CHAPTER ONE: KARMA
1. The marquise diamond cut was originally commissioned in 1745 by King Louis XV of France to reflect the smile of his mistress, Madame de Pompadour.
2. Spencer House is London’s finest surviving eighteenth-century town house. Still owned by the Spencer family, its current title holder is Charles Spencer, the 9th Earl and brother of the late Diana Princess of Wales. It is open to the public and is available for weddings and private events.
3. Rupert Murdoch has had four wives. His first was Melbourne flight attendant Patricia Booker. Married 1956, one daughter, Prudence, divorced 1967. Second, Anna Maria Torv, Scottish journalist, married 1967 for thirty-two years; one daughter, Elisabeth, and sons Lachlan and James. Divorced 1999. Third, Wendi Deng, Chinese businesswoman, married 1999, when he was sixty-eight and she thirty; two daughters, Grace and Chloe. Murdoch divorced her in 2013 over unproven scandal of her alleged infidelity with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Fourth, Jerry Hall.
4. The phone-hacking scandal of 2005 onwards saw employees of the News of the World and other Murdoch papers accused of hacking phones, bribing police officers and breaking the law in other ways as they gathered sensational stories. Royals, celebrities and politicians were targeted. In July 2011, it emerged that the phones of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, victims of the 7/7 London bombings and deceased army personnel had also been hacked, causing executives to resign. The Leveson Inquiry investigated phone hacking and police bribery. Several arrests and convictions ensued. Boycotting by advertisers caused the News of the World’s closure after a hundred and sixty-eight years. Murdoch’s worth as a newspaper proprietor was called into question.
5. Two Brydges members’ club relaunched as Brydges Place in 2020.
CHAPTER TWO: JONER
1. Leukaemia: a type of cancer affecting blood cells, mainly the white cells and bone marrow.
2. Britain’s publicly funded healthcare system the NHS was founded in 1948 by Labour Party politician Aneurin Bevan (1897–1960). ‘Nye’ was the son of a Welsh coal miner.
3. Geraldine Crehan, ‘The Surviving Sibling: The Effects of Sibling Death in Childhood’, 2004. David E. Balk, ‘The Self-Concepts of Bereaved Adolescents: Sibling Death and its Aftermath’, 1990.
4. Richard Hughes’s references: John Bowlby: The Making and Breaking of Affectional Bonds, Routledge Classics, 2005; Albert C. Cain, Barbara S. Cain: On Replacing a Child, The American Academy of Child Psychiatry, Elsevier, 1964. The Mimi or ‘Mimih’ spirits to which Hughes refers are the fairy-like creatures of Arnhem Land in the beautiful Northern Territory of Australia, said to be one of the last remaining areas that could qualify as its own separate country. It is made up of many different Aboriginal countries with languages, traditions and cultures that date back tens of thousands of years. According to their collective folklore, the Mimi taught the Aboriginal Australians the arts of hunting and cooking kangaroo, and how to paint. The protected region is known for its rock art and bark paintings. Keith Richards may, however, have meant to describe Brian Jones as a ‘me, me person’: the kind to whom we would refer today as an extreme narcissist. That is, a controlling, bullying, self-absorbed, exploitative, explosive, entitled and impulsive individual given to possessive behaviour and jealous fits of rage; someone who demonstrates a lack of empathy with others, who lacks insight into their own emotions, who is obsessed with the way others see him, who is easily offended, and who often humiliates, ridicules and even hurts their partner(s) and makes contemptuous remarks about others behind their backs. Know who I mean? No moral compass? Bereft of self-control? Lives beyond their means, eating, drinking and even drugging themselves stupid? Get the hell out.
5. Keith Richards probably meant ‘delusions of grandeur’.
6. P.P. Pond, born Paul Pond in Portsmouth, 24 February 1942, rose to fame as Paul Jones, lead singer and harmonica player with the group Manfred Mann, who scored hits with ‘5-4-3-2-1’, ‘Do Wah Diddy Diddy’, ‘Oh No, Not My Baby’, ‘Pretty Flamingo’, ‘Ha! Ha! Said the Clown’, ‘Mighty Quinn’ and more. Brian Jones and Keith Richards asked him to front a new group they were putting together. He turned them down, and the part went to Mick Jagger. Paul went solo in 1966. He formed the Blues Band in 1979, and is a member of the Manfreds: a reunion band of former Manfred Mann members (excluding Manfred himself) including Tom McGuinness, of McGuinness Flint fame. Paul also hosted BBC Radio 2’s Blues Show for thirty-two years until 2018, when the then seventy-six-year-old was replaced by Cerys Matthews. All part of the BBC’s misguided drive to lure thirty- and forty-somethings back to radio. We did warn them.
CHAPTER THREE: MICK’N’KEEF
1. Avon was founded in the US as the California Perfume Company Inc. in 1886 by bookseller turned entrepreneur David H. McConnell. He changed the business’s name to Avon in 1928, inspired by Stratford-upon-Avon, birthplace of William Shakespeare, whom McConnell adored. He launched what became a vast army of mostly fragrant stay-at-home mothers (a small percentage of their representatives were male), who demonstrated the company’s products to other housewives, around their own neighbourhoods. Goods were then ordered from catalogues, with the rep receiving a commission. The company launched in the UK in 1959. In 2010, Debbie Davis from Sunderland became the first British Avon lady to earn over £1 million. Having signed up after being made redundant, she built a sales team of 8,000 reps. Until 2014, when it was overtaken by American health, beauty and homecare company Amway, Avon was the number one global direct sales company.
2. Mick Jagger would rekindle his love for cricket in later years, becoming an enthusiastic spectator, Test match follower and fixture at Lord’s Cricket Ground, the ‘home of cricket’.
3. ‘Love Me Do’, the Beatles’ debut single with ‘P.S. I Love You’ on the B-side, was released in the UK on 5 October 1962. It rose to No. 17 on the British chart.
4. Glaswegian Anthony James ‘Tony’ Donegan, ‘the king of skiffle’, changed his name to Lonnie in tribute to Alonzo ‘Lonnie’ Johnson, revered New Orleans blues and jazz guitarist and singer-songwriter.
5. Little Richard, born Richard Wayne Penniman (1932–2020) in Macon, Georgia. Best known for his hits ‘Tutti Frutti’, ‘Long Tall Sally’, ‘Lucille’, ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’.
6. Buddy Holly, born Charles Hardin Holley (1936–59) in Lubbock, Texas, inspired and influenced the Beatles, the Stones, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, the Hollies (who named themselves after him), Elton John and just about everybody else. He is credited with having established the ‘traditional rock’n’roll line-up’ of two guitars, bass and drums. He and his Crickets very nearly called themselves ‘the Beetles’. A while down the line, the Beatles settled on their name partly in tribute to him. Holly died in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa, on 3 February 1959, at the age of twenty-two. His wife Maria Elena was pregnant with the couple’s first child, which she miscarried soon after receiving the news of his death. Paul McCartney later acquired Holly’s song publishing rights.
7. The documentary was Jazz on a Summer’s Day, about the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island, New England. The line-up included Louis Armstrong, Chuck Berry, Dinah Washington and Thelonious Monk. The film premiered at the 1959 Venice Film Festival.
8. Borstal, part of the English prison system, for young offenders aged between sixteen and twenty-one, who would be trained while kept in custody. Named after an old convict prison bear Borstal, Kent, not far from Rochester.
9. From the Latin poet Virgil’s Georgics, it means ‘To know the causes of things’.
CHAPTER FOUR: DRUM’N’BASS
1. Charlie famously took exception to being called ‘my drummer’, in Amsterdam in 1984. Mick and Keith had been out on the town. On returning to their hotel in the early hours, an inebriated Mick called Charlie in his room and demanded, ‘Where’s my drummer?’ Charlie did not respond. Twenty or so minutes later there came a knock at the door. Keith opened it, only to find a freshly showered, shaven and fully Savile Row-suited and booted Charlie standing there. He marched past Keith, grabbed Mick by the lapels of Keith’s wedding jacket (which Mick was wearing), and punched him in the face, with the warning, ‘Never call me your drummer again!’ The embellishment, ‘You’re my fucking singer!’ has been added over many years of re-telling, but is not how Keith remembered it in his memoir Life. As he recounted it, Mick fell backwards into a silver salver of smoked salmon and towards an open window, which looked out on to a canal glinting below. Had Mick fallen into it from that height, he would likely have been killed. The thought of which did nothing to dampen Keith’s enjoyment of the spectacle, when suddenly he remembered that Mick was wearing his wedding jacket. He lunged for it, saving Jagger at the same time. Keith reckoned that it took a good twelve hours to calm Charlie down. He was only too keen to have another go, and had to be restrained.
2. The backbeat is the second half of the beat. It usually means the snare drum being played on beat two and four (if in a 4/4 time signature). The drums are the foundation of the music. The drummer is the engine driver, with the job of keeping it all together. The rock drummer usually sits at the rear because drums are loud. Positioning him upstage lets the sound fill the stage, and allows the other musicians to play and sing over the top of it.
3. Manny’s Music dominated midtown Manhattan’s W48th St at two addresses for seventy-four years. Founded by sax salesman Manny Goldrich in 1935 on what became ‘Music Row’, it started small and grew to meet demand, enjoying a heyday during the British Invasion of bands during the sixties. Incoming musicians could get what they couldn’t in Europe, at competitive prices. Its walls were plastered with signed photos of many famous musicians, including Buddy Holly, Bob Dylan, the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix. The store appears in the video for Guns N’ Roses’ ‘Paradise City’.
4. Nearly one hundred and sixty thousand prefabricated homes, known as prefabs, were constructed in the UK from 1945–48. They were built as temporary accommodation to house families made homeless by bombing during the World War II. Although most were later demolished, some were still inhabited decades later, particularly in parts of south-east London.
5. The boys’ and girls’ Tylers Croft Secondary Modern schools merged to become Kingsbury High School (motto: Spectemur agendo – Let us be judged by our actions) in 1967. Other celebrated alumni include George Michael and jazz saxophonist Courtney Pine.
6. Harrow Art School was later absorbed by the University of Westminster, the alma mater of the author.
7. It was Shakespeare’s Hamlet who said, ‘I am native here, and to the manner born.’ (Act 1 Scene 4 of the Tragedy of the Prince of Denmark). ‘To the Manor Born’, its title a wordplay, was a popular 1979–81 BBC TV sitcom starring the late Peter Bowles, and the ineffable Penelope ‘The Good Life’ Keith as Audrey fforbes-Hamilton.
8. Daisy Buchanan, the woman with a voice ‘full of money’, is Jay Gatsby’s unobtainable true love in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most celebrated novel The Great Gatsby (1925).
9. Bread pudding, also known as ‘poor man’s pudding’ and dating back to the eleventh century; its base is scraps of stale bread into which dried fruit and peel, suet, eggs, sugar, milk, butter and spices are mixed before baking.
10. 10. Beckenham and Penge County Grammar School (motto: Mores et Studia – Good character and learning) later became Langley Park School for Boys. The author gained a place to the girls’ equivalent of Langley Park, but accepted a place at the Ravensbourne School (formerly Bromley Grammar School for Girls).
11. 11. The Wetherby Arms was located at 500 Kings Road, close to the Stones’ flat on Edith Grove. It later became known as the Dean Swift, before closing as a public house in 2004. It passed into commercial use, becoming a Paddy Power betting shop.
CHAPTER FIVE: HUSTLERS
1. Henry the bookmaker’s proclamation was perhaps the first of multiple variations on the theme. By 1964, Melody Maker was blaring, ‘Would You Let Your Sister Go With a Rolling Stone? – asks Ray Coleman, who has been on tour with them.’ The phrase was seized upon and redeployed as his own invention by manager Andrew Loog Oldham, when he decided to position the Stones in the market as the anti-Beatles.
2. Murrayfield in Edinburgh, the home of Scottish Rugby Union, is Scotland’s largest sports stadium with a seating capacity of just over 67,000.
3. Gomelsky later managed the Yardbirds, and launched his own Marmalade Records, representing Brian Auger’s Trinity and Julie Driscoll, Blossom Toes, and Graham Gouldman, Kevin Godley and Lol Creme, who later formed the band 10cc; he worked with various other artists, including Soft Machine.
4. The Stones were at that stage still a six-piece.
5. Bruce Channel, 1940–, American singer-songwriter and one-hit-wonder co-composer with Margaret Cobb of multi-million selling No. 1 hit ‘Hey! Baby’ (ooh, ah), 1962. The song features famously in the 1987 film Dirty Dancing, and has been covered by many including Del Shannon, Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, the Shirelles, Pat Boone, Adam Faith, Jerry Lee Lewis, Ringo Starr and José Feliciano.
6. ‘Exit, pursued by a bear’ is a stage direction in William Shakespeare’s romantic tragicomedy The Winter’s Tale, published in his First Folio, 1623.
7. Galeano launched his own rock band, Diamante Eléctrico, in 2012. Their sixth album, Mira Lo Que Hiciste Hacer (Look What You Made Me Do) was released in 2021.
8. Loog Oldham’s reference to ECT involves electroconvulsive therapy, used to treat psychiatric patients with severe depression or bipolar disorder that has failed to respond to alternative treatments.
9. By ‘Allen Krime’, Andrew means the late American music business manager Allen Klein, who became the band’s manager after him.
CHAPTER SIX: HEYDAY
1. ‘Shuffle off this mortal coil’ is a phrase from William Shakespeare’s most celebrated soliloquy, Prince Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be.’ Its meaning is obscure, many scholars interpreting it as the shedding of one’s earthly, physical form to prepare the soul for eternal life in the hereafter. It is sometimes compared to the way a reptile shrugs off its dead skin.
2. Originally expressed by Geoffrey Chaucer in the Prologue of The Cook’s Tale (1390) as: ‘Ful ofte in game a sooth I have herd saye!’
3. The Who captured the mods v rockers culture in their 1973 album Quadrophenia, leading to 1979’s hugely influential cult film of the same name set in Brighton during the infamous 1964 clash and starring Phil Daniels as Jimmy and Leslie Ash as Steph. Toyah Willcox, John Altman and Sting also appear.
4. There would be one last, impromptu performance on the roof of their Apple Corps building at 3 Savile Row, London, on Thursday 30 January 1969 … a final farewell rather than a full-blown gig.
5. From the author’s Who Killed John Lennon? – The lives, loves and death of the greatest rock star, John Blake, 2020
6. Henry David Thoreau (1817–62), American naturalist, philosopher and poet.
CHAPTER SEVEN: REACTION
1. Olympic Sound Studios, established during the late 1950s, had moved to a derelict synagogue on Carlton Street by the time the Stones arrived. They relocated to 117 Church Road, Barnes, a building which had previously been a theatre, cinema and a television studio in 1966. The Stones were among the first clients to record there, creating six albums at Olympic between 1966 and 1973. Among the many A-listers also to record there were the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, Queen, Led Zeppelin, the Who, Prince, the Eagles, Madonna, Björk and Adele.
2. The Staple Singers (they dropped the ‘s’ from their surname for commercial purposes – see, Keith, there was a precedent) were a Mississippi family group made up of Roebuck Staples, known as ‘Pops’, and his children Cleotha, Pervis, Yvonne and Mavis. The family moved to Chicago after the birth of Cleotha, where Pervis, Mavis and Yvonne were born. They recorded and performed primarily religious music. As a result of Pops’s intense friendship with Martin Luther King Jr, they became the musical and spiritual voices of the civil rights movement. Achieving vast success as ‘God’s Greatest Hit Makers’, their most celebrated hits during the 1970s included ‘Respect Yourself’, ‘I’ll Take You There’, ‘If You’re Ready (Come Go with Me)’ and ‘Let’s Do it Again’. All are now deceased, except Mavis Staples, who continues to work well into her ninth decade. When she performed live at the 2019 Glastonbury Festival, she was eighty years old. In an acclaimed 2015 documentary about her life and career, entitled Mavis!, she revealed that Bob Dylan had once proposed marriage, but that she had turned him down. They remained close friends, and later toured together.
The Stones clearly plagiarised the Staple Singers’ specific arrangement of the traditional spiritual song ‘This May Be The Last Time’, for which they were never pursued. Having ‘gotten away with it’, shame on them for later suing the Verve for sampling ‘The Last Time’ on their release ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’. Because as they say, where there’s a hit, there’s a writ. Richard Ashcroft and his Britpop band had a worldwide hit with the 1997 recording. The Stones challenged its authorship. Although Ashcroft wrote the lyrics, its melody and arrangement borrowed substantially from the Stones’ recording, and also from an orchestral version recorded in 1965 by the Andrew Oldham Orchestra: a separate project for which Oldham used session musicians to create classical renditions of Stones songs.
The Verve, to their credit, did do things properly and above board. They sought permission from Decca, the label that had released Oldham’s orchestral album. They had been granted the right to use a few notes of the string melody, in return for half the Verve’s royalties earned by their song. But the applecart was overturned when Allen Klein, who had managed the Stones during the late 1960s and who controlled their copyrights into 1970, sued the Verve for plagiarism after ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’ was released. Klein claimed that their use was not fair use; that it infringed the songwriters’ rights, and that it could not be classified as a sample.
The Verve settled with Klein in 1997. They gave Jagger and Richards songwriting credits on ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’, and released the song’s publishing royalties to Klein’s company ABKCO Records. Which should have been the end of it. But Oldham then sued the Verve himself, two years later, for $1.7 million in mechanical (songwriter) royalties. The result of the two lawsuits was that Oldham, Jagger and Richards received all royalties earned by ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’ for many years. That’ll do nicely.
The Staple Singers were all still alive at this point. Pops did not die until 2000. Cleotha departed in 2013, Yvonne in 2018 and Pervis in 2021. At the time of writing, Mavis is still with us. Klein had died in July 2009 at the age of seventy-seven, twelve years after winning the dispute. Perhaps Mick and Keith felt the gentle breath of the faithful Staple Singers on their cheeks at night as they tossed and turned. Perhaps guilt eventually caught up with them. In April 2019, Mick and Keith signed over all publishing rights for ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’ to Richard Ashcroft and the Verve. What a pity that they never settled with the Staple Singers similarly.
3. ‘Baby, better come back maybe next week/Can’t you see I’m on a losing streak?’ refers to a girl the singer wants to have sex with, who cannot oblige because she has her period. She invites him to try asking again the following week, when she will be in the parlance du jour, ‘off the rag’.
CHAPTER EIGHT: MARIANNE
1. The observation that men want more sexual partners than women do is known as the Coolidge effect. The desire for multiple sexual partners appears to increase as men age. It’s certainly so in the case of Mick Jagger. Research has established that males soon grow tired of sex with the same female, and are rapidly aroused by a new mate. Some women under some conditions show some evidence of a Coolidge effect, but overall to a lesser degree. Studies have also found that women tend to prefer resources (status, wealth) over a man’s looks when selecting a long-term partner, but that they favour looks over resources in casual flings. It is interesting that ageing men appear to become less fussy about their sexual partners’ beauty, as long as the females are young. So older men crave more sexual variety than younger men. May we conclude that older men have come to terms with the fact that biology drives them to desire sex with as many younger partners as possible? Or could that be plain old insecurity, coupled with the fact that they are terrified of their own impending doom?
The Coolidge effect is named after Calvin Coolidge, thirtieth president of the United States, 1923–29. American scientist and author Frank Ambrose Beach Jr claimed to have coined the term, which is based on an old joke. You probably had to be there.
See also Experimental Evidence for Sex Differences in Sexual Variety Preferences: Support for the Coolidge Effect in Humans: Hughes S.M., Aung T., Harrison M.A., LaFayette J.N., Gallup G.G. Jr.
2. Masochists achieve sexual gratification through being hurt, punished and/or humiliated.
3. Peter Asher’s and Gordon Waller’s first and most famous hit, ‘A World Without Love’, was written by Paul McCartney and was a No. 1 million-seller in 1964. Subsequent hits included Del Shannon’s ‘I Go to Pieces’, ‘Lady Godiva’, ‘Woman’ and ‘Nobody I Know’, also written by McCartney; and ‘True Love Ways’, a cover of the Buddy Holly and Norman Petty song. Asher went on to become a manager and producer, responsible for the careers of James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt and others. Waller died in 2009.
4. ‘Wigan Pier’ gained fame after the 1937 publication of George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. The title is ironic, referring as it does to an inland area of Greater Manchester that is nowhere near the seaside, and has no pier.
5. The UK’s Abortion Act, passed on 27 October 1967, did not come into effect until 27 April 1968.
6. Ned Kelly was director Tony Richardson’s biopic about the son of a transported Irish convict who grew up to become ‘Australia’s Robin Hood’. Kelly, a bushranger turned bank robber, outlaw and police killer, was hanged for his crimes in 1880, at the age of twenty-six. He became a cult figure, and has had more biographies written about him than any other Australian. The film was poorly received, and Jagger effectively disowned it. It was not the vehicle to celluloid fame that he had imagined.
7. Trident Studios, 17 St Anne’s Court, Soho, was a recording business created by the Sheffield brothers, Norman and Barry. It was a working studio for thirteen years, between 1968 and 1981. Trident generated many hit singles and albums. The Beatles recorded ‘Hey Jude’ there, and Elton John ‘Your Song’. Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was a famous Trident album, as were Carly Simon’s No Secrets, and Queen’s eponymous debut album, as well as Queen II and Sheer Heart Attack. Other artists who used the facility included Genesis, Harry Nilsson, Frank Zappa, James Taylor, Tina Turner, T. Rex, and, of course, the Rolling Stones.
8. Nicholas Dunbar is the author of The Devil’s Derivatives and Inventing Money.
CHAPTER NINE: ANITA
1. La Dolce Vita is the charming, seemingly immortal cult masterpiece by Federico Fellini, released in 1960. Starring Anita Ekberg, Anouk Aimée and Marcello Mastroianni, it charts the adventures of a young magazine journalist as he rips around Rome’s Via Veneto and environs in search of love.
2. Barbarella is a 1968 sci-fi classic directed by Roger Vadim. It’s silly, but it does star Jane Fonda.
3. In Candy, also released in 1968, Anita co-starred with Richard Burton, James Coburn and Marlon Brando after whom her and Keith’s firstborn (Marlon) is named.
4. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/sudden-infant-death-syndrome-sids/
5. Many fans around the world were distraught at the apparent destruction in the fire of Keith’s 1953 butterscotch Fender Telecaster, nicknamed ‘Micawber’ after the character Mr Micawber in Charles Dickens’s novel David Copperfield. But they confused the name ‘Macabre’ with ‘Micawber’. The Fender, a present from Eric Clapton for Keith’s twenty-seventh birthday, just as the Stones were getting ready to record Exile on Main St., he uses to this day – for songs like ‘Brown Sugar’ and ‘Honky Tonk Women’.
6. Although South Salem is often referred to as the location of the notorious seventeenth-century Salem Witch Trials, these took place in Salem in the neighbouring state of Massachusetts.
7. See A Christmas Story, 1983, a seasonal drama starring Melinda Dillon, Darren McGavin and Peter Billingsley; also, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, 1989, set in the snowy suburbs, in which the twinkling Griswold house is the star (alongside Chevy Chase); and The Family Stone, 2005, with Sarah Jessica Parker.
8. Spoiler alert: in the 1978 war film The Deer Hunter, starring Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken, the latter’s character shoots himself dead during a game of Russian roulette. It involves loading a bullet into one chamber of a revolver, spinning the cylinder, then pulling the trigger while pointing the gun at oneself. If you’re lucky, things don’t line up and you’re still alive. ‘Playing Russian roulette’ has come to mean gambling foolishly on something risky or potentially lethal, e.g. driving under the influence.
9. Anita was once again ahead of the trend. Jaipur was the setting of the 2011 film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and its 2015 sequel The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, starring Bill Nighy, Judi Dench, Celia Imrie and Maggie Smith, which charted the adventures of a group of pensioners who relocate from England to a retirement hotel there. The pictures were based on Deborah Moggach’s 2004 novel These Foolish Things.
Paul McCartney composed and recorded a tribute to the city, entitled ‘Riding into Jaipur’. He included it on his 2001 album Driving Rain. Hypnotic and sitar-infused, it features a sparse, chanty vocal that sounds for all the world like the voice of John Lennon.
10. 10. There’s a popular bootleg version of ‘You Got the Silver’ in circulation, with Jagger singing the lead. The album track, featuring Keith’s lead vocal, was the last Stones song released with Brian Jones playing on it.
CHAPTER TEN: REDLANDS
1. Lena Mary Calhoun Horne (1917–2010) was an African American actress, singer, dancer and human rights activist. She joined New York nightspot the Cotton Club as a teenager, soon moving on to Hollywood. A popular film actress, she lost faith in the industry after Ava Gardner pipped her at the post for the role of Julie LaVerne in MGM’s Show Boat (1951). The choice was controversial as Ava Gardner’s voice was dubbed. Curiously, Ava sang her two songs herself on the soundtrack album. Miss Horne went on to become an acclaimed variety star, and toured her own one-woman show.
Incidentally, Keith’s Bentley was one of only sixty-eight S3 Continental Flying Spurs manufactured, the most expensive model in the Bentley range. Blue Lena’s chassis number is BC68XE, and the car was first registered as JLP 400D. Since the 1960s, this car had been the world’s ultimate Grand Tourer, able to take you from any capital in Europe to Monte Carlo to play the tables that same night. He purchased it from London dealer H.R. Owen in Mayfair’s Berkeley Square. She survived several accidents, including the one that occurred on the way back from Knebworth in 1976, where the Stones had topped the bill alongside Led Zeppelin. Keith dozed off at the wheel and drove the car into a tree. The seven passengers including his little boy Marlon were unhurt. Later that year, driving back down the M1 from a concert in Leicester, Keith tore through a hedge and a fence and wound up in a field. Officers attending found his drugs and arrested him. He sold Blue Lena two years later to an Ascot Rolls-Royce dealer, and promptly bought another one, same model. Bonhams sold Lena at auction for £763,100 in September 2015.
2. As well as Connecticut, New England includes the states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
3. In Greek mythology, Cronus (Kronos, Roman name Saturn), King of the Titans, ruled the cosmos during the Golden Age after castrating and deposing his own father, Ouranos (Uranus). Fearing a prophecy that he would be overthrown by his own son, he devoured each of his children as they were born. Only the youngest, Zeus (Jupiter) was saved. He did grow up to usurp his father.
4. The Who recorded and released ‘My Generation’ in autumn 1965. The aggressive song that features Roger Daltrey exploding in a furious, exasperated stutter – as if he’s so mad, he just can’t get the words out – is the definitive encapsulation of rebellious youth. ‘Hope I die before I get old’ became their mantra. The members of the Who lived on, however, with the exception of their drummer Keith Moon.
5. Preludin: phenmetrazine appetite suppressant pills, consumed to stay awake.
6. Jerry Hall wrote in her book My Life In Pictures, Quadrille, 2010, that Mick Jagger told her he dropped acid every day during the 1960s, and that he gave up smoking heroin for her. Jagger did not sue, nor did he comment.
7. Volker Schlöndorff’s film Mord Und Totschlag translates as A Degree of Murder. It was Germany’s entry to the 1967 Cannes Film Festival.
8. ‘Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?’ was a quote from English poet Alexander Pope’s ‘Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot’ (1735). It referenced torture victims having their long bones smashed with an iron bar while strapped to a Catherine wheel.
William Rees-Mogg edited The Times from 1967 until 1981. He was the father of Conservative politician Jacob Rees-Mogg and journalist-turned-politician Annunziata Rees-Mogg.
CHAPTER ELEVEN: MOUCHE
1. Borrowdale is in the Cumbrian Lake District of England, about three hundred miles north of London. The town of Keswick lies at the northern end of its lake, Derwentwater, in the shadow of Skiddaw, the sixth highest mountain in England. The highest is Scafell Pike, which can be approached and climbed from Borrowdale. The children’s author Beatrix Potter spent summer holidays at Derwentwater. Her stories and drawings were influenced by the surrounding landscape. Ken Russell lived in an exquisite lakeside house, Coombe Cottage, next door to the Borrowdale Hotel.
2. This superb assessment of Gothic was made by the American author and critic Harlan Ellison (1934–2018).
3. Women in Love (1969) starred Oliver Reed, Glenda Jackson and Alan Bates, and is famous for the first full-frontal male sex scene on film. Ken Russell was nominated as Best Director. The Devils (1971) starring Reed and Glenda Jackson, focuses on a French Catholic priest who falls prey to witchcraft. It outraged the censors with its violent and sexually explicit content, and was banned throughout the world. Despite which, Ken was named Best Director at the Venice Film Festival and by America’s National Board of Review. The picture is still listed as one of the most controversial in history.
Ken directed the videos for Elton John’s single ‘Nikita’ (1985); Cliff Richard’s ‘She’s So Beautiful’ (1988) from Dave Clark’s musical Time (it was banned by the BBC … a Cliff Richard video!); and two of the promos of songs from Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s musical Phantom of the Opera: Sarah Brightman and Steve Harley singing the title number, and Sarah with Cliff Richard singing ‘All I Ask of You’ (1988). He also directed the video for Bryan Adams’s 1993 tribute to the late Diana, Princess of Wales, ‘Diana’.
Elton John played the Pinball Wizard in seven-foot-high boots in Tommy, and performed the song of the same name.
A father of eight, like Mick Jagger, four times-married Ken suffered several strokes in later life and died in 2011, at the age of eighty-four.
4. The Beatles released A Hard Day’s Night (1964), Help! (1965), Magical Mystery Tour (made for television in 1967, a critical flop, although its soundtrack album did well), the Yellow Submarine animated fantasy feature and Let It Be (1970).
5. John Schlesinger (1926–2003) was the Academy Award-winning director of Midnight Cowboy (1969) starring Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight, father of Angelina Jolie. He also directed 1965’s Darling, starring Julie Christie, and Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) with Glenda Jackson and Peter Finch.
6. Peyton Place was the first popular American TV soap. It aired during the mid–late 1960s, and was broadcast on British television. Based on the 1956 novel by poor young housewife Grace Metalious and the film adaptation of the same name, it charted the dark secrets and sordid goings-on of a small New England town. The principal characters, including Ryan O’Neal as Rodney Harrington, Dorothy Malone as Constance Mackenzie, Mia Farrow as her daughter Allison Mackenzie and Barbara Parkins as Betty Anderson, became household names. Metalious’s book, ridiculed by critics, was a New York Times bestseller and an international smash hit. ‘If I’m a lousy writer,’ said Metalious, ‘then an awful lot of people have lousy taste.’
7. Nicolas Roeg (1928–2018) directed Walkabout (1971) with Jenny Agutter, Don’t Look Now (1973) starring Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) with David Bowie, and The Witches (1990), based on Roald Dahl’s novel, produced by Jim Henson of The Muppets fame and starring Anjelica Huston. He married two actresses, Susan Stephen and Theresa Russell, and died in London at the age of ninety.
8. ‘Consent’ is when an individual agrees to something or permits something to happen without being bullied or pressurised into it, without being manipulated, and without being given alcohol and/or drugs to make them change their mind.
CHAPTER TWELVE: CHRISTOPHER ROBIN
1. Not only can drugs trigger asthma symptoms, they can also make a sufferer’s general condition worse. They affect lung function by narrowing the airways and making them more sensitive, according to asthma.org.uk. Drug use can also lead to stress, anxiety and depression, all of which exacerbate the condition.
2. Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4BC–65AD), best known for his plays Medea, Thyestes and Phaedra, and who influenced William Shakespeare.
3. www.nationalbullyinghelpline.co.uk/about.html
4. Palinacousis or auditory perseveration is, in the non-psychotic, the auditory phenomenon commonly referred to as an ‘ear worm’ … when you can’t get it out of your head. That tune, those lyrics, that bloody chorus. Drives you nuts. From the Greek pali, meaning again, and acousis, hearing. It is mostly triggered by external stimuli, e.g. hearing a song repeatedly, or by something that jogs a memory.
5. ‘Rock the Casbah’ was a 1982 song by the Clash.
6. The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus was released on video in 1996, twenty-eight years after it was filmed, and on DVD in 2004.
7. A.A. Milne suffered what is thought to have been post-traumatic stress disorder (there was no diagnosis in those days) after active service during World War I. The Winnie the Pooh stories are believed to have been conceived out of desperation to eradicate his horrific memories of war. Christopher Robin Milne, who suffered from Myasthenia gravis, an autoimmune disorder, died in his sleep in Totnes, Devon, in April 1996, at the age of seventy-five.
8. John Lennon was born on 9 October, as was his second son, Sean. He lived at 9 Newcastle Road, was a Beatle for nine years, wrote songs featuring the number – ‘One After 909’; ‘Revolution 9’, a ‘sound collage’ on the Beatles’ ninth studio album (the so-called ‘White Album’); and ‘#9 Dream’, on John’s ninth solo album, Walls and Bridges – which peaked at No. 9 on America’s Billboard Hot 100 chart when it was released as a single. There are endless examples: Beatles manager Brian Epstein first saw the band on 9 November 1961; they signed their contract the following year on 9 May; their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in the US took place on 9 February 1964 … all coincidental, of course.
9. The Murder of Brian Jones by Anna Wohlin and Christine Lindsjoo, Blake Publishing, 1999.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: ALTAMONT
1. Marianne Faithfull and Marsha Hunt were oblivious of the fact that they were both there with Mick that day.
2. Adonais by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1821); stanza forty.
3. The Battle of the Somme, 1 July–18 November 1916, with World War I Allied troops against armies of the German Empire. It is named after a river running through Picardy, northern France. Of more than three million men who fought, more than a million were killed or injured. An encounter later condemned as one of ‘mud, blood and futility’, it was one of the deadliest battles in human history.
4. ‘A coupla rocks’ in this context is $2 million.
5. A snuff movie is a pornographic film or video recording of an actual murder, and not one created by sophisticated special effects. No conviction having ever been made, the film industry believes such movies to be mythological. The murder in Gimme Shelter is not considered by purists to be snuff because it was not pre-meditated. The idea naturally disgusts and terrifies moviegoers, but no evidence of them exists.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: EXILE
1. The Beatles’ Abbey Road was released on 26 September 1969. Let It Be was released on 8 May 1970. Although Abbey Road is generally regarded as the ‘last’ Beatles album – ‘because Let It Be was recorded before it’ – Let It Be does in fact feature the final Beatles song ever recorded. George Harrison’s curious, plaintive, multi-tempo ‘I Me Mine’ was recorded on 3 January 1970, a year after the Get Back sessions, and after the release of Abbey Road. NB: this was the last Beatles song not counting the two recorded for the Beatles’ 1990s Anthology series, ‘Free As a Bird’ and ‘Real Love’, which were made after John Lennon had been murdered, using material he had committed to tape years earlier.
2. A number of books quote 93 per cent. Maybe this clears it up: ‘In the 1970s, the highest rate of income tax on earned income was 83 per cent. Margaret Thatcher’s government reduced it to 60 per cent in 1980 and 40 per cent in 1989 (equal to the higher rate). From 1989 to 2010, the highest rate of income tax remained at 40 per cent …’See LSE blog: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/the-top-rate-of-income-tax-2/
3. Mick owned the now Grade II listed Stargroves for nearly nine years. He sold it in 1979 for £200,000, four times what he had paid for it. Twenty years later, it was acquired from its then owner by Rod Stewart for £2.5 million. But Rod never lived there. He and his second wife Rachel Hunter separated soon after the purchase, and he sold it again. ‘I was a rock star!’ he moaned at the time. ‘You don’t dump a rock star!’ The loss of the manor house clearly irked him. ‘Instead of getting married again,’ he later said, ‘I’m going to find a woman I don’t like and just give her a house.’ In 2012, the house sold again, to a member of the American Sackler family, for more than £15 million.
Mick sold 48 Cheyne Walk later in the decade. He would return to the neighbourhood, purchasing number 98, the grand house once owned by engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel and his father before him. He obviously missed the stretch of street that ran between Albert Bridge and Battersea Bridge, its blue plaques and famous ghosts. Bram Stoker, Bertrand Russell, T.S. Eliot, Somerset Maugham, Ian Fleming, Laurence Olivier, George Best and Mick Fleetwood had all lived on Cheyne Walk. Ken Follett still did, at 92. Ronnie Wood owned 119, the house in which the Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner had died, and Keith had once lived at number 3. At 100 were Roman Abramovich and family. Was Mick planning on popping round to see his Chelsea FC-owning neighbour, to borrow the odd cup of sugar?
Mick had a thing about the name of his old home. When he built his beautiful beach house in Mustique during the seventies, he christened it Stargroves Villa.
4. Patti D’Arbanville was the inspiration behind Cat Stevens’s 1970 hits ‘My Lady D’Arbanville’ and ‘Wild World’. The actress and model was part of Andy Warhol’s Factory scene, appearing in his 1968 film Flesh and his 1973 flick L’Amour. She survived her racy youth to work steadily as an actress, had a child with actor Don Johnson in 1982, and married and divorced three times.
Pamela Miller, ‘Miss Pamela’, was part of the female line-up Girls Together Outrageously (Orally/Occasionally/Often/Only) some of whom worked for Frank Zappa as domestic staff. He produced their only album, Permanent Damage (1969). Pamela later became the notorious groupie Pamela Des Barres.
5. In 2015, Carly Simon told the LA Times that the second verse of ‘You’re So Vain’ is about Warren Beatty, the actor almost as infamous a shagger as Jagger. She added that the other two verses were about two other men, neither of whom is Mick. The contenders could include her ex-husband James Taylor, record producer David Geffen and Cat Stevens. Who also got around. It is rumoured that a recording featuring Carly of the Stones’ ‘Under My Thumb’ lies in a vault somewhere, unreleased. Let’s hear it.
6. Gram Parsons (1946–73) was born Ingram Cecil Connor III into a family of wealthy Florida citrus-growers. His father committed suicide by gunshot when Gram was twelve. His mother remarried, the children taking their stepfather’s name. His stepfather then ran away with the children’s nanny, and his mother died from cirrhosis of the liver on the day of his graduation. Poor little rich boy with a beyond dysfunctional background: the ultimate candidate for rock stardom.
After seeing Elvis Presley in concert in 1956, Gram set his heart on a career in music. He began slowly but surely, co-creating a genre of music that blended folk, rhythm and blues, country, soul and rock that placed him on the same page as the Stones. He recorded with the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers, and started hanging with the Stones during the summer of 1969 when they were working on Let It Bleed and their upcoming US tour. He paved his way into their lives with money: they accepted him because he was rich. The Stones did not hang with leeches and gold diggers. Your typical seventies reckless rocker, he shared Keith’s heroin addiction and used alcohol and pills like soda and sweets. He became devoted to the Stones, and performed at Altamont as one of the Flying Burrito Brothers. He got out of there on one of the last choppers and tried to pull Michelle Phillips, of the Mamas and the Papas, who was there with Keith.
Gram became a solo artist in early 1970, but his drug addiction hampered his work ethic. He accompanied the Stones on their three-week jaunt around England and Scotland during March 1971, hoping that their new Rolling Stones Records would sign him: he and Keith were talking about recording an album together.
Gram married his long-suffering girlfriend; got off heroin; got in with Emmylou Harris, and started recording with her. They toured the US. In summer 1973, a discarded cigarette started a fire that burned down his Topanga Canyon house, destroying everything except a single guitar and his favourite Jaguar car.
He could afford to pay Elvis’s band, and did, to back him on the brilliant solo albums GP and Grievous Angel, that he recorded towards the end of his life. But he preferred getting zonked, especially while out on the road. An average guitarist, he was a gifted songwriter with the voice of an angel.
Parsons was life-threateningly promiscuous and neglected his daughter Polly. He could be charming company, but was often disloyal to his friends. A fantasist and a rewriter of truth, it was said that no one ever knew him truly. His knowledge of country music was blinding. He made it his mission to contemporise it and expand its appeal. To some extent, he got there.
Gram died on 18 (some say 19) September 1973, from morphine and alcohol overdose. He was twenty-six. His tour manager and friend Phil Kaufman stole his body and conveyed it to Joshua Tree National Park, where he cremated it in the car park. Kaufman later insisted that Gram had asked him to. He got away with it.
7. Gretchen Burrell is listed by IMDb as Gretchen Berrill. Gretchen Parsons relaunched her acting career as Gretchen Carpenter after she remarried.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: CRISIS
1. Parkinson’s disease is caused by a loss of nerve cells in part of the brain. It causes problems like tremors and stiffness that worsen over time. Physiotherapy and medication can improve quality of life, but there is currently no cure. To support research, visit www.parkinsons.org.uk or call 0808 800 0303.
2. PPL PRS Ltd is the joint venture of the UK’s two music licensing organisations. It grants The Music Licence, enabling licence holders to legally play and perform music in public. www.pplprs.co.uk
3. Baby-faced Stevie Winwood started performing in 1956 at the age of eight, and joined the Spencer Davis Group, with his elder brother Muff, when he was fourteen. When the band celebrated its first No. 1 single, ‘Keep On Running’, a cover of the song written by Jamaican artist and Island Records songwriter Jackie Edwards, Steve was still only seventeen. He left the line-up two years later and went on to great success with Traffic, Blind Faith and Ginger Baker’s Air Force. He probably peaked too soon and withdrew from the mainstream music scene for several years. He re-emerged in 1986 at the age of thirty-eight with his album Back in the High Life, scoring a hit with the single ‘Higher Love’.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: JUGGERNAUT
1. Glaswegian singer-songwriter Jim Diamond topped the UK singles chart at the end of October 1984 with ‘I Should Have Known Better’, co-written by his pal Graham Lyle of Gallagher and Lyle. But he threw his No. 1 away, appealing to fans to go out and buy Band Aid’s ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’, the fundraiser for famine relief that led to Live Aid. Although it is often stated that Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s ‘The Power of Love’ was the Christmas No. 1 in 1984, it wasn’t: https://www.officialcharts.com/chart-news/every-official-christmas-number-1-ever-__3618/
Until 1997, ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ was the UK’s best-selling single in the UK. It was displaced by ‘Something About the Way You Look Tonight/Candle in the Wind 1997’, Elton John’s double A-side in commemoration of Diana, Princess of Wales. The Band Aid offering stands at No. 2, followed by Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, ‘Mull of Kintyre’ by Wings and ‘You’re the One That I Want’ from John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John.
Jim re-recorded his signature song for his solo album Jim Diamond (1983). In regular touch for more than forty years, we exchanged texts on 7 October 2015 while I was en route to Chicago to give a lecture. He died the next day, just seventeen days after the death of his mother.
2. In Greek mythology, Pandora was the first human woman, and as such corresponds to the biblical Eve. A ‘beautiful evil’ whose descendants would ‘torment the human race’, she was given gifts by each of the gods. She is said to have opened a jar, handed down as a ‘box’, which contained all the evils of humanity. She thus unleashed them on an unsuspecting world. Only Hope remained contained.
3. ‘The Red Special’, also known as ‘The Fireplace’ and ‘The Old Lady’, is Queen guitarist Brian May’s home-made instrument that he created with his father Harold sixty years ago. The wood from which the neck is made came from an old fireplace mantel. Other materials used in its construction were bits and pieces lying around the family home, including from his mother Ruth’s sewing box. Brian has played it on virtually all Queen recordings and during live performances since the early 1970s.
4. WAGS is an acronym for ‘wives and girlfriends’, also known as ‘footballers’ wives’. Who tend to be young, blonde and leggy with Barbie tresses and killer talons, and usually of the ‘Model, Actress, Whatever’ variety (check out the song of that name which featured in the film The Wedding Present). Having become a British household term during the 2006 FIFA World Cup tournament, thanks to David Beckham’s wife Victoria and Ashley Cole’s wife Cheryl, it is now in use internationally (‘Les Wags’, ‘die WAGS’). It is also applied to the female partners of high-pro men in other sports.
5. Walter Theodore ‘Sonny’ Rollins (born 1930) is the legendary American jazz tenor saxophonist and composer, whose career spans seven decades. A jailbird and heroin addict during the 1950s, he turned himself around and went on to record with Miles Davis, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, establishing a reputation as the ‘Saxophone Colossus’ and ‘the greatest living improviser’. He plays on three tracks on Tattoo You, but goes uncredited. Having travelled the world commanding huge fees for his appearances and having released many albums, he withdrew from public performance in 2012, citing ill health. At the time of writing, he is ninety-one years old.
6. That doorway, on St Mark’s Place in the East Village, is known as ‘New York’s hippest street’. Billie Holiday, Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane and Miles Davis played at the Five Spot jazz club at the corner with Third Avenue. Leon Trotsky, Debbie Harry, W.H. Auden and William S. Burroughs all lived there. Andy Warhol ran a nightclub there. Billy Joel filmed a video there – for the track ‘A Matter of Trust’ from his 1986 album The Bridge. The New York Dolls and Led Zeppelin shot album covers there. The Dolls posed in front of the famous news-stand Gem Spa, said to have invented the egg cream (a type of milkshake with neither eggs nor cream in it) for the back of the sleeve of their eponymous first album; while Led Zeppelin photographed number 96 and 98 for their 1975 album Physical Graffiti – the same buildings used by the Stones in ‘Waiting on a Friend’. Fun factoid: the tea shop Physical Graffitea later opened in the same building.
7. Port production is expressed in ‘pipes’. A pipe of port, as traditionally ordered from their wine merchant by wealthy clients, was usually sixty dozen or 720 bottles. A pipe, today, is a unit of liquid volume equivalent to 550 litres.
8. Latin, Cicero: ‘Oh the times! Oh the customs!’, was famously interpreted by English historian, classicist and cricketer Charles Duke Yonge (1812–91) as ‘Shame on this age and on its lost principles!’
9. ‘The economy, stupid’ was a phrase coined by Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign strategist James Carville in 1992. Their campaign used the US recession to steal a march on George W. Bush.
10. 10. Thunderclap Newman were an English rock band formed by the Who’s Pete Townshend and manager Kit Lambert, featuring John ‘Speedy’ Keen, Jimmy McCulloch and Andy ‘Thunderclap’ Newman. ‘Something in the Air’ was a UK No. 1 in July 1969. The lyrics actually read as follows: ‘Call out the instigators/ Because there’s something in the air/ We’ve got to get together sooner or later/ Because the revolution’s here.’
Scottish guitarist McCulloch, a precocious talent, became a member of Paul McCartney’s Wings. He was found dead in his apartment in September 1979, aged twenty-six. Although he was not a known user, cause of death was later given as alcohol and morphine poisoning.
11. 11. ‘The gods’ are the furthest seats from the stage in the highest tiers of a performance venue: the cheap seats.
12. 12. … according to writer and reviewer Mic Wright.
13. 13. Tommy Steele, aka Sir Thomas Hicks OBE (born 1936), was the UK’s original rock star and teen idol, whose hits included ‘Rock with the Caveman’, ‘Singing the Blues’ and ‘Little White Bull’. The soundtrack of his 1957 biopic, The Tommy Steele Story, became the first British No. 1 album. A major star of stage and screen (see what I mean?) and well into his ninth decade, he performs to this day.
14. 14. ‘Portraits in the attic’: a reference to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde’s only novel, published in 1890/91. It tells of a well-to-do young man who lives a depraved and murderous lifestyle but retains his youthful beauty by selling his soul to the Devil. His portrait, painted by his friend Basil, absorbs his evils. Banished to the attic, the picture reveals the truth about what a grotesque Dorian had become.
15. 15. From American Gods (2001), the novel by Neil Gaiman.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: MANDY
1. This quotation is usually attributed to philosopher and political writer Edmund Burke (1729–97), but is perhaps more accurately traced back at least in essence to another philosopher, John Stuart Mill (1806–73). He said as much, if not in so many words, during his 1867 address at the University of St Andrews in Scotland: ‘Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.’
2. At the time of writing, Bill Cosby’s new civil trial is pending.
3. Roman Polanski: in May 2018, during an interview with Newsweek Polska, the fugitive child rapist denounced the #MeToo movement as ‘mass hysteria’ and ‘total hypocrisy’. He made these comments after the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that it was at last expelling him and Bill Cosby. Polanski was forty-four years old when he raped thirteen-year-old Samantha Geimer in Los Angeles. She was not, allegedly, his only victim. He admitted part of the crime, and was convicted of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor. But before he received full sentence, and having spent forty-two days being evaluated by psychiatrists ahead of sentencing, he fled to Paris. He never returned to America, where he could have been sentenced to fifty years’ imprisonment. He subsequently won six Oscars: three for Tess, starring Nastassja Kinski, and three for The Pianist, with Adrien Brody and Emilia Fox. His detractors continue to hope that he will be extradited to face re-trial. Meanwhile, people ask, will Hollywood now obliterate his star from the Walk of Fame? They won’t have to. He doesn’t have one: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/aug/09/hollywood-walk-of-fame-dark-history-trump-star
4. Ken Gold co-wrote and produced many hits throughout the seventies and eighties, including ‘I Can’t Ask For Any More’ by Cliff Richard, and ‘You To Me Are Everything’ and ‘Can’t Get By Without You’ by the Real Thing. He also wrote for Billy Ocean and the Nolans.
5. Untouchables by Michael Gillard and Laurie Flynn, Abe Books, 2012, exposes countless cases of dirty cops, bent justice, racism and bribery within Scotland Yard.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: CLÍODHNA
1. La fourchette is French for ‘fork’. It also happens to be the name of a small fold of membrane connecting the labia minora in the posterior part of the vulva. Wonder why on earth Mick chose that.
CHAPTER NINETEEN: RESONANCE
1. The opening line of The Go-Between, the 1953 novel by Leslie Poles Hartley CBE (1895–1972).
2. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), German poet, novelist and playwright. Author of Faust (1808 and 1832), his play about a man who sells his soul to the Devil. It is widely considered to be Germany’s greatest contribution to literature.
CHAPTER TWENTY: SO LONG
1. The vaudeville blues song ‘Trouble in Mind’ was written by jazz pianist Richard M. Jones. He recorded it with vocalist Thelma La Vizzo in 1924. It was made famous by Bertha ‘Chippie’ Hill two years later. She also recorded it with Jones, adding Louis Armstrong on trumpet. The now blues standard has been recorded and performed by many, notably Nina Simone, who had a hit with it in 1961, and Otis Spann and Lonnie Johnson, who recorded it in Copenhagen in 1963. Take a minute to find that one, it is sublime.
2. ‘Up Above My Head’ is a traditional gospel song. It was recorded by the Southern Sons in 1941. Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s and Marie Knight’s duet of it in 1947 was a huge hit. Tharpe’s guitar-playing is a thing to behold.
3. Songwriter Don Raye famously wrote for family singing group the Andrews Sisters, who were hugely popular during World War II for entertaining the Allied forces. They are reckoned to have sold around eighty million records.