk as he witnessed my personal shortcomings at mastering the art of eating with chop-sticks. ‘Get a fork instead, mate. You’re too shaky anyway.’ It was his way of saying ‘However sharp you think you are you’re never going to pin me down.’ Mick Jagger was always a little too tricky for me. He and Richards both had it: this total sense of self-possession. If you locked eyes with them, you’d always be the first to be lowering your gaze because theirs was always so steady and intense it just ultimately seemed to bore through you. That’s why these guys were going to survive even this hideous drug Waterloo with Keith and go on to prosper into old age as rock’n’rollers, whereas a walking casualty like Elvis – a punk loser who never folly comprehended the vast charisma and talent the good Lord entrusted in him and so was led by fools and flatterers – would fall into a drug-fuelled demise straight down to the grave with half his life still ahead of him. They were just too damn strong and too damn hip.
‘Who’s dead this week then?’ he sneered finally. ‘Roy Orbison? Hard to tell these days, innit! Pop stars! They’re droppin’ like flies! Droppin’ all over the place, mate!
‘I was in Turkey when Elvis choked it by the way. They started playing all his records one after the other on the radio in some bar I was in and after three or four hours I sussed the logical thing. He’d snuffed it, the poor bastard!’
Of course, everybody knows Keith finally got virtually pardoned for his transgressions, even though any other junkie would have gone down for many long years for holding such large quantities of two grade A drugs. The Toronto trial reeked of a set-up and there was intense talk of some colossal pay-off- 3 million dollars ‘filtered through to the right people’ was the sum being referred to in most of the rumours circulating at the time. However, by then, the group had managed to record and release their last ‘significant’ album to date, Some Girls, a raw rebuttal to the then-current punk icons’ accusations of the Stones’ debauched redundancy. There were a couple of lumpy three-chord thrashers created by Mick Jagger in the style of Lou Reed, an ersatz disco rocker written for the woman he’d finally left Bianca for, Texan model Jerry Hall, that went on to sell millions as a single entitled ‘Miss You’, a surreal country honker with Jagger singing like some straw-sucking Bakersfield bumpkin called ‘Faraway Eyes’, and two fine Keith Richards songs. ‘Before They Make Me Run’ was a hearty two-fingered ‘fuck you’ to all those who wished him dead or behind bars, but the real highlight was ‘Beast of Burden’, the last Stones ballad to be able to stand gracefully alongside something as timeless as ‘Wild Horses’ or any other of the Stones’ truly finest tender moments. I’ve always imagined it as Richards’s tired but determined plea to partner Anita Pallenberg not to drag him down any further with her into the lowest depths of substance abuse and border-line insanity.
After Toronto it was pretty much all over for Keith and Anita. Couples committed to drug treatments are often kept apart, and certainly the powers-that-be in the Rolling Stones’ business empire felt that Pallenberg was perhaps the more destructive influence in the whole issue of drug abuse involving the pair. Anyway, she wasn’t around on the 1978 American tour they played to promote the Some Girls album, a disastrous and much criticized series of dates which still stand as the all-time low point of the group’s considerable live career. After that, the group continued to coast as though nothing could shake their tree. They’d recorded enough tracks in Paris back in 1977 to fill out at least two more records, but returned in 1979 for further sessions that would amount to the contents of the 1980 release, Emotional Rescue, and its immediate successor, Tattoo You, in 1981. The latter sported a punchy rocker called ‘Start Me Up’ and a couple of other lively items, but, like Emotional Rescue, there was too little creative sparkle and too much raunch-by-rote for any kind of long-term satisfying listening experience.
None the less, the tour of the States they underwent to promote Tattoo You proved they’d not lost their vitality for the millions who avidly flocked to see them. One of the big reasons for the improvement in their live sound was Keith Richards back on form – now heroin-free and looking almost robust.
The following year the tour hit Europe and I got to spend a long evening with Richards just prior to the group’s two London shows, and it was the nicest time I ever got to have with the guy. He was in love again, with a beautiful blonde model named Patti Hansen with a seemingly warm and vivacious personality, and so he’d straightened up a lot or at least cut down on his intake of cocaine drastically. Still, there were three large black bottles of Rebel Yell on the table in front of him; one was already empty and he wasn’t backward about reaching out to the second for further liquid refreshment. He was still staying up three or four nights at a time too and had outdone himself with his choice of ‘personal assistant’, this time employing a dubious specimen of humanity known as Sven, an individual so wretchedly seedy-looking I could only imagine him as having been a professional grave-robber in some previous incarnation. And then there was the usual circus surrounding Keith, the bashful musicians who wanted to jam and get high, the huddle of roadies and dealers who prostrated themselves in front of him to get his attention. One big fat guy almost literally had a heart attack that night, he was hyperventilating so much from finding himself suddenly so close to ‘the living embodiment of rock’n’roll itself, as he kept referring to the unimpressed guitarist. To his credit, Keith played the whole room like a harp, sitting back strumming an acoustic guitar and running through an eclectic blend of songs predating the sixties. Only a day earlier he’d reconnected with his long-alienated father Bert and now the sweet old bloke was sitting here among this motley parade of all-purpose rock’n’roll flotsam and jetsam, puffing on a pipe and chuffing back lagers with a happy smile on his big red face. Thus Keith would choose songs that his dear old dad could relate to. Unfortunately he could find only one – ‘Danny Boy’ – but played it sombrely and reverently several times, an act that seemed otherwise to confuse those present who’d come expecting raucous rhythms, dancing girls and silver syringes bursting out of any corner of the hotel suite we were all holed up in.
But these were also dark days for the Stones, for while Richards’s hedonistic nature was on a more even keel, Ron Wood had fallen into serious problems with ‘free-base’ cocaine and was getting sloppy and stupid. He even fell asleep on stage during one of the London shows and Richards had to wake him up with a sharp punch in the face. Jagger and Richards meanwhile were no longer seeing eye-to-eye on anything and so there was this huge ego battle going on, spilling out on to the stage. Half the fun of watching these shows – for insiders – was in seeing the withering glances this odd couple would shoot at each other or the way Jagger would try to hurry songs up only to have Keith slow them down even more. It got so bad that on one show Richards hijacked this cherry picker that Jagger was using to haul himself over the crowd and stood suspended over the masses playing a twenty-minute guitar solo while Jagger stood seething behind the amps.
Once the tour had wound down, the Stones recorded yet another album, Undercover, which attempted to return to the dark world view of Exile but only ended up sounding like a tacky comic book version of the original. After that the group moved from Atlantic, their US record base since the beginning of the seventies, to Columbia, where Mick Jagger shamelessly courted the attention of the record company’s odiously flamboyant president, Walter Yetnikoff, getting himself signed to a major solo deal to the same label as a direct consequence. This is when the big problems occurred. Jagger wanted to distance himself from his old group because he saw them getting old and obsolete and because he was sickeningly obsessed with staying as young and on top of the trends as he possibly could. He’d become obsessed by other solo acts gaining great international acclaim at the time (like David Bowie and Prince) and wanted to duplicate their success without having the other Stones around to share the spotlight and all that lovely money. Jagger had also been deeply stung by some statements John Lennon had uttered to Playboy at the very beginning of the decade just a few weeks before his untimely death:
‘You know they’re congratulating the Stones on being together 112 years. Whoopee! At least Charlie’s still got his family. In the eighties they’ll be asking: “Why are these guys still together? Can’t they hack it on their own? Why do they have to be surrounded by a gang? Is the little leader frightened someone’s gonna knife him in the back?” That’s gonna be the question. They’re gonna look at the Beatles and Stones and all those guys as relics . . . They’ll be showing pictures of the guy with lipstick wriggling his ass and the four guys with the evil black make-up on their eyes trying to look raunchy. That’s gonna be the joke in the future . . . See, being in a gang . . . it’s great when you’re at a certain age. But when you’re in your forties and you’re still in one, it just means that you’re still “eighteen” in the head.’
Right in the middle of a decade remarkable only for its sustained levels of gross ambition and back-stabbing greed, Jagger put out his solo record She’s the Boss and went into complete overdrive in his zest to force it right down the general public’s throat. He employed the hottest producers and session players and even bank-rolled a ninety-minute comedy film based around the album’s songs and starring himself and Jerry Hall as a jaded narcissistic rock star couple separated by a ludicrous series of misfortunes. There was only one problem: the record was a lousy lifeless piece of work causing the film to become a foolish exercise in over-the-top vanity. Which meant that his solo career started out a bit of a flop, though you’d have been forgiven for thinking otherwise, had you viewed him in mid-’85 looking like a stick insect all dressed up in canary yellow and belting through a lively five-song set that ranked among the most exciting performances of an already star-studded show-down of rock talent otherwise known as Live Aid. With virtually every other major rock band for the two shows taking place in London and Philadelphia, it was typical of the Rolling Stones’ innate perversity to do exactly the opposite thing, for straight after Jagger’s exhilarating twenty minutes, the actor Jack Nicholson introduced the final performer of the event – the only one deemed capable of topping this monumental bill – Bob Dylan accompanied by two mystery guests. The increasingly eccentric singer/songwriter had joined forces with Ron Wood and Keith Richards, the latter particularly savouring the possibility of up-staging his infuriating lead singer. They’d apparently rehearsed together but then, just as they started to walk towards the stage, Dylan turned to Wood and muttered something about first performing ‘The Ballad of Hollis Brown’, a song that hadn’t been rehearsed by the trio and which Wood himself wasn’t even familiar with. ‘Hollis Brown?’ the guitarist offered back hopefully. ‘Isn’t that the name of a cough syrup?’ It was downhill from there, which is to say that Bob Dylan performed like he’d just been beamed down from another planet while Richards and Wood made themselves look ridiculous and not a little obsolete with their slovenly ill-focused accompaniment and self-satisfied smirking in the background.
Meanwhile, the turmoil that resulted from the making of Dirty Work, the first Stones project for Columbia that got recorded while Mick Jagger was simultaneously preoccupied with promoting his solo career, has resulted in some fine old tales that have been part of public domain for over six years now. There’s the one about Charlie punching Jagger full in the face after the singer had referred to him condescendingly as ‘my drummer’ during a drunken altercation. There’s the one about how Keith got so pissed off by Jagger’s absences and bitching behaviour he started calling him ‘Brenda’ around the studio. And there’s the one about how the album really wasn’t a proper Rolling Stones album in the first place because Charlie’s only on half of it, because Bill’s also absent from several tracks and because it was recorded with Keith’s little nucleus of players – he, Wood and session drummer Steve Jordan called themselves the Biff Hitler Trio – and then Jagger who’d stomp in separately and record his vocals as quickly as possible before returning to plug his solo career ever more relentlessly. By the same token, Jagger didn’t like being around all the drinking and doping anymore, spending numbingly long hours waiting until everyone’s heads were in the right place and the groove was right, and he deeply resented Richards for trying to take total musical control of the band, not to mention poking his ill-informed nose into matters of business and general administration. He’d grown tired of Wood’s cocaine excesses and aimless rock star stupidity, Wyman he’d never been able to stomach, and poor old Charlie, his biggest pal, suddenly seemed to be going off the rails a bit from the old evil influences that had gutted others in the band back in the seventies.
Fate, then, provided the crowning blow to the Rolling Stones’ crumbling identity, when at the end of 1985 Ian Stewart suddenly dropped dead in his doctor’s waiting room from a heart attack brought on by severe respiratory pains. He was forty-seven years old and the last one connected to the Stones name and legacy anyone expected to die from anything but natural causes at a ripe old age. ‘I thought he’d be the one to hold the shovel, the one to bury all of us,’ stated Keith Richards. What a hole he’s left, such an obvious gap. He would always be there to comment on things and sometimes you’d think he was crazy. But then you’d go and realize he was right all along.’
They were all there at his funeral – alongside other old stalwarts like Eric Clapton and Glyn Johns – held down in Surrey just before Christmas 1985, and the photographs taken that day of them crying and holding on to one another with dazed and frightened expressions on their faces are among the most haunting Stones shots that exist anywhere.
Anyway, just as Dirty Work was being released at the beginning of 1986, Jagger told Richards he didn’t want to tour with the Stones to support the record and that effectively broke up the group for almost the next three years. I’d ended up being the bearer of the bad tidings after I’d spotted Charlie in the street next to the group’s West End office and he’d hazily told me as much. (’Touring with the Stones again? I can’t imagine it,’ he’d muttered with a weary old look straining down on his face. ‘I always have this image of me when playing with the Stones and there are all these sixteen-year-old girls in the front screaming at us. I mean, my daughter’s actually older than them now! I just find it all rather embarrassing!’) I put all the dirt in too, and the consequent article – published in Spin that spring – scarcely endeared me to the group’s principals and their organization. To me, the issue was simple: the Rolling Stones were falling apart and someone needed to tell the public what was going on, even though I knew that whoever did it was bound to be excommunicated from the inner sanctum for his efforts.
But then Jagger’s career really flopped with the release of his second useless solo album and his girlfriend Jerry Hall left him for the umpteenth time over the compulsive philandering he’d become hopelessly addicted to as he grew older, even going so far as to refer to him as ‘that wizened old man’ in public places. What it all added up to was that after an eternity of being always the winner in everything he attempted, the singer suddenly felt the cruel sting of being perceived as a loser and he didn’t like it one bit. Worse still, there was his son of a bitch nemesis Keith Richards slagging him all over the popular press, calling him an ‘ageing victim of a Peter Pan complex’, ‘a wimp’, a ‘back-stabbing cunt’ and all-purpose betrayer of the primal essence that was the Rolling Stones. In fact, this was the way Keith chose to promote his début solo album, a pleasant collection of chunky jams with two or three meaty songs thrown in for added sustenance entitled Talk is Cheap that garnered respectful reviews but limited sales. Meanwhile, from all corners of the globe, offers were pouring in to get the group back together with sums like ioo million dollars being thrown around as the kind of revenue to anticipate. Of course, they finally swallowed their pride and embraced anew in 1989, banging out a reasonable album in the process which Jagger entitled Steel Wheels and then off they went on a financial megablitz of a tour that broke all established box-office records all across America.
Of course, I went when the tour hit Paris even though I’d been warned about Jagger’s theatrical bullshit and the pre-recorded samples littering certain items. I was expecting the worst anyway and so was consequently truly taken aback by the force and focus with which they played and the sheer magnificence and unstoppable vitality of Mick Jagger’s work as a front man and vocalist. Sure, the show was aimed to placate both the tourists and the purists who’d gathered in this 70,000 capacity outdoor swamp to ogle at the hardy old legends, but to anyone who’d seen them play live from the very beginning there was no doubting that they’d ascended to a new peak of musical interplay, dynamism and non-stop visual magnetism.
Later, in a nearby bar, a couple of French journalists came over and started commiserating about how soulless it had been and the next minute they were evoking the memory of Brian Jones . . . I had to tell them to disappear! The Stones had been great, goddammit, and to hell with all the clod-headed nostalgianiks who couldn’t see through their own blind reverence for the cherished past of their now-departed youth.
I guess I should take this particular opportunity to temper all the less than joyous reminiscenses I’ve been spinning out here and tell you about the good things I experienced from getting so close to the Rolling Stones. Because when I actually stop to think about it now, I realize I learnt so much from being around them and that they influenced my life in so many ways, some good, some less good. If there has been one constant message coursing through the group’s music from the beginning right up to the present day, it’s been that the world is a strange and ruthless place and that if you want to make a mark on it in your own terms without getting martyred, robbed blind or endlessly stabbed in the back, you’ve got to be even more ruthless in your own dealings. So if touring with Led Zeppelin was like travelling around with Ghengis Khan and his boys on a particularly lurid rampage of some foreign dominion, and working with the Sex Pistols was like blending into some late-twentieth-century update of Charles Dickens’s portrayal of Fagin, the Artful Dodger and that wretched den of teenaged thieves out of the pages of Oliver Twist, then being around the Stones was rather like finding yourself in the company of something like a cross between a stuffy old English gentlemen’s club and the Mafia. Little was stated outright, most things were only intimated and if you didn’t read the signs or got too sloppy – or worse still, too uncool – you were treated like you simply didn’t exist. But if you could stay on the wild kicking horse long enough to assimilate all the tumultuous ups and downs, you were off on the best and baddest ride of an adventure you could ever hope to handle. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.