MICK JAGGER makes a solo album. In Paris, the singer talks dodging paparazzi, the outrageous young Rolling Stones, and the miners’ strike. He even touches on his solo prospects. “You can’t expect to get No 1s all the time,” he says, “and if you do you’re a cunt.”
Jagger cuts through all the crap…
“When I was in Barbados and Jerry was pregnant, we done a lot of pictures for the press and we didn’t wanna be bothered any more and… I could see figures in the garden… y’know, we done the pictures, we played the game. So I walked out very quietly and I found this guy underneath the hedge. He’s lying there and I’m going ‘Heeyyy’ and he goes, ‘C’mon, just another few rolls.’
“So I got him in and he has a cup of tea and he says, ‘I’m very proud – I was the one who got Princess Di when she was pregnant in the Bahamas, remember that one? Lying on the beach? The Queen called it the blackest day in English journalism.’
“He really loved it. And he was saying, ‘Oh, that was much worse… I had to crawl through all this stuff,’ and he was giving me the whole works about how he had to hide all night in this hedge. What a way to earn a pound note! What can you do? If you’ve not much going on it’s alright, but if you have a baby or you’ve got a new bird or you’re getting a divorce, it’s always a bit dodgy with that lot. Well, there’s always something.”
Well, if you’ve got skeletons in the cupboard, Mick, what do you expect?
“That’s right.” Not so much tornado, more a chilling wind…
Jagger enters the fray just 15 minutes behind schedule. A paltry 15 minutes. Before you even notice he’s there he’s whipped off his jacket, dumped the poncho, shaken every hand in the room and, eyes darting in a dozen different directions at once, absorbed every minute detail of the scene confronting him. Instinctively you know there is no way you could ever win an argument with this man. Without having to say a word, the boy, instantly, is in charge.
This story is from the March 2017 edition of The History of Rock.
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This story is from the March 2017 edition of The History of Rock.
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