Chapter Fourteen
The most surprising release of 1970 was The Madcap Laughs. The first solo album by ultimate pop recluse Syd Barrett had been several years in the making, not least because the erratic former Pink Floyd frontman had submitted to psychiatric care. He performed his one and only solo gig that June, but dropped his guitar and stomped off stage after only four numbers. His departure two years earlier from the band beloved of all rock stars was, commented the Guardian, ‘on a par with, say, Mick Jagger leaving the Rolling Stones in 1964 to live quietly with his parents.’ The frontman had now become a yardstick by which other rock stars were judged.
Also that year, Led Zeppelin performed, incongruously, at London’s Royal Albert Hall. Diana Ross dumped her Supremes. Black Sabbath presented both their first and second albums in the same year, the latter the indelible Paranoid. Simon and Garfunkel released Bridge Over Troubled Water, the multi-Grammy Award-winning album that would become Britain’s biggest seller of the decade. The Who recorded their outstanding Live at Leeds album and performed Tommy at the New York Met. David Bowie married his Angie, Mike Nesmith quit his Monkees, and the Isle of Wight Festival drew Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Leonard Cohen, Joan Baez, Jethro Tull, ELP and close to 700,000 fans, the largest rockfest of all. Within weeks, Hendrix was dead, and so was Janis Joplin. Neither tragedy came close to the cataclysm caused by the Stones’ oldest rivals calling it a day. Paul McCartney threw the world into meltdown with his dissolution of the Beatles via a Q&A press release on 10 April. Lennon fumed at the snatching of his thunder, having informed the others months earlier that he was quitting. Paul presented his eponymous first solo album, the one with the cherries on the sleeve that he had recorded at home in secret. The former Beatles offered their going-away gift, Let It Be.1 ‘The Long and Winding Road’ became their last US No. 1 hit. The single was not released in Blighty.
Mick and the boys rolled on frantically as if terrified to stop, in case the same fate befell them. Not that life within the band was exactly harmonious. Bill Wyman was no longer talking to Keith. Theirs was a frost that would not thaw for the next ten years. Keith’s desperate heroin addiction had come between them. Dropping pennies caused fury and grief so deep in Bill that he simply could not bring himself to get over it. His good friend Brian had been ousted not only for spurious ‘visa issues’ but also for a ‘drug problem’ that Bill considered mild compared to Keith’s mounting excesses. Those things had been excuses, it occurred to Wyman now. Having been somewhat in denial about the fact that Mick and Keith had hounded Brian out of his own band, he reached a point at which he could no longer ignore the unpalatable truth. Had they treated him with more kindness and compassion, and had matters been resolved in a more civilised way, Bill realised, Brian might well still be alive.
By the time the Lennons were on their way to spend the rest of John’s life in New York, chasing the abductor of the daughter they would never get back, the Stones were in tax exile. Despite vast sums having swelled coffers during their biggest and best tour to date, catastrophic miscalculations had left them wanting. Their outgoings had exceeded their income. I mean, imagine a rock band doing that. The upshot being that they were unable to cover their colossal tax bill. Interest on their liability to H.M. Revenue had been accruing steadily over the past eight years. When he discovered this, Mick was stumped. He had believed that their affairs were in order and that their returns were up to date. The highest rate of income tax at that point was 83 per cent.2 The band had no choice but to get out sharpish. Leaving the rest of the band to weigh up the implications and practicalities of this, Mick started genning up on tax havens. They wound up with a business address on Sark, a tiny isle in the Channel Islands off the coast of Normandy.
Their European outing during the summer and autumn of 1970 was give or take a continuation of the previous year. Beset by riots, notably in Hamburg, West Berlin and Milan, it proceeded from Malmö, Sweden to Amsterdam in the Netherlands via Finland, Denmark, West Germany, France, Austria and Italy. Europe and the world now regarded them as rich-as-fuck, do-as-they-please rock superstars, unaware that they were facing financial ruin. The band wrapped the tour and relocated to the South of France. Not the most affordable destination, you might think, especially during a period when that country’s cost of living had gone Tour Eiffel. Still, it was comfortably close to home. Off they went. Oh, and by the way, goodbye Decca. Their leader was on the lookout for a brand-new record company to distribute the output of their brand-new label, Rolling Stones Records.
At twenty-seven, Jagger was no contender for the grim ‘club’ then claiming the lives of fellow high-profile rockers. He was happy in the land of the living, thanks. A highly controlled as well as controlling individual, he dabbled in his share of drugs and booze but would never have let addiction get the better of him. He was a man in charge of his destiny, accustomed to the good life, to calling the shots, and to a band and entourage who deferred to him and did as they were told. When he said he could not imagine himself as a rock star past the age of thirty, he meant it. Not that he hoped he’d die before he got old. Mick was in the business of preparing for rock retirement. He invested his money astutely and stayed in front of the game. To add to his property portfolio ahead of the Stones’ relocation – he would not offload for a few more years his 48 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea residence, acquired in 1968 for fifty grand – he paid another £55,000 for Stargroves: a Victorian Gothic stately home with a landscaped park in East Woodhay, Hampshire.3 Before long, the Stones’ mobile recording studio had trundled into the vast park and plugged in. There, they recorded tracks that would feature on Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main St. and It’s Only Rock ’n Roll, before they departed for France. Other artists took advantage of the facility too, including the Who, Led Zeppelin, Status Quo, Deep Purple, Iron Maiden and Bob Marley.
When he first landed in France, Mick established himself in a Paris hotel while he went on the hunt for a suitable château. The one he rented eventually, in Saint-Tropez, would not be welcoming Marianne as its mistress any time soon. Now that she was living in Italy with Mick’s replacement, Jagger had dismissed her and moved on. Or had he? He had last seen her in December 1969, when they were both obliged to attend court for their cannabis possession hearing. Marianne was acquitted while Mick was found guilty of possession and handed a £200 fine. He was also banned from travelling to the United States for eighteen months, which both clipped his wings and put him in a hypocritical position. Hadn’t the band fired Brian for his ‘visa issues’ the previous year? Was the band going to fire Mick for the same offence? Hardly.
Marianne, her four-year-old son Nicholas and her new partner Mario Schifano travelled to Berkshire after the hearing, to spend Christmas at the cottage Mick had bought for her mother. Here we are again. On Christmas night came the inevitable knock at the door. Marianne answered it to find Mick standing there with her present, an engraved solid silver box containing cocaine. Just what the desperate drug addict had always wanted. Still, it appears that she was gratitude personified. She welcomed Mick into her bed that night, while poor old Mario was relegated to the sofa with a blanket, and sloped off back to Italy the next day. But it did not turn out to be the happily-ever-after Christmas that Marianne might have craved. Mick left too, to spend what was left of Yuletide with Keith and Anita. He didn’t really want Marianne. He just couldn’t stand the idea of anybody else having her. The classic, exasperating, territorial male, Mick enjoyed Marianne’s obvious devotion for the simple reason that it boosted his ego. Having seen her again, albeit in court, he’d found that he hadn’t yet broken the habit. But he had other habits too, namely the one called keeping his options open. This is where it gets all musical beds.
Marsha Hunt, who had been staying at 48 Cheyne Walk, perceived that Mick was still in love, if only a bit, with Marianne. Marsha moved out of Cheyne Walk and into her own St John’s Wood flat. Marianne moved back into Cheyne Walk. Mick spent half his time at Marsha’s. He took her to dinner one night, told her he loved her and that he wanted to have a child with her. What on earth was scrambling his mind when he said those things? Were they mere romantic nothings, sipped from the second bottle and cooed into the candlelight, which he never in a million expected her to take him up on? How could he sit there muttering about big, adult, responsible things when he was happily footloose, relishing his way through the pick of the pick’n’mix chicks? But Marsha took him at his word. It was what led her to abandon her contraception, while Mick was doing a Judas on Marianne.
Marianne overheard Mick’s conversation with Ahmet Ertegun in the house one day, during which the boss of Atlantic Records agreed to slap $30 million on the table, provided that Mick agreed to offload Marianne. The drug-addled creature had become a liability, Ahmet pointed out, and was likely to bring his label into disrepute. It was too risky.
What Mick should have done, out of respect for all that they had meant to each other, was refuse to barter and tell Ertegun straight that his private life was not subject to any Stones contract. He should then have set about getting Marianne the medical help she needed, and have helped her on the road to recovery. Hearing her lover accept money in return for dumping her was a slap in the face with a whale. No, she would not allow treacherous Mick this final humiliation of her. She packed and fled. Leaving Mick not exactly heartbroken.
He was soon out jaunting with Patti D’Arbanville, getting it on with Pamela Miller,4 dilly-dallying on the way with Carly Simon.5 With whom the world was in love, at that point, and what a beautiful couple they made. Rumours about her signature song, written in 1971 and released the following year, persist to this day. Was ‘You’re So Vain’ really about Mick? In 1983, Carly flatly denied it. She did not deny, however, that Jagger had recorded its backing vocal. She hardly could, I suppose, as that’s obviously Mick. Even though he went uncredited for his contribution.
While Marsha was preparing to give birth to Mick’s firstborn, Karis, in St Mary’s Hospital Paddington – not in the private, exclusive Lindo Wing but on a standard NHS ward – Mick was obsessing over an exotic young woman he had met at the band’s after-show party at the Georges Cinq Hotel on 22 September, following their gig at the Paris Olympia. The curious thing was, he recognised her. Wouldn’t that be because he had seen her staring back at him from the mirror for the past twenty-eight years? Her sulky eyes, sculpted philtrum and pendulous underlip could have been his own. Which is what Marianne meant when she remarked that Mick had fallen in love with himself. He would do more than that. He would take her as his lawfully wedded wife. As an acknowledgement of his own narcissism, subconscious or not, it was priceless.
By the time Mick tied the knot with Bianca Pérez-Mora Macías on 12 May 1971, the Stones had completed a spring ‘Farewell Tour’ of England and Scotland, he had told Marsha he’d never loved her, had threatened to sue her for custody of Karis, had been threatened in return that she would ‘blow his brains out if he dared’ and was expecting another child with his new bride. The former actress had changed the L in her name to an I, incidentally, when she was sixteen. She told Mick that she was twenty-one, though she was actually five years older. How desperate does that seem, lying about one’s age in one’s twenties? Bianca must have been aware of Mick’s penchant for tender youth, and feared that he might go off the boil if he knew the truth: that she was only twenty-one months younger than him. Perhaps she was even aware of ‘Stray Cat Blues’, the prurient celebration of under-age sex that Mick co-wrote for Beggars Banquet, featuring the line ‘It’s no hanging matter, it’s no capital crime’.
She hailed from a broken home in Nicaragua, a country under rigid dictatorship, where she had witnessed a student massacre and mass discrimination. Pledging to spend her life making a difference, she sought a scholarship to further her ambitions and was accepted at the Paris Institute of Political Studies. Earlier boyfriends during her years there included screen actor Michael Caine and French musician, producer and record label boss Eddie Barclay. She was still involved with the latter, who was almost a quarter of a century her senior, when she locked eyes with Mick across a crowded and noisy but vacant and silent room. The throng parted like the waters of the Red Sea. Having perceived in a heartbeat that this was no one-night stand and that he had better be on his best behaviour and put the work in with this one, Jagger was hooked.
Mick thought he was the one doing the running. In fact, Bianca was reeling him in. He whisked her away to the Bahamas, locked a weighty diamond bracelet around her hummingbird wrist and denied to everyone who asked that they were an item. Game on. Their civil and Roman Catholic nuptials on the French Riviera, at Saint-Tropez Town Hall and the tiny seventeenth-century church La Chapelle Sainte-Anne in Ramatuelle, and at the Brasserie des Arts for afters, were drooled over in thousands of column inches as ‘the wedding of the year’. In reality, it was a bun fight. Having been invited only the day before, the family-and-friends package tour who rocked up to witness it and partake of the knees-up – which included Beatles, Brigitte Bardot, Julie Christie, Keith Moon and the Queen’s cousin Patrick, Lord Lichfield, but no Stones other than Mick’s best man Keith (what was that about?) – put their best shoes forward. Not only did the world’s media rush in for the scrum, but most of the locals too. French law decreed that the public could not be excluded from proceedings. Aprons and braces all round. The bride wore Yves Saint Laurent: tuxedo jacket with nothing underneath, a bias-cut skirt and a veiled, wide-brimmed hat. Rewriting the rules of bridal chic, her look has never been outclassed.
A good time was had by some, if not by Bianca. But you have to ask. What did this fine, worthy woman with altruistic ambitions that she would one day achieve see in the multimillionaire rock superstar, who was out of his hemispheres on cocaine on his wedding day? What kind of life did he imagine, in turn, with her? Had he convinced himself that her beauty, dignity and gravitas would take him up a notch? While Mick rather fancied himself as Renaissance Man and could play the culture vulture with the best of them, it was impossible to picture Bianca getting down and dirty in the studio after midnight with Keith and his cohorts, loosening her girdle, passing the spliffs and knocking back the moonshine straight from the bottle. These were impossibly colliding worlds and inclinations. Bianca was as unlikely to nip out on the totter with smacked-up, capsizing Anita as Mick was to join his wife’s professors for a lecture on political oppression. Imagine his soignée missis out on the road with the Stones: goldfish out of bowl doesn’t begin.
Don’t tell me she hadn’t intuited this. Rock stars are not that hard to read. They are for the most part unreconstructed, especially those who like to kid us earnestly otherwise. Spend enough time around them and their primary motives become clear. They crave a mother they can have sex with; a soulmate to praise and approve of them; an indulgent partner willing to turn a blind eye to their peccadilloes, bandage their bloody knees, pick up after them and be waiting whenever they call – not necessarily attired in designer silk lingerie and hot to trot, with a casserole under one arm and a rosy-cheeked child under the other, but you get it. Jerry Hall’s mother set back the cause by centuries when she taught her exquisite daughter the secret of keeping a man: by being ‘a maid in the living room, a cook in the kitchen and a whore in the bedroom’. Right. And the intransigent rocker is the last type of male to grow out of such nonsense. Ain’t gonna happen. Because rock stars treat their women the way they treat their cars. It’s just a crate, right? Goes rusty. Bits drop off. There’ll be a new model out next year. More gears, more gadgets, whole lotta tread in her tyres, know what I’m sayin’? Simplest thing in the world to trade her in.
‘Mick married Bianca because he needed his Wendy,’ comments consultant psychotherapist Richard Hughes, ‘and he gave himself a wife he thought reflected the man he now was. Because who is Mick other than Peter Pan, with Keith, Charlie and Bill as his tribe, his Lost Boys? He’s on this endless quest for a Wendy – in other words, his mum. All those bimbos were the Tinkerbells. He’d had all the groupies and he’d had the most beautiful women in the world, but had found fulfilment with none of them. He sensed that he had to couple, in order to survive – not that he would have had any intention of staying faithful. So he winds up marrying himself: Bianca. He then proceeds to disown all the aspects of her that he cannot tolerate or accept about himself.
‘From her point of view, it was a good move. She really came into her own during that marriage, and succeeded in making a worthwhile life beyond it. But the public never warmed to her. They perceived her as frosty and tricky. Looking back, Mick did nothing to ease her passage into public life, did he. Partly because he both envied her and was jealous of her. Partly because once he had what he wanted, he lost interest. She gave birth to their baby Jade, who became his jewel and usurped her mother, and that was that. He was back out there on the prowl, she knew what he was up to, her contempt for him grew and grew. Not only was Bianca never right for him, but he was never right for Bianca. Only Jerry Hall was perfect for Mick. She was the one who got away. He will probably regret losing her, though of course he would never admit it, until his dying day. No way back there.’
But it’s still about him. The woman who won’t get down to his level stands no chance. The most perfect rock star women, incidentally, were Linda McCartney and Yoko Ono. Having identified the gap in the market, sized up the weaknesses of their intended and worked out what he was short of, they focused on fulfilling his every need and making themselves indispensable, knowing that it’s via giving that we receive. Bianca Jagger was never that kind of woman. She expected equality. She had her own agenda, her own objectives to fulfil. While she may or may not have uttered the immortal words attributed to her, ‘My marriage ended on my wedding day,’ they encapsulate why their union was doomed. They gave it seven years. Nice try.
We have only to compare the refined lifestyle that Mick was now living with the underworld Keith had conjured for himself to comprehend the gulf between the Dartford boys at this juncture.
Here we are in Villefranche-sur-Mer on the glistening Côte d’Azur. Just west of the border with Italy and only ten minutes in a Maserati from Monaco, this little paradise basks in its reputation as one of the five most beautiful bays in the world. Shouldered by Cap de Nice and Cap Ferrat, its mediaeval Old Town spills off the hill into a perfect horseshoe cove. The views over pastel buildings looking out to sea are like paintings. Hollywood location scouts seeking ‘traditional French fishing villages’ would miss a trick if they failed to find this one. Perched at a table on the market square sipping a glass of Jas d’Esclans Côtes de Provence while watching the fishermen flog their catch, who could wish to be anywhere else? Whiling away the day, inhaling potent aromas of garlic, orange and freshly baked loaves, seeking refuge in quaint covered streets, lingering out of the noonday sun in the sixteenth-century Chapelle Saint-Pierre, once used by the locals to store fishing nets and restored during the fifties with murals by poet and artist Jean Cocteau, it is a place of dreams. Kick along the Plage des Marinières after lunch and down to La Darse for an aperitif before dinner. It doesn’t get better.
It’s not hard to imagine what they made of him, the rank mainlining rocker gurning through sunburnt lips, flashing his mouldering incisors and his narcotised cronies, who crowed like roosters as they tore around town in Keith’s red convertible Jag; terrorising widows out of their black support hose each time they took the boat out for a spin; cutting through the waves like boy racers, reckless fifth-form bullies flipping the kids over the side for laughs. He was a fish out of water in this place. He hadn’t wanted to come here. He loved it.
‘Keith’s place’ housed the infamous dungeon of debauchery and disgrace that has become synonymous with the album that was recorded there. You can’t see it from the road, and you couldn’t get into it if you tried. Snapped up by a Russian oligarch for €100 million in 2005, the Villa Nellcôte, a sixteen-room Belle Epoque mansion on the Avenue Louise Bordes, is these days strictly out of bounds. From April 1971 until October 1973, Keith rented this gaff with its own private beach for a grand a week. He made space for the Stones’ £65,000 mobile recording studio on the drive, installed himself, producer Jimmy Miller and assorted musicians in its dank, multi-roomed basement and set about recording their most fabled, some say most overrated work, Exile on Main St.
Reports imply that he and his family – Anita and Marlon – were there for much longer than they were. Which is all part of the mythology. An untimely gendarme intrusion caused them to beat a hasty retreat at the end of August, only months after they had arrived. The French government ordered Keith to honour his rental agreement, so he had to keep coughing up long after he moved out. But he could never go back there. On 15 October he was found guilty by the court in Nice of trafficking cannabis. He earned a one-year suspended prison sentence, a 5,000 franc fine and was banned from entering France for the next two years. Despite which, Villa Nellcôte inhabits rock history as a legendary Stones location. It has drawn fans from all corners to catch a glimpse of it from the sea, and to wallow in their imaginations in all that went on there. Some even quiz the locals as to what became of Keith’s speedboat, Mandrax. Like everything else that happened half a century ago, that little craft is now less than a memory.
Mischievous Keith, evidently brimming with joie de vivre and whatever else he was ingesting, gave oxygen to a rumour that the house had been the headquarters of the Gestapo during the Nazi occupation of France in World War II. The floor vents in the basement were covered in gold swastikas. Honest, guv. It wasn’t true. No Germans resided in the vicinity for long enough. Nazi occupation commenced only after Benito Mussolini’s forces withdrew, meaning that the tenure of the Germans in the South of France was fleeting. The Gestapo HQ was established in Nice, not in Villefranche. Maybe the rumour began because the villa came with its own German housekeeper, ironically named Elizabeth. As you were.
As for the album. Said guitarist Mick Taylor of Exile on Main St. ‘It’s got a raw sound quality, and the reason for that is that the basement was very dingy and very damp. The roof leaked, and there were power failures. We had to deal with all that, and go with the flow.’
Quelle flow. Of drug dealers, itinerant musos, exotic acquaintances, family members and hangers-on by the limo-load; Joe Cocker, John and Yoko (who floated around naked), Eric Clapton, Alain Delon, Catherine Deneuve, folk from the record industry, their kids, their mistresses, anybody’s dogs, and a steady zipping in and out of journalists and groupies. Upwards of twenty round the table most days, most nights, most mornings. Who knew what time it was? Follow the sun. Most of those present were on liquor diets, too. Losing days.
But recording was no pique-nique. Marshall Chess, boss of Rolling Stones Records, remembered that Jagger was vexed. Exile was regarded as ‘Keith’s album’, because it was being made in his domain. Keith was now a junkie. Mick was not. If there was still common ground between them, neither of them could put their finger on it. Mick was also irked that his old mucker was getting far too close to his guest Gram Parsons,6 the American singer-songwriter and friend of the band who arrived with his new wife Gretchen Burrell7 at Keith’s invitation, and instantly became his fellow guitarist’s abettor. Because Parsons was out of it all the time and fighting constantly with his bird, who was also throwing her weight around, pissing off Anita, who ejected them. Keith later blamed Jagger for Gram’s departure, adding weight to Chess’s theory that Mick was jealous of all the time he and Gram spent plucking together. Fans have speculated since its release that Parsons features on Exile. Keith concedes that he is probably one of the singers on the track ‘Sweet Virginia’, although there is no proof. Others insist that his influence can clearly be discerned throughout. Maybe. Anyway, things got arctic after that, and goodbye kisses were blown. Gram’s efforts to re-befriend the band during their 1972 US tour were rejected. He fell into a deep depression from which he never recovered. The coffin that went up in flames at the ghostly Joshua Tree National Park in southern California the following year had Gram in it.
Nellcôte was not, despite the chandeliers, gilded chaises and polished-to-perfection parquet, what you could call an elegant environment. Mrs Jagger, always perfectly dressed, coiffed and made-up, and who was also with child, visited only when she had to and kept her distance while she was there. Tiptoeing through toddler excrement to get to the bathroom, the Richardses having neglected to potty-train little Marlon and letting him doo wherever he would, must have sent her gagging. These were not Bianca’s people. They were in Paris. She sat it out among friends, awaiting her baby’s October birth.
And bad stuff happened. Not only busts but outlaws, shady Corsicans, chancers, fly-by-nights, burglaries. Keith was relieved of a dozen guitars, some of which were irreplaceable. He never got them back. A chef was rumoured to have gone berserk when he discovered that Anita had apparently injected his daughter with heroin. But American journalist Robert Greenfield, who stayed briefly at Nellcôte and wrote a book about his experiences named after the album recorded there and sub-titled ‘A Season in Hell with the Rolling Stones’, discounts the rumour. He states that the employee was trying to blackmail Anita, and that he did not even have a daughter. The chef was replaced by a twenty-three-year-old cook, Gérard Mosiniak, whom I interviewed in 1983 for society and celebrity magazine Ritz.
‘It was sex, drugs and rock’n’roll all the way at Nellcôte,’ Mosiniak told me. ‘Everything they say is true. I wondered at first whether it was Hades I had walked into. Anita interviewed me, I went to see Keith, he asked me if I wanted the job and they hired me. I had no experience of this kind of work, and no idea what to expect. They would go down into the caves (cellars) at about eleven at night and stay down in the sweaty hellhole until five in the morning. They wanted food during the night, and I never knew until they called for it how many I was cooking for. Mostly they slept through the mornings. Some of them went to the beach. But the days were slow. I had to go to the market to get food to prepare. I couldn’t drive in those days, so Keith’s chauffeur would take me in his Bentley or in the Jaguar.
‘The food Keith wanted wasn’t challenging. It was home cooking. Wholesome food, as made by Maman. He liked roast dinners, pies, barbecues. Mostly meat, nothing “too foreign”. There would be a big evening meal, around the time the little children needed to eat; there were always several running around. Those dinners could sometimes go on and on. There was a lot of drugs, and strange types turning up to deliver them, who sometimes stayed on to join in. Keith and Anita and a number of those who came and went were on heroin. I never tried it myself, although I was offered. There was no sense that they were risking their lives, or that it was anything all that bad.’
Rosie Bell was also at Nellcôte, with her then partner Mick Taylor and their child. ‘I was twenty-four. I moved to the South of France with a six-week-old baby, our daughter Chloe, which was not a happy thing to do,’ she said in 2017. The former Rose Millar Taylor was once a drop-dead gorgeous wild child who had been expelled from her smart London school, St Paul’s, and who had previously been the girlfriend of Muddy Waters and Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac.
‘I missed my mother and the sort of support I was getting. I had a succession of nannies, English ones, who just wanted to sleep with the Rolling Stones. They were always a problem. And then we had a wonderful French girl. She just walked around everywhere in a bikini with a Gitanes, the baby under her arm, a beer, a fantastic French book in her hand, and she wasn’t the least bit impressed with anyone. Anne-Marie. She was great. We kept her for years.’
But there was ‘too much hanging around’, Rosie said. She and Taylor would turn up for a recording session but either Jagger or Richards or both would not be there: ‘Mick would have gone to Paris, and Keith was not available because the train hadn’t arrived from Marseille. Mick (Taylor) was unhappy and depressed having to wait around all the time in order to play. I thought they were crazy, basically. I still think they are. But I loved the music.’ Just not the other stuff. Were the epic drug-taking and orgies for real?
‘Yes, they certainly were. There were guys who were procuring women from here, there and everywhere and bringing them along. Yes, it was dealers and groupies and hangers-on as well as some lovely people. Gram Parsons was there, a lovely musician, and some other famous people like John Lennon, falling down the stairs, and it was mad.
‘We were there for the sessions in the basement, which was a very strange and a very odd environment. There was no air conditioning. You’d have Bobby Keys, the saxophonist, in the toilet, and Mick in some other funny little room, all in the basement which was simply, acoustically not the place. An absolute nightmare in the summer in the South of France. Everyone was really uncomfortable down there. It was amazing anyone got any music done at all, really. I think it was very creative. I think Mick played very well, but I am hopelessly biased, though a lot of people say he added a lot to the music. With him it became more than just thrash rock, and I think he is quite proud of his contribution, although he’d like a few more credits.’
An encounter that Rose would forever wince to recall involved one Mick too many. It may have been the real reason behind her Mick quitting the Stones abruptly in December 1974.
‘Years ago, I went to a party given by Robin Millar, who was producing the singer Sade,’ recalled lawyer Paul Levett. Millar, a CBE and one of the most successful record producers in the world, was born with a condition that led to him losing his sight when he was thirty-five. In addition to Sade, he produced the Style Council, Randy Crawford, the Christians and Fine Young Cannibals. He was seventeen when his elder sister Rose married Mick Taylor, and spent his teens hanging out with the Stones.
‘Apart from Robin, I didn’t know many people at the party,’ said Levett, ‘and I spent the evening sitting quietly talking to Rose, who was lovely. She told me that she found her husband Mick Taylor in bed with Mick Jagger. This got out years ago, and has been gossiped about ever since. It tends to be dismissed as a vicious rumour. But why would she say such a thing to me if she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes, and if it were not true?’
Some insist that Taylor quit the Stones after Jagger allegedly seduced him. He was addicted to heroin at the time; an easy target, young and vulnerable. We know that Jagger was predatory, and of his omnisexuality, at least in his younger days. It is said that Taylor was so shocked by what he’d done, he turned around and married Rose in 1975 when their relationship was already on the slide. The marriage failed, predictably. He fathered another daughter by an American woman who had sung backing vocals for his own band. He tried marriage a second time, but failed again. He went off the rails, became virtually destitute, and sadly lost contact with his daughters.
‘People are always asking me whether I regret leaving the Stones,’ he said in September 2009. He was living in near squalor in a Suffolk semi, and working on and off as a pub musician. ‘I make no bones about it – had I remained with the band, I would probably be dead. I was having difficulties with drug addiction, and couldn’t have lasted. But I’m clean now, and have been for years.’
In 1982, taking advantage of a loophole in his contract, Taylor revealed, the Stones suddenly cut off his royalties for the six of their albums to which he had contributed.
‘I should have got a lawyer. Instead, I called them rude words and asked how they could just stop paying me. They all know it’s not right. In fact, it is outrageous. I’ve tried to talk to Mick a couple of times, but I realise that hiring a lawyer is probably the only way they’ll take me seriously. But they figure I’m not going to do anything about it.’