Chapter Nineteen

Resonance

In the dwindling days, there is restlessness. The fear that it has all been for nothing. Dismay at the dawning that what lies ahead could be void. It keeps them awake at night, when sleep is all they crave. It causes them to slumber during precious daylight hours, when there are not so many of those left. Though we all fear death, many make their peace with it via faith or other means. For all of us, but especially for those who have lived exceptional and privileged lives, who have ‘been someone’, who have gone everywhere and done everything they never set out to do, the thought of no longer existing is unbearable.

‘It’s the reason why the Stones keep doing it,’ says rock manager, songwriter and film-maker Simon Napier-Bell, who made stars of the Yardbirds, Marc Bolan, Wham! and George Michael as a solo artist. ‘It’s the reason why we all do it: because nobody likes to die. So that we don’t have to face the inevitable. It’s no use sitting around worrying about how long you’ve got left. You do the thing that you do to stay alive. Because they need to feel relevant, they can’t just give up. It’s worse for superstars like the Stones, worshipped by millions all over the world and richer than they could ever have imagined when they were spotty young oiks. The hardest thing they have to swallow is that they are so powerful they practically own countries, they can buy absolutely anything they want, but they can’t buy their own immortality. The moment they realise this, when the end is nigh, it all begins to feel pointless. Yet they can’t stop, retreat, go into hiding and be just like any ordinary old person.

‘If being a rock’n’roll star is what you do in your life, you do it forever. They have to keep on, fighting back time, getting the steroid injections and the vitamin shots, being who they are and doing what they do until the last. Why keep recording and performing when they don’t need the money, when they could easily sit back and enjoy an easy life pottering in the shed and playing with their grandchildren? Because they wouldn’t enjoy it. It would be anathema to them. The last thing any star wants to be is a has-been, a whatever-happened-to? So they keep on, hoping for the best that it lasts as long as possible. It’s what I’m doing.

‘Mick is no fool. He’s quite interesting. He was also very honest when he gave Lord Weidenfeld back his million-pound publishing advance in the early eighties, because he found he didn’t want to write his autobiography. “I lived it,” he told me. “I didn’t want to go through it all again. When I started to think about everything, it made me very unhappy. Some people seem to get off on living the past, but it wasn’t for me. I prefer to look forward, not back.”’

The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.¹ The way we remember it is not how it was. The memories we carry are obscure and untrustworthy. Our true stories avoid us, as if they can’t abide having been that dull. They rewrite themselves, embellishing wildly, trying to convince us of alternative versions and parallel universes. The past being anathema to the Stones, especially to Mick, the last thing they want to hear is that their songs are the soundtrack of it. They would rather we didn’t go dredging it up, either, because it reminds them of something uncomfortable: that their claim to fame, and to some extent their legacy, is as much about their personal lives as about their music. You can see why. Who in history, with the exception perhaps of King Henry VIII, ever wove a more festering, noxious tapestry of betrayal, infidelity, abuse, neglect, addiction, criminality and destruction? You couldn’t make it up. Nor did they. The phrase ‘sex, drugs and rock’n’roll’ in this context is almost cartoon.

But it’s not all bad. At least the Stones will not go down in history as ‘mythomaniacs’, the stinging term coined by travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux to describe U2’s Bono, actors Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and the rest who are, in his eyes, ‘people who wish to convince the world of their worth’; which they do primarily by interfering in the social politics of other countries, notably African ones. Nor could they be denounced as ‘ego-warriors’, having never been into activism, give or take the odd fundraiser. They do not flaunt beliefs, nor dabble in politics. They readily declared themselves tax exiles rather than continue to live in and support the Treasury of the mother country whose NHS saw them into the world, and whose education system schooled them. The curiosity of Jagger’s knighthood for services to popular music in Her Majesty’s 2002 Birthday Honours is not that he accepted it (he had long craved that gong), but because he had turned his back on the land of his birth.

‘The Rolling Stones are actually a number of businesses: touring, recording, publishing, sponsorship, synch and so on,’ reported the Guardian in 2014. ‘As Fortune magazine explained in 2002, these businesses are headed by a partnership of the core members of the band. To feed into that, they created separate companies to handle each aspect of the business – Promopub, Promotone, Promotour and Musidor – which were based in the Netherlands for tax reasons.’

Nor is it just the Stones’ companies that depend on tax efficiency. ‘The whole business thing is predicated a lot on the tax laws,’ Keith himself informed Fortune. ‘It’s why we rehearse in Canada and not in the US. A lot of our astute moves have been basically keeping up with tax laws, where to go, where not to put it. Whether to sit on it or not. We left England because we’d be paying ninety-eight cents on the dollar. We left, and they lost out. No taxes at all. I don’t want to screw anybody out of anything, least of all the governments that I work with. We put 30 per cent in holding until we sort it out.’

And they do whatever it takes to stay ahead. They headline the Isle of Wight in June 2007, at the invitation of John Giddings, my pal of forty years who owns the show. This is their first festival fixture for more than three decades, the kind of thing that calls for the Red Arrows. ‘Start Me Up’ brings them kicking like kung fu fighters: kohl-eyed Keith in lurex pinstripe, Ronnie in floral black leather, requisite fag dripping from his gob. Mick’s in red satin and Charlie sports a clean white tee. Full brass, keys and BVs are all revved. Phenomenal sound, superlative energy, and nobody’s chanting ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’. Mick’s taking us places we’ve barely been and can hardly imagine, fang queue very m-u-u-u-ch. ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ generates mass woo-woos and returns Jagger in a red sequinned tailcoat. ‘Ain’t Too Proud to Beg’ brings Amy Winehouse, tippy-toe tiny in satin ballet slippers, hair as high as herself. She smiles broadly, exposing the gaps in her teeth. She flirts with the old man, all attitude and beehive, out-grooving Mick and giving him a run for it. She is sensational.

If she knew then what we would all too soon be grieving, that she had only four years left to live. Amy was found dead in her London flat in July 2011, poisoned by alcohol. The Stones kept rolling. There was a lesson there somewhere. If only we could work out what it was.

Six years later they make their Glastonbury debut, on the world-famous Pyramid Stage. Prince Harry is there too, somewhere in the crowd. Imagine that, now. Mick makes out that the band have been sitting around for years, awaiting the call from Michael Eavis. It wasn’t quite like that. The festival organiser has been pleading with them for decades. They weren’t available or didn’t respond. What happened? The Stones’ fiftieth anniversary happened, in 2012. It must have thrown the remainder into sharp focus. As if galvanised by the realisation that time really is running out on them, they give what they’ve got. As one observer puts it, ‘Keith seems to be running out of steam but Ronnie’s picking up: I’d call that a positive outcome.’ Mick teases with a silly song called ‘Glastonbury Girl’, which he tells us he penned last night. Forget that, though, because Mick Taylor’s back. You heard. Have the old feuds been forgotten, or is there acrimony yet to come? Not tonight there isn’t.

An orchestra of guitarists rearrange themselves on stage, Taylor posing alongside Ronnie, his replacement. If the delivery at first sounds hesitant, it’s because it is. He puffs his cheeks and slides into ‘Can’t You Hear Me Knocking’ with all the mellow of a warm Black Velvet. Skinny minny Mick does the dislocation dance and sweats a bit. He sidles down one of the three specially erected catwalks to shake his booty at wide-eyed fans. His hips look narrower than his ankle measurement, and his legs are so thin that he seems knock-kneed. Keith gets the giggles now. He turns his back.

The special bit, the one they haven’t all been waiting for, is Taylor’s guitar solo. He hasn’t come all this way for nothing. At last he loses his inhibitions and comes alive. Less chubby geography teacher giving it a go on the axe at the end-of-term disco, more paid-up rocker playing for the past. Jagger maracas away in the back there, squinting. Either his face sinks in or it must be a trick of the light.

Most of the mostly young crowd look blank. Who did you say that is again? Couldn’t tell you. Not bad though, izee. If you like that sort of thing. The night heaves, as rock’n’roll nights tend to. Taylor takes no notice, just gets on with the job in hand. He’s not milking it. He doesn’t have to. He is suddenly the only grown-up on stage. Charlie’s loving it.

‘Fang queue, Mick!’ roars Jagger. ‘Fuckin’ great, we love yew.’

No Adele. No Springsteen. Both had been rumoured. But we do get ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ in its entirety, during which flares scarlet the sky and a scrap-metal phoenix pops out of the top of the Pyramid like a cuckoo from a clock, raising its wings and spurting fire. A little red rooster might have been funnier, but this is symbolic. ‘Our passions are the true phoenix,’ said Goethe.² ‘When the old one is burnt out, a new one rises from its ashes.’ In other words, long live the Stones. Did they get it, down in the front? Did Harry?

As the fireworks light up Worthy Farm, Mick turns to the crowd. ‘We’ve been doing this for fifty years or something,’ he says. ‘And if this is the first time you’ve seen a band, please come again.’

The festival loves the Stones, all right. It is official. Glasto boss Michael Eavis calls them ‘The high spot of forty-three years of Glastonbury. They finally did it,’ he enthuses, ‘and it was fantastic. My God, did they deliver.’

‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’, straight in, followed by a psycho thrashing of ‘Satisfaction’. Beat that, little’uns.

On an end-of-summer sojourn in the Lakes, I am staying with my friend Peter Myers. The former mountaineer and member of the Keswick Mountain Rescue Team lives half the year here, the other half on Hudson Street in MePa, as they call downtown New York’s Meatpacking District. He opened a shop there in 1985, naming it ‘Myers of Keswick’ after his dad’s old butcher’s shop in the town of his birth. He made sausages, pork pies and sausage rolls in his kitchen there, and imported British grocery items such as Heinz beans, Jacob’s cream crackers and Marmite. He once supplied Princess Diana with bangers at the Upper East Side’s Carlyle Hotel. Not a euphemism. The December queues for his homemade mince pies and Christmas puddings stop traffic for several blocks.

Pete still supplies thousands of ex-pats throughout New York and across the US of A. He and my late sportswriter father Ken Jones became pals in the way back, when Pete ran a pub at 105 West 13th Street near Union Square called The Bells of Hell. He bought it from a gold smuggler, Malachy McCourt, brother of Angela’s Ashes author Frank, who later became a famous writer himself. Pete turned the watering hole into a heaving think tank of journalists, musicians and activists. By importing all the daily British newspapers and weekly singles releases for his jukebox, inventing Happy Hour with free pork pies and sausage rolls on the bar and presenting live bands, he ensured a feisty Blighty clientele. Mick Jagger was said to frequent the Bells, though nobody could remember ever seeing him in there. Bill, Keith and Charlie would rock up from time to time too. Dad frequented Madison Square Garden throughout the golden era of heavyweight title fights, when the world’s best boxers were the rock stars of their game. From Pennsylvania Plaza, it was only a ten-minute walk down 7th Avenue to the Bells. Dad and Pete became best friends, and here we are … chewing cud while gazing over breathtaking hill and dale, swallowing our way through my Cumbrian chum’s fine wine cellar.

The next bottle that Pete fetches up bears the Rolling Stones lip and tongue logo. I take a closer look. It’s a bottle of Washington Cabernet Sauvignon 2016, emblazoned with the words ‘The Rolling Stones 50 Years’.

‘Where did you get that?!’

‘Keith gave it me.’

‘Keith Richards?’

‘Of course bloody Keith Richards. Who else would brew their own plonk with the Stones logo on the label?’

‘You never told me you knew him! How do you know him?’

‘Because I am the corner shop for English folk in New York. The kind of folk who still want to eat sausage rolls and pork pies. When I started out, there were a hundred and fifty thousand Brits living in the city, and another hundred thousand in the tri-State area. That’s like being the only butcher in Carlisle. Anyway, I opened, in 1985, and shortly afterwards a woman came in calling herself Jane Rosen, Jane Rose as she is now. Works for the Stones. She places an order for “HP Sauce for Mr Richards”, and says, “You know who that’ll be for.” Keith was living on East 3rd Street above Tower Records. He was with Patti by then.

‘I delivered the HP Sauce, a bloody case of the stuff, to “Mr Richards”. I sent a delivery boy over there, I didn’t have the time to go myself. He came back and said, “It’s fucking Keith Richards’s house!” Forever after that, I made sure it was me who took it round. You can’t have these upstarts salivating over the customers. It’s not hygienic. I’d go up, I’d hand it over to Patti, and over time we became quite friendly. One Saturday afternoon, Patti calls the shop. “Can you send over another case of HP …” – what’s he doing, bathing in the bloody stuff? – “and some kippers, please, Pete?” “We don’t deliver on Saturdays,” I informed her. “Oh, Peter,” she says. “You can have a drink with Keith when you come over, if that makes a difference.” That was it. Out came the motorbike and off I went. Lug it over there. Knock, knock. Go upstairs, go in the kitchen, put the kippers in the fridge, which is heaving with bottles of Heineken and Beck’s. Patti pours me a beer. “Keith’s waiting for you in the front room,” she purrs.

‘I go in the front room. It’s pretty sparse, there’s not much furniture. Just a huge couch in front of the window, looking all the way uptown. And there on the couch is Keith, unconscious, with beer bottles rolling on the floor all around him. I look round at Patti and she is giggling her head off. This is her idea of me having a drink with Keith Richards.’

Peter’s first face-to-face encounter with the guitarist happened not long afterwards.

‘He flew in from Sydney early one morning, and instructed his driver to bring him straight to Myers of Keswick on Hudson Street. He walks in the shop. He’s wearing a beautiful snakeskin jacket, and he looks as though he could do with a cup of tea. No big deal, I greet him like I greet everyone else. “Hiya, Keith. Welcome. Siddown. Want a cup of tea?” I sit him down, pour him a cuppa and hand him a sausage roll. It is then that I notice the two huge bodyguards, one of whom stands blocking the doorway. It’s Keith Richards. Even though he is sitting with his back to the door, the python jacket is a dead give-away. Other customers come in and out. One or two of them slide bits of paper in front of him to sign, which he does, ever so graciously. But nobody really bothers him, and he’s not bothered by anybody else. It’s all very relaxed.’

What made him come there?

‘Nostalgia. He’s an old-fashioned man, and a very homely one. I’d gone round to his place a few times. I once found him and Ronnie Wood and his dad playing dominoes. He wanted to see the shop for himself. It took him back. It was the grocery shop of his childhood. It still is.’

Shortly before the Steel Wheels tour of North America kicked off in August 1989, the phone rang in Peter’s shop. ‘It was Patti. They are now living out in Connecticut with their daughters, they are regular customers and we are on first-phone-number terms. “Keith wants to speak to you,” she said. She put him on. “Hiya, Pete. How ya doin’? How many people work for you?” ‘Five,” I said. “Here’s the deal,” he replied. “I’ve got five tickets for Sunday night, Shea Stadium. I want five sausage rolls, five pork pies and five steak and kidney pies in return.” “Well, Keith,” I said, keeping a straight face, “this is quite a lot of stuff. Any chance of another VIP ticket for my daughter?” I had some bloody cheek, me. Needless to say, he obliged.’

Peter went to the gig with Jenny, his daughter who now co-runs the business and who at the time was a little girl. ‘We go to the VIP room, which is a bit basic. Jenny and I are sitting in the middle of this room, all on our own, when Robert De Niro walks in. Talking Italian, yeah. More people start to trickle in, they all look shiny and important. I’m thinking, what the fuck am I doing here? Then Patti walks in, looking bloody marvellous, her leather skirt held together with safety pins. She peers over the top of these important heads and shouts, “Pete! Did you bring the stuff?!” Every head in the place turned, true as I sit here.’

At which point, the Myerses were upgraded. ‘We are sent into the VVIP room, which is reserved for band members and family. There’s a table to one side with a roast turkey centrepiece, surrounded by roast chickens, ducks, smoked salmon and caviar. In front of the table watching American football on telly is Keith’s dad Bert, smoking a bloody great spliff. And directly opposite me and Jenny stands Jagger. Who is staring at me.

‘I knew why. I was the only person in the room who he didn’t know. It wasn’t that many years since John Lennon had been murdered uptown, and every rock star was wary in New York. Mick starts heading towards me and opens his mouth to speak when I am saved by the bells of hell. A gorilla comes in and starts shouting at everyone: “Will everyone in this room who is not, repeat NOT in the band, please get out now!” Jenny and I oblige. We make our way down this walkway in front of the stage. At the end of which a huge Mercedes rolls up, the back door opens and Keith falls out of it. The bloody back! The arms are flailing, the eyes are going, and he beams me a dirty great smile: “Ha-llo, Pete!” and I’m thinking, there’s no way they’ll let this bugger on stage tonight. Twenty minutes later the Stones are up there giving it ‘Satisfaction’ and there’s Keith coming on like an eighteen-year-old, more energy than a planeload of Russian gymnasts and going like a good’un.’

Keith sent Peter tickets to all the shows after that.

‘And what a nice guy he turned out to be. Contrary to what I’d been expecting, having read about the shenanigans, the drugs and the drink. Almost a gentleman. He’d never want to be called a complete one. And we became friends. People thought we were chalk and cheese. They couldn’t be more wrong. He and I are not dissimilar. Not only are we the same age, but we have our childhood in common. We both grew up on Colman’s mustard and Branston Pickle, on all the things that I sell in my shop. His Britishness, his roots, are very important to him. I remember an occasion when I had my mate Jack in, a good old East Ender whose son is Keith McNally, ‘the restaurateur who invented Downtown’ and owner of Balthazar, all that. Jack loved to come and sit in my shop and drink tea. This particular evening, getting ready for closing at about ten to seven, I’ve got Jack in the corner and the door bursts open.

In walk Keith and Patti. Keith is wearing the most ridiculous bloody outfit I’ve seen in my life. Slate grey leather trousers, a three-quarter-length jacket and a bowler hat. In they breeze, and Patti and I sit and get chatting. Keith’s parading back and forth, picking up all sorts of shit. Caster sugar, self-raising flour. He’s fascinated. Patti tells me he likes going out to restaurants but he never eats in them. He goes home and cooks something afterwards. I say, “Here, Keith, this feller here, I think you and him are from the same neck of the woods.” They practically fell into each other’s arms. I opened a few beers, as I tend to after closing time, and these two get stuck in, talking about old London.’

Not long after Keith fell off the branch in Fiji in 2006 and wound up having brain surgery, the then sixty-two-year-old came down to Myers of Keswick for another cup of tea. ‘I asked him how he was feeling after landing on his head,’ remembers Peter. “Peter,” he replied, looking me straight in the eye, “I’ve been falling on my head for most of my life. It’s the only thing that ever knocked any sense into me.” Which sums him up. He’s been a loyal pal. He still sends me presents every year. A copy of his autobiography when it came out. Picture books, all signed. A copy of his first solo album, Talk is Cheap, dedicated “To Peter with love.” Special box sets with booklets and multiple CDs. A crate of the Stones’ wine, the very stuff we are drinking now. A Stones umbrella and a hoodie, very smart. They never forget me, and I never forget them. Keith Richards is standard, a down-to-earth British lad. He always will be.’

‘People can laugh at the Stones and call them ridiculous,’ says David Ambrose. ‘But that’s just ageist, and it doesn’t wash these days. Besides, unlike the Beatles, the Stones rock. It’s like being in an octuple scull, an eight-man rowing boat, and everyone’s rowing beautifully in unison. Jagger knows, and Richards knows, that they are as good as it gets. No one has bettered them. Yes, others have lasted as long. The Who have always been brilliant, but they never really rocked. The Stones have got it down to a fine art. The chords fall in the right place at the right time, and take you perfectly into the choruses with these great grooves. It doesn’t do to dissect the elements, you have to consider it as a whole. Mick’s not a real singer, for example. He’s a character singer. His voice hits highs and lows, like a teenage boy’s. It sounds unique, but is easily impersonated. It’s an affectation. But look how far they have come on it.

‘I do believe that the Beatles, had they continued, would have mattered in this way too, at this stage in the game,’ mulls EMI’s former head of A&R. ‘But they quit, they created a vacancy, and the Stones stepped straight in. They are the seminal act. But how much longer can they go on for? Not long now.

‘Who succeeds the Stones? It’s the big question. U2? Not sure. Bono’s a bit boring now. We’ve kind of gone off him. My guess is that Lindsey Buckingham will come back to Fleetwood Mac. That they’ll take the Stones’ ball and run with it and be the next forever band.’