THE ROLLING STONES – by Bob Spitz

Led by multimillionaires Sir Michael Philip Jagger and the now abstemious Keith Richards, The Rolling Stones are as solid a fixture in the British psyche as the Royal Family, the Houses of Parliament and 100-year-old naturalist Sir David Attenborough. This was not always the case, however. Indeed, for the first 15 or so years of a career that seems eternal, they were looked upon by the forces of law and order as desperadoes and misfits, a menace to society, a shocking manifestation of undisciplined adolescents whose long hair, scruffy clothes and jungle music was an affront to polite civilisation. “Lock ’em up,” they cried and, by golly, they almost succeeded.

This doorstopper of a biography by US writer Bob Spitz is therefore a timely reminder of those times, essential reading for anyone who became a Stones fan during the last 40 years or so, which I’ll wager is the vast majority of those who during that time have packed stadiums around the world and paid top dollar to watch Jagger and Co strut their stuff on stages large enough to accommodate the many offspring Jagger, Richards (and Brian Jones) have sired between them. For this generation of fans, that tongue and lips logo is as universal as the curvy contours of a Coca-Cola bottle, the cowbell intro to ‘Honky Tonk Women’ as recognisable as any national anthem and The Rolling Stones a byword for a dependable night out of rollicking rock and roll. 

Spitz has worked very hard to document the lives and times of the Stones and, like most biographers of rock performers who’ve stayed the course, his focus is almost exclusively on the early years. By the halfway point of this 690-page book we’re still in the 1960s, on the tour that led up to Altamont, not yet a quarter into the group’s lifespan; 150 pages later, in 1975, Jagger is vainly defending the cover of Black And Blue; 100 pages after that we’ve reached the acknowledgements followed by 90 pages of end matter. All of which demonstrates how Spitz has prudently concluded that once the Stones became rich, touring the world every three or four years – seven such tours are helpfully itemised in one paragraph on page 586 – to amass vast fortunes, their story becomes repetitive, even dull; far better to concentrate on the shenanigans that came before, the naughty years on which their legend was built.

        This, of course, is anything but dull and neither is the book. At its heart are the many chapters that cover the period between 1965 and 1975, which relate the extraordinary highs and lows of the Stones’ saga: fan mania that rivals The Beatles; pissing on garage forecourts; the Redlands and other drug busts; the court appearances; Jagger’s blustery relationship with Marianne Faithfull; the Brian/Anita/Keith love triangle; Jones’ downfall and death; the financial squeeze after falling out with US co-manager Allen Klein; Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile On Main Street – the great triumvirate of Stones’ masterworks; the nightmare of Altamont and its repercussions; Richards’ debilitating heroin addiction; tax exile in France; and, finally, back on the road as a stadium-filling juggernaut. 

        Quite how Jagger, firmly in charge after Klein and early manager Andrew Oldham are dismissed, found the reserves of mental stamina to deal with it all while writing songs and fronting the group on stage boggles the mind. Spitz covers all these high jinks in great and often illuminating detail, a roller-coaster ride through the Stones’ devil-may-care years that makes this central section of his book a page-turner of the highest order, most especially when recounting the mischief that occurred at Nellcôte, Richards’ hideaway on the French Riviera that became a flophouse for every ne’er do well for miles around.

        Before and after all this, the momentum isn’t quite as recklessly debauched. Assembling the group from the pool of London’s young blues devotees took time but, unlike The Beatles, there was no Hamburg or Liverpool to hone their chops on stage for three years before fame beckoned. Once the right five had found each other, it happened quite quickly, as did the notoriety stoked by Oldham who was brilliant at PR but out his depth controlling this bunch of strong-willed characters. Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts keep their noses clean for the most part, maintaining a low profile during the mayhem; Jones, acknowledged early on as the best musician in the group, is fragile, losing his way, an accident waiting to happen; and, once they started writing songs together, Jagger and Richards take control, each reliant on the other though no prizes for guessing who was the most unreliable, at least until he weaned himself off heroin following that 1977 Toronto bust. Mick Taylor, who never really fitted in, comes and goes. Ron Wood is a far better fit, musically and mentally. WAGS come and go. 

        An awful lot is crammed into the final two chapters. The penultimate finds Jagger and Richards at loggerheads, the bone of contention the former’s stab at a solo career, and for a while the group’s future is in serious doubt. Meanwhile, they lose Ian Stewart, the Rolling Stone who doesn’t get his photograph taken, Watts goes off the rails, and Wyman hits the headlines through his courtship of 13-year-old Mandy Smith whom he would marry when she turned 18. Exhausted, he leaves the band four years later.

        The final chapter concertinas the period from around 1993 to the present day, 30+years, and closes, rightly, with the death of Charlie Watts and a moving report of the tribute night at Ronnie Scott’s organised by his great friend and fellow jazz enthusiast Dave Green. A brief epilogue finds the author attending a 2024 Stones show in Los Angeles. “Mick and Keith were both eighty years old,” notes Spitz.

        The book’s only flaw is that it is written with an American accent, almost certainly a reflection of its intended market. While the size of America – where in some parts the weekly grocery shop involves a day-long round trip – can perhaps explain how Dartford is described as “around the corner” from Ealing (they’re 65 miles apart), and Cheltenham is “nearby” to Guilford (about 100 miles apart), the vast majority of reviews quoted are from US media, and the UK – the country of the Stones’ birth, after all – doesn’t get much of a look in after the group has decamped to France. As an example, their barnstorming 2013 Glastonbury appearance doesn't merit a mention. Still, this is a minor quibble in what is the most substantial Stones book I’ve read since Keith Richards’ Life in 2010. 

        As stated, the book has 690 pages, plus two 16-page picture sections, includes lengthy source notes and a decent index. The front cover features a magnificent portrait of Jagger and Richards by Norman Seeff, albeit from the era of Mick Taylor, who is on the reverse alongside Wyman and Watts. I think Woody or Jones belong there myself. 

Charlie’s Good Tonight: The Authorised Biography of Charlie Watts by Paul Sexton

Inspired to dig deeper into the world of Charlie Watts after learning about his fabulous book collection – see last post about Christie’s sale of Charlie’s library – I bought a book called Charlie’s Good Tonight: The Authorised Biography of Charlie Watts by Paul Sexton. It was a mistake. It is bland, riddled with repetition and insufferably dull, unlike its subject, and I strongly suspect that its subject would agree with me, not that Charlie Watts would have wanted an authorised biography to have been written about him in the first place. 

        No one in their right mind would deny that Charlie Watts was a fine fellow, a great drummer, a delightful companion and man of exceptionally modest virtue. Such qualities, however, do not make for a page-turner. Paul Sexton, I fear, was faced with an insoluble problem when he took on this commission, presumably at the behest of Charlie’s wife Shirley, who died in December, 2022, 16 months after her husband (the book was published in September 2022), insofar as Charlie didn’t say very much, at least to interviewers. When he did talk, he was vague, often evasive and occasionally taciturn. So, the most obvious research tool (and page filler), music press interviews, was scant to say the least. The next port of call would have been fellow Stones past and present, among the most useful archivist Bill Wyman, all of whom loved him dearly, as did his daughter Seraphina and granddaughter Charlotte. Old friends and fellow musicians too weigh in with their memories but all anyone can say is what a great, laid back, lovely bloke Charlie was, which is no doubt correct.

        Mick and Keith write forewords and it must have been something of a relief for them to read a book about a Rolling Stone that draws a polite veil over the stuff that makes most people buy them in the first place. It’s no secret that the Stones’ story is littered with decadence on an industrial scale, as detailed in countless other books, but apart from a brief lapse in the mid-1980s when he overindulged in drugs and booze Charlie seems to have been looking the other way when all that was going on. It comes as no surprise that the brief lapse is dealt with briefly.

        The distance that Charlie placed between himself and the rest of the group, certainly Mick, Keith and Brian, though perhaps not Bill, was established early on. “It’s just a job that pays well,” was his default position, and it remained that way until the end. It seems he threatened to leave a few times but was dragged back, perhaps because he enjoyed playing the drums, perhaps because Rolling Stones tours were so lucrative, most especially from the 1990s onwards. He was never happier than when the tour was over and he could return to his small family, whom he loved as deeply as they loved him. Charlotte thinks he was born a granddad, which is rather sweet, but doesn’t set the pulse racing. 

        There isn’t even much about the Stones’ music, which is discussed only in the most insipid of terms, and never with a critical eye. Nevertheless, if you want to know about Charlie’s love of jazz, the jazz albums he made and jazz bands he led, his drumming technique, what others felt about his drumming and lifestyle, the camaraderie within the Rolling Stones, the cool and often extremely expensive clothes he liked to wear, his love of cricket and antique firearms, and Shirley’s love of horses, this is the book for you. Considering it’s about a man who lived to the grand age of 80, it won’t take you long to read either. File under ‘Affectionate Memoir’. 

CHARLIE WATTS – Some Sort Of Epic Grandeur

The true character of a man is often revealed only after their passing, frequently to their detriment, but the opposite is the case with Charlie Watts. There were hints of his noble demeanour during his lifetime, of course; that quiet reserve, that well-groomed approach to everything he ever did, that refusal to bow to anyone, least of all his fellow Rolling Stones.  

Some Sort Of Epic Grandeur is the title of Matthew Bruccoli’s definitive biography of the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, and I chose it for this post not just because Charlie’s first edition of The Great Gatsby, signed by Fitzgerald, has the highest guide price (£200,000-£300,000) of any of around 100 books in Christie’s forthcoming sale of almost 200 items from Charlie’s collection but because Epic Grandeur seems to me to be the perfect synonym for the life of Charles Robert Watts.

I was alerted to this sale by my former Melody Maker colleague Richard Williams whose post on his Blue Moment blog on the same subject he perceptively titled A Man Of Wealth And Taste. When we last met he and I agreed that Charlie’s episode of the 2002 My Life As A Rolling Stone TV series of profiles of individual members of the group was quite wonderful, leaving viewers in no doubt that Mr Watts was a Gentleman in the strict, old-fashioned sense of the word. His Savile Row tailor said precisely that, and he should know.

Now we have further enlightenment in the form of the catalogue for the Christie’s sale, a document of some grandeur in itself. Charlie Watts: Gentleman, Collector, Rolling Stone, it says on the cover, placing Charlie’s credentials in order of importance as they see it. Almost 200 pages of items on sale are prefaced by essays by Paul Sexton, author of Charlie’s Good Tonight, The Authorised Biography of Charlie Watts. “Once Charlie Watts had some funds at his disposal, he became almost obsessively acquisitive, but only about things that complemented his impeccable taste,” he writes. “Cars, first edition books, silverware, flatware [cutlery], records, photographs, memorabilia on the American Civil War and Horatio Nelson, and vintage drum kits.”

So, where we do we start on this superb collection of first editions? How about Agatha Christie? We have 25 hard backs, including the first appearance of Miss Marple in The Thirteen Problems, with ultra-rare dust jacket and wraparound band, price 7/6d when published in 1932, now estimated at £40,000-£60,000. “We have been unable to trace any first edition in a dust-jacket sold at auction,” Christie’s inform buyers. Or how about Parker Pyne Investigates “from the library of Agatha Christie’s sister, first edition in the extremely scarce dust-jacket, signed by the author and her sister Madge”, (£6,000-£10,000).

        Moving on, we have Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study In Scarlet, 1890, “the first Sherlock Holmes Story: presentation editions of the first American edition, inscribed by the author” (£25,000-£35,000), along with four other Holmes books, including The Hound Of The Baskervilles, first published in 1902, (£70,000-£100,000), “a remarkably fine presentation copy of the first edition in book form, inscribed by the author on the title page: ‘I perambulated Dartmoor before I wrote this book. A Conan Doyle.’”

The Great Gatsby is by no means the only Fitzgerald book in the sale. There are eight more, including a second (unsigned) first edition with the iconic blue cover depicting the eyes of optometrist T. J. Eckleburg over the lights of Manhattan (£100,000-£150,000). 

    Elsewhere we can find Graham Greene (13 books), Dashiell Hammett (five), James Joyce (two), George Orwell (five), P. G. Wodehouse (seven), Evelyn Waugh (11), Dylan Thomas, Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, H. G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams, Virginia Woolf, Langston Hughes and others. In almost every case Charlie collected signed first editions, some accompanied by letters from the authors to friends. 

Then there’s music, mostly jazz (photographs, paintings, records and artefacts like Duke Ellington’s baton) but also Count Basie Orchestra manuscript arrangements for 31 compositions, 88 pages in total (£30,000-£50,000) and material that relates to the Great American Songbook: scores. for George Gershwin’s An American In Paris, Rhapsody In Blue and Porgy And Bess, all signed. Mostly, though, it seems Charlie liked his namesake, Charlie Parker, and collected 78rpm recordings, autographed photos, contracts and even reel-to-reel tapes from Parker’s recording sessions. It’s all in the catalogue, with precise descriptions, price a modest £40 to delve into Charlie’s obsessions. 

In the essay at the beginning of the catalogue Charlie’s daughter Seraphina tells Paul Sexton: “I opened this cupboard the other night, a piece of furniture with drawers, and I found all these things, Edwardian glasses and carved pipes. I was like, ‘He’s forgotten about this stuff, hasn’t he, totally forgotten about it! I really wanted to speak to him [and say] ‘What is this? This could be Roman and incredibly valuable, or it could be a piece of junk.’ He had phases where I can see he’s gone completely OCD-collecting mad, throughout his life.”

The Charlie Watts Collection can be viewed at Christie’s St James Street premises between 20 and 27 September, and the sale takes place there at the 28th.

THE STONES AND BRIAN JONES – BBC 2 Documentary by Nick Broomfield

Stonesmania never grabbed headlines like Beatlemania but it was just as intense, perhaps even more so as the Stones attracted almost as many boys as girls and these fans were more uninhibited, more inclined to rush the stage and grab hold of Mick or Brian or Keith. They didn’t bother much with Bill, who was a bit forbidding, and couldn’t reach Charlie behind his drums, but then again Charlie was much too dignified to get involved in any of that malarkey anyway.

        Brian wasn’t dignified. He laughed his head off at the behaviour of fans, even encouraged it. One widely circulated comment from him that didn’t appear in last night’s documentary on BB2 occurred when the Stones were on the same bill as The Beatles at London’s Royal Albert Hall in April, 1963. Observing the fan frenzy as he helped Neil Aspinall move The Beatles’ gear, Brian turned to early manager Giorgio Gomelsky. “That’s what I went, Giorgio,” he said.

        He certainly got it, as several wonderfully chaotic scenes of Stonesmania worldwide in the documentary confirm, but if Jones really did say that, it gives lie to the belief that he was the purist in the group who railed against the pop star ambitions of Mick and Keith, aided and abetted by their next manager, Andrew Loog Oldham. This theory was promoted by this very watchable documentary, which featured plenty of hitherto unseen footage of Jones as a boy and interviews with many from the Stones circle, some new and others archival, prominent among them four of the five women who bore his children, all of whom harbour surprisingly benign feelings towards their father regardless of the callous manner in which he abandoned them.

        What is without question is that without Jones there would not have been a Rolling Stones. He was the band’s architect, furthering Jagger and Richards’ research into, and enthusiasm for, blues music, recruiting Bill and, probably, Charlie and taking on the hustler’s role until Oldham and his early partner Eric Easton became their managers. Bill Wyman, credited as Historical Consultant, confirms this and throughout the 90-minute programme extols Brian’s talents on guitar and other instruments he brought along to the studio to enhance recordings like ‘Little Red Rooster’, ‘Lady Jane’ and ‘Paint It Black’. Wyman, a genial old cove who turns 87 in October, sits in his book-filled study like a long-retired university don and gamely hums along to Stones numbers, explaining the parts that Jones contributed while waving his fingers around like a conductor. 

        The other side of the coin isn’t so entertaining. Raised in a family that expected him to aspire to their own bourgeoise ambitions, Jones was a mixed-up ball of confusion, at times playful, at times cruel, at times arrogant, at times deeply unsure of himself. When he wanted to be, he could be exceedingly courteous. After his parents kicked him out of the family home for not living up to their upwardly mobile expectations, he charmed his way into the homes of various girlfriends, impregnated them and moved on. 

        Once he gravitated to London, he founded the Stones and, at first, seemed crucial to their progress. He was a shaggy-haired dandy dressed in all the latest styles, a fixture of Swinging London, liked and admired by his peers, even Dylan. However, as his role as the group’s leader was usurped by Mick and Keith, encouraged in their songwriting by Oldham, his insecurity lead him into a downward spiral, exacerbated by drugs, dismissal from the group for being unable to cut it on stage and, soon afterwards, his death. 

        All that is pretty much well-known to anyone who has followed the Stones’ story over the years, and the documentary reinforces this version of events. It skims over Brian’s court appearances on drugs offences, doesn’t go into much detail about the bust-up with Anita Pallenberg – though all concur she was a terrible influence – and, unlike subsequent books that cleave to the murder conspiracy theory, avoids the headline-grabbing temptation to suggest that this was how Jones met his death at Cotchford Farm in East Sussex, the former home of Winnie The Pooh creator A. A. Milne, where his body was found in the swimming pool on July 3, 1969, aged just 27.

        What I did learn was that Jones hated ‘Satisfaction’, that four of his five sons were called Julian and that Jones’ father Lewis came to regret the way he treated his son. The documentary closes with one of his girlfriends, Linda Lawrence, reading a heart-rending note from Lewis Jones to Brian that she found amongst her mementoes many years later. “I have been a very poor and intolerant father,” he wrote. “I was quite out of my depth.”

        As narrator Paul Trynka, author of a book on Jones, makes clear, few of the millions of fans who nowadays flock to see the Stones in vast stadiums around the world have even heard of Brian Jones. Nick Broomfield’s documentary goes some way to restoring Jones’ role in their phenomenal career, if not his reputation as a human being. 

THE ROLLING STONES: EXILE ON MAIN STREET

Fifty years old this week, the double album Exile On Main Street is being rightly celebrated as the Rolling Stones’ greatest ever LP. The hits compilation Forty Licks aside, it is the Stones’ LP I have listened to the most; released as a single CD in 1994, I doubt any six-month period has passed since when I haven’t played it at least once at home or in my car, a great big smile erupting as ‘Rocks Off’ blasts from my speakers, Keith’s guitar swinging into action as Mick sings ambiguously about sex and, possibly, the perils it can bring. 

        It’s a downhill, helter-skelter ride from there, not a duff track among the 17 that follow, a smorgasbord of hi-energy rock, spirited gospel, honky country and soupy blues. Never again would the Stones sound so confident, so convincing, so energised, so prolific, so eclectic, so wrapped up in their musical ideals in the space of one LP, albeit one that occupied four sides of vinyl. When I play it now I sense a sort of musical claustrophobia, as if the group was cramming as much into it while they could, perhaps even making a final grand statement before the money ran out and they imploded into a mess of Mick’s upwardly mobile ambitions, Keith’s drug addiction, Charlie’s ambivalence, Bill’s gloom and Mick Taylor’s inexperience. 

        We could be forgiven for thinking that ‘All Down The Line’ and ‘I Just Want To See His Face’ were produced by different bands. The former – which was actually recorded 18 months earlier in Los Angeles – ranks alongside any of the Stones’ great Chuck Berry rewrites, a Grade-A rocker that demands repeated plays, while the latter is a swampy voodoo chant in the style of Dr John, the sort of thing that might be heard at a gospel church in Mississippi where the congregation speaks in tongues. 

        No two songs on the entire record are less alike than this pair, and they are matched by the incomparable ‘Tumbling Dice’, with its layer after layer of sinewy guitar lines, or the country campfire vibe of ‘Sweet Virginia’, in which Gram Parsons surely had a hand, and its companion piece ‘Torn And Frayed’, or the relentless, almost punk, pace of ‘Rip This Joint’, or Keith’s own ‘Happy’, virtually a one-man band creation. 

        Everywhere you look there’s something to gorge on: the James Moore cover ‘Shake Your Hips’, aka ‘Hip Shake’, given a sensuous Southern twist; the OTT tribute to Angela Davis that was ‘Sweet Black Angel’; the down-home blues of ‘Stop Breaking Down’, rearranged from Robert Johnson’s original with Mick Taylor on slide; the sumptuous gospel of ‘Loving Cup’ with Nicky Hopkins’ cascading piano; even the throwaway ‘Turd On The Run’, another pacy sprint with Mick’s harp howling in the wind.

        What have I missed? Bobby Key’s sax in ‘Casino Boogie’; the sleazy ‘Ventilator Blues’; the emotion-packed, choral majesty of ‘Let It Loose’; and the swaggering finale ‘Soul Survivor’, the cue to start again at the beginning, as I so often have. 

In Keith’s book, Life, the Stones’ guitarist says the title of the album came from the group’s tax-imposed exile in the South of France where the LP was recorded, the main street being the Riviera coast road that stretched from Cannes to Monte Carlo. Being cooped up in Nellcôte, the 18-room mansion built in the 1890s in the hills above Villefranche Sur Mer, the Stones and their entourage of wives, crew and additional musicians like Keys, Jim Price, Parsons and Hopkins, had nothing else to do but eat, drink and make music, urgently, and result still sounds spectacular. 

 

CHARLIE WATTS & TED DEXTER: NOT SO FAR APART

On the surface, Charlie Watts and Ted Dexter, who died last week within 24 hours of each other, might seem to have little in common. The former, the son of a Wembley prefab-dwelling lorry driver, was the drummer with The Rolling Stones, while the latter, born in Milan to a prosperous insurance broker, captained England at cricket. Charlie went to a secondary modern and Ted went to Radley, a public school; Charlie studied at Harrow Art School, Ted entered Cambridge, probably on the strength of his sporting skills. 

        So far so different but here’s a few similarities. They were both spectacularly good at what they did. Both always dressed smartly and carried themselves with an air that bordered on the aristocratic. Neither suffered fools and were, in fact, quite shy, which sometimes came across as arrogance or, at the very least, impatience. Both were married for over 60 years to the same women whom they met when they were in their early twenties. They both loved fast cars and bred horses. They both reached 80, Ted a bit more. Their obituaries in the Guardian occupied the same amount of space – one page plus one column – and both were mourned deeply within the fields in which they excelled, with glowing tributes from their peers and contemporaries. Finally, I saw the Stones perform five times between 1971 and 1981, and probably saw Ted Dexter bat and bowl about five times at the Scarborough Cricket Festival between 1958 and 1962. And I enjoyed watching them both immensely. 

        But there’s something deeper that I’ve fathomed, not just through reading copious obituaries of both but from observing their graceful, elegant journeys through life. Both showed an identical lack of concern about what others thought of them. They simply hadn’t a care in the world if how they behaved was contrary to what was expected of rock stars or first-class cricketers. Both lived their lives precisely as they wanted to live their lives, casually and utterly insouciant, and would not be dictated to by those around him nor, heaven forbid, public opinion. 

        Charlie Watts was the odd one out in the Stones. Not for him the dedication to decadence espoused by Brian and Keith, nor Mick’s vanity or Bill’s promiscuity. All this was beneath him. Aside from a bit of a wobble in the 1980s, he behaved at all times with dignity, slightly aloof from the rest of the gang and always smartly dressed, in the certain knowledge that they needed him more than he needed them. The Stones were his day job, his bread and butter, nothing more, nothing less. He could have been a graphic designer and would no doubt have been a damn good one. It always seemed to me as if he viewed his position in the group as slightly absurd, as if he was the beneficiary of a lucky break that occurred through being in the right place at the right time, but once installed he knew precisely what was required of him and how to become indispensable. He was no doubt bored when required to drum for take after take after he’d nailed it first time. He followed his own path and if that meant financing a 38-piece jazz band just so he could play drums alongside them, then so be it. 

        In a similar way, Ted Dexter refused to be intimidated by the cricket establishment. He batted with enormous style the way he wanted to bat, taking on fearsome fast bowlers without today’s helmets, and if the cricketing gods were with him he smacked boundaries all around the field. If they weren’t and he was dismissed, well there was always tomorrow. He looked bored when he was fielding. His cricketing career was curtailed by a freak motoring accident but he didn’t complain, just turned his skills to something else. He was dignified, and dressed smartly. He could have been a professional golfer and would no doubt have been a damn good one. He followed his own path and if that meant piloting his own plane to Australia, a journey that took five weeks and involved 24 stops for fuel, taking his wife and infant son along for the ride, then so be it. His spell as a chairman of England’s selectors did go as well as it might, but as a cricket administrator he was a pioneer of white ball cricket, fixed contracts for players and professional coaching methods for young cricketers. 

        And, of course, the Stones had a private box at Lords for the use of Charlie and Mick. Pity they could haven’t afforded it when Ted was playing, or that he and Charlie never met, not that I know of anyway. If they had they’d have had plenty to talk about.

The photograph of Charlie appeared on the BBC's web page, photographer unknown. The photograph of Ted was downloaded from his own website. 

SHE’S A RAINBOW: THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE OF ANITA PALLENBERG by Simon Wells

The perception of The Rolling Stones in the Sixties was as much about attitude as it was about the music they created, and for this reason Anita Pallenberg was as much a member of the group as Mick, Keith and doomed Brian. She embodied all that was subversive about them – the feisty glamour, brash impertinence and haughty dismissal of conventional values, the kind of behaviour that grabbed headlines in the voyeuristic tabloid press, especially when something went wrong, like police intervention or death.

         “She, Mick, Keith and Brian were The Rolling Stones,” states Stones PA Jo Bergman, in She’s A Rainbow, Simon Wells’ new biography of Pallenberg, pragmatically acknowledging that Charlie and Bill were on a different wavelength. “Her influence has been profound. She keeps things crazy.”

         Andrew Loog Oldham, the Stones’ manager concurred, as did Anita herself. “I feel as though I’m like the sixth Rolling Stone,” she said. “Mick and Keith and Brian need me to guide them, to criticise them and give them ideas.”

         Keith might, at a pinch, have conceded the point but I somehow doubt that Mick, who always seemed like the kind of man who preferred his women under his thumb, would agree. Nevertheless, the role of Anita in fashioning the image of The Rolling Stones between 1965, when she turned up on the arm of Brian Jones, and the mid-1970s, when her relationship with Keith Richards began to deteriorate, is the key point of interest in this book.

         Wells’ 2011 book Butterfly On The Wheel systematically and with great flair dissected the Great Redlands Bust, and he has chosen Anita as his next subject in an ongoing interest into rock and roll subplots that now include Charles Manson and The Who’s Quadrophenia. Pallenberg, born in 1942 of German-Italian ancestry, was a model, actress, muse and mysterious siren amidst the Stones’ harem of influential women; spectacularly beautiful in her prime and, quite appropriately in the light of this book’s title, something of a rainbow, strikingly colourful, hard to catch and likely to vanish into thin air in a jack flash.

         Published in hardback with a cover featuring Pallenberg dressed only a man’s shirt, her uncovered legs parted and a look of defiance in her eyes, She’s A Rainbow could be mistaken for a top shelf item but Wells makes it clear from the outset that Anita was no groupie or passive rock chick. He is especially good on her early life and on her films, which he writes about at length as befitting an expert on cult movies of the period. Much space is devoted to Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s Performance, Anita’s most celebrated role, which featured an on- – and perhaps off- – screen dalliance with Jagger, a cause célèbre that lingered within the Stones’ clique like a disagreeable fungal infection.

         As you would expect, the period when she was part of the Stones inner circle is covered in great detail, as it was at the time, particularly the 1967 holiday in Morocco where Pallenberg switched her affections from Jones to Richards, and the stay at Nellcôte, the mansion at Villefranche-sur-Mer near Nice where the group’s masterpiece, Exile On Main Street, was recorded. Charged with maintaining the domestic requirements for a household that sometimes numbered 20 or more, the multi-lingual Pallenberg displayed uncharacteristic catering skills that rivalled Mrs Bridges in Upstairs Downstairs.

         Moving to Westchester County in upstate New York by the late seventies, Anita and Keith grow apart. Keith blamed her for the Toronto heroin bust that almost saw him jailed and sees other women. She puts on weight, flirts with the New York City punk scene and when a teenager is found dead at her house in 1979, her world comes crashing down. Addicted to just everything possible, she roams New York and becomes an embarrassment before finally returning to London, cleaning herself up and taking a course in fashion and textile design at Central St Martin’s so as to become a costumier. Eventually her legendary status is acknowledged by the Britpop crowd, she gets pally with Kate Moss and is much applauded at an emotional re-appearance on the catwalk.

         Inevitably the book suffers from the ‘not much to say about the later years’ syndrome insofar as once Anita is back in London she spends the rest of her life not doing very much that attracts headlines, which translates as not doing very much that Wells can write about. Indeed, the final chapter opens on page 267, around 1980 when she’s 38, and she dies a mere 18 pages later, on page 295, aged 75. It’s kinda sweet that in her twilight years she became a keen gardener and tended an allotment at Chiswick.

         It was certainly an extraordinary life but Anita Pallenberg is a difficult prey to catch, as elusive as a butterfly, so for all his prodigious research and the wealth of information contained within his book, Wells hasn’t quite captured her spirit. Then again no one really could, though Keith Richards came closer than most.

PETER RUDGE – 1973 Interview, Part 2

This is the second part of my 1973 interview with Peter Rudge, pictured below as he looks today, more or less.

The mechanics for the [1973 Rolling Stones tour] tour are coming from all over the world. The lighting system, which includes seven “super-trooper” arc lights, is being brought over from New York, as are the seven operators. These lights are placed at the rear of the stage and shine forward into a 40ft x 8ft mirror which is slung down from the ceiling mid-way up each hall. Thus they are reflected back onto the stage. There are also 88 smaller spotlights shining down on the band, and in charge of this whole operation is Brian Croft, who runs his own company which specialises in lighting rock groups. Croft has worked on the last three Stones tours.

          The sound system is being flown over from Los Angeles and the men who will operate it are being brought in from as far afield as Australia. Local labour will be used as “muscle” to carry it around but there are at least half a dozen top sound men (including the vice-presidents of the two companies that manufactured it in the first place) to work the switches.

          On top of this there is a makeup and wardrobe man from Paris who will be solely working for Jagger to ensure his stage clothes are clean and pressed for each concert. Keith Richard is bringing over a guitar mechanic from Arkansas whose job it is to restring and tune his instruments for each show and, if necessary, between each number the group plays. Then there is a “reccy” man who will never see a concert. His job it to visit each location a day ahead of the group and check out that the facilities for the following day’s show are in order.

          “The Rolling Stones are not a group to learn the business from,” says Rudge. “They use the best who have already proved themselves the best. They tour infrequently and can afford this luxury, but there is plenty of kudos for a roadie to have worked on a Rolling Stones tour. It’s like a good reference for getting a job on any other tour afterwards.

          “I try to keep control of everything all the way down the line as the group themselves worry a lot about what is going on. Mick Jagger works with me on organisation details as much as anybody and he came down to Cardiff with me last week to check out the Castle there where we are playing. He’s the guy who’s going to be up there on the stage and he’s the guy that the public will blame if they can’t see properly so he insisted on having his own say in the matter. It doesn’t always happen like this with groups.

          “My job is to keep an eye on all these aspects. The group will blame me if something goes wrong, although I will know that the fault lies with someone who hasn’t done what I’ve told them to do. I don’t know any other groups who are as demanding as the Stones or who have this intensity about them.”

          The transport situation is another major headache, although the actual driving around Europe is being done by a professional haulage firm that knows the roads better than any group roadie – having delivered cabbages across the continent for most of the year. Two 40 foot trucks will transport everything from town to town, and each promoter must supply an English speaking man at every border in order to facilitate passing through customs.

          Then there is accommodation. A full time travel agent from Denmark has been hired to book everyone into hotels throughout Europe, and he will travel with the party.

Tax and insurance are another headache for Rudge. A qualified accountant is on the tour to deal with immediate tax matters.

          Pre-tour meetings covering all these aspects have been going on for the past month. There have been two meetings in Paris when all the European promoters got together, and one similar meeting in London.

          Security is another worry. Where possible the group will book a complete floor of a hotel and station security men at the lifts so that unauthorised people cannot get on to that floor, let alone near the group’s bedrooms. There will be checks on fans coming to the concerts, something the Stones have always insisted on after the notorious Altamont incident.

          A system of aliases is used to book the group into hotel and restaurants. On the last US tour they used the names of cricketers, while in Australia they were professional cyclists.

          Each evening on tour Rudge will dictate a newsletter that is distributed to each member of the tour from Jagger downwards. This will give details of the following day’s itinerary. “Each tour we have a change-over day just for fun when – apart from appearing on stage – everyone takes on another role. Mike will be baggage man, and just for the hell of it he’ll go around the hotel corridors picking up everyone’s luggage. Bobby Keys is usually the accountant as he can’t add up and I usually become the singer and take things easy. You’ve got to do something like this when you’re on the road, otherwise you’d go mad.”

PETER RUDGE – Stones, Who tour boss, 1973 Interview

Yesterday I had lunch with my friend Pete Rudge whom I’ve known for 45 years, ever since we first encountered one another backstage at a Who gig in 1970. He was their tour manager in those days but in truth he was doing pretty much everything a bona fide manager does, Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp having more or less abdicated their responsibilities for day-to-day administration of the group’s affairs.

          Pete went to on become the tour manager for The Rolling Stones, then set up a business in New York and manage Lynyrd Skynyrd, and along the way I worked for him for a while. Then it all went pear-shaped after the LS plane crash, details of which can be found elsewhere in two consecutive postings on Just Backdated, the first linked below:  http://justbackdated.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/lynyrd-skynyrd-1977-part-1_28.html

          These days Pete manages Il Divo, amongst others, which explains why he was in London to meet with Pete Townshend to discuss marketing plans for the classical version of Quadrophenia that was released earlier this week. Clearly delighted to be working with Townshend again, Pete hasn’t changed much, still full of energy, full of great stories, an old school rock biz pro who’s seen pretty much everything in his time.

          In July 1973, just before I took up my post as MM’s US editor, I interviewed Pete Rudge about what it was like to organise a Rolling Stones’ tour, a bit of a challenge in anyone’s book. Here’s the story I wrote, in two parts, today and tomorrow, and bear in mind that we were talking in 1973.

Pete Rudge, photographed in 1973 by MM's photographer Barry Wentzell.

“The Royal Family have rung up asking for a quote on their next official tour of the Commonwealth,” joked Pete Rudge after he’d spent the best part of two hours explaining how he’s managed to get The Rolling Stones on the road this autumn. Whether or not Rudge has the skill to organise a Royal tour is debatable, but a tour by The Rolling Stones – rock’s equivalent of royalty – doesn’t fall that short in terms of security, travel problems and general organisation. And while there’s a man in charge of each particular aspect of the tour, Rudge is the commander-in-chief, a kind of Field Marshall who is answerable for everything if things go wrong.

          The whole tour is being set up from the office of 5-1 Productions in New Bond Street. 5-1 is Rudge’s own company, recently formed, and named after a football score line. Wolves, you see, beat Arsenal 5-1 one day last season, and Rudge, a loyal Midlander, never misses a Wolves match if he can help it.

          Fast talking, shrewd and fiercely hard when it comes to negotiating business, Rudge’s rise in the world of rock and roll has been nothing short of sensational. A Cambridge graduate in history, he left college to work for Kit Lambert and Track Records. It wasn’t long before he was running The Who’s tours in Europe and the US, and soon other top acts were clamouring for his services.

          While retaining his contacts with The Who, he managed the Stones’ massive US tour last year and took them to Australia last winter. He’s turned down offers from T. Rex and The Faces, and maintains that this latest Stones tour will be his last. In the future he’ll just be the group’s manager and someone else can do the hard work.

          “The first thing I do when a group tells me they want a tour organised is to work out with them how long it’s going to be and how much money they will earn,” he says “There are two reasons for doing a tour. It’s either to promote an album or it’s an event. In the case of the Stones it’s both, though we may be taking them behind the Iron Curtain and in this case it’s an event and money is secondary.

          “But on a Stones tour money is important. The Rolling Stones haven’t toured Europe for some time, which makes it an event, but at the same time it has to be economical. Fortunately with the Stones we can rely on at least 99 per cent sell-outs, so we can afford to spend money on things that other groups might not be able to afford.

          “Hopefully, the Stones are about the best group in the world, or at least the best known, so we have to spend money to make them appear the best. We can afford to spend money on lighting and sound, and we can afford the services of the best road crew available. We’re having sound and lighting men flown in from all over the world to make up the crew on this tour. Also we can afford to have someone like Billy Preston on the tour as a supporting act whereas in most cases Billy Preston would be topping the bill himself.

          “And at the end of all the spending we have to work out that there’s a reasonable amount left over for the five boys in the group. A group can make far more money sitting at home writing songs than they ever will going out on the road. But we all think this will be a good tour, like the American one last year. Other groups are still trying to beat that one.”

          Ticket prices and audience comfort weigh heavily on Rudge’s mind as in these areas the Stones are more susceptible to criticism than any other band. “A group like the Stones, just because they are the Stones, will be more liable to criticism if something isn’t right. When you have any regular top twenty group charging £2.50 a seat, it gets overlooked by most people because they are not that well known. The Stones are like the Prime Minister. Anything they do will be closely scrutinised by would-be critics.

          “The worst thing with so many groups when they go on tour is that they want everything. This is just pointless and a waste of money. We are in a commercial business and we want to earn money. The Stones have the right to earn money, but not at the expense of the public or at the expense of the people who work for them.”

          There is a 20 page contract to sign on the Stones’ forthcoming tour. While the bulk of the contract includes relatively mundane and obvious clauses about billing, stage size and facilities that the promoter of each concert must provide, there are intriguing clauses too.

          A promoter, for example, must provide at least 50 of his own security men at each concert, he must provide a make-up room with at least 12 towels and bars of soap, there must be no discrimination on grounds of sex, religion, race or age when it comes to selling tickets, there must be a doctor available 24 hours a day, there must be five limousines provided (at the promoter’s expense) for the benefit of the group, the promoter must provide 10 dozen red roses for the group and supply a complete list of first class restaurants in the town together with details of which restaurants provide a private room.

          Even more interesting is an accompanying note which details the refreshment requirements in the dressing room. Each promoter is advised to supply two bottles of whisky, two bottles of bourbon, two bottle of tequila, three bottles of iced white wine, one bottle of brandy, one bottle of vodka, one coffee liqueur, a gallon of apple juice and orange juice and a supply of mixes, cokes and ice. Fresh fruit, cold cuts, good cheeses, and Alka-Seltzer are also on the list.

          A note with this list of requirements adds ruefully that, “It would be very strange to see Keith Richards on top form without the company of a good tequila.”

CHINESE BEATLES - and Russian Zeps, Stones & CCR

Like hair dryers and feather pillows, The Beatles were deemed by the leaders of the People’s Republic of China to be evil products of decadent Western capitalism. Nevertheless, somehow or other, their music found its way over the Great Wall. To combat any suggestion that Western capitalism might be a good thing after all if it was the source of such great pop music, the Chinese rulers decided to co-opt The Beatles for themselves, give them a quick makeover to hoodwink the proletariat into believing they were the product of good wholesome communism, just like everything else. 
          Although you can now access this picture quite easily on the internet, I happened on it in the 1980s, brought into my office by a guy who wanted to do a book about obscure Beatles albums. He had a few other weird picture sleeves too: Chinese-featured JPG&R walking down a street that could have been in a Chinatown anywhere, The Beatles caricatured as old men, and all those strange early American Capitol albums that mixed Beatles songs with songs by others or told ‘The Beatles Story’ in breathless fashion between snatches of screams and a bit of music.

          This Chinese Beatles album is a bootleg of course, insofar as whoever released it in China, probably a state sponsored label, never asked permission and never had a contract, let alone paid royalties to JPG&R. I like how Paul’s eyes are rounder than the others, just as in real life. 
          I would love to have been able to show this to John. He’d have laughed his head off.

All of this reminds me that in the mid-eighties, when my Russian friend Artemy Troitsky visited the UK for the first time, he brought me these three Russian vinyl albums, by Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones and Creedence Clearwater Revival. This was in the days before Glasnost, of course, when contact between Western rock and Soviet culture was pretty much non-existent. I am certain that these albums, on the state owned Melodiya label, had been manufactured simply by copying tracks from Western albums bought in the West and brought back to the USSR by Kremlin-approved agents and, as in the case of the Chinese Beatles, no permission was sought from the artists and no royalties paid to them either.

BOBBY KEYS – 1971 Melody Maker Interview

I was going to post the second half of my interview with Ray Davies today, but that can wait until tomorrow as last night I heard of the sad death of Bobby Keys, one of the all-time great rock and roll saxophone players, along with King Curtis and Clarence Clemons.

          In May of 1971, as I report elsewhere on Just Backdated, I was flown to Cannes for a party to celebrate the Rolling Stones signing with Atlantic, and at the party I was introduced to him by Mick Jagger, no less. So I whipped out my pen and note book and did a quick interview, not the most profound I’ve ever done but it seems like the right thing to post it today.

          In 2012 Omnibus Press published Bobby’s biography Every Night’s A Saturday Night, with a Foreword by his best pal Keith Richards. It’s a wild ride.

          RIP Bobby. 

“It's Bobby Keys, the greatest saxophone player in the world,” said Mick Jagger. And Bobby smiled modestly towards me.

          “A great bunch of guys, the Stones. But there are plenty of others better than me. I can't even read music,” drawled Bobby in his Texas accent. “I just love playing rock and roll and the Stones are just a great little rock and roll band.”

          Looking at Bobby's young face, it's hard to believe he actually started out with Buddy Holly. And has other impressive references too: Delaney & Bonnie, Leon Russell and Joe Cocker's Mad Dogs & Englishmen.

          At the weekend Bobby was staying with Keith Richard near Cannes and while everyone fussed around the Stones at their press conference, a chat with Bobby seemed like a good idea.

          How did the Stones-Keys partnership come about, I asked. “When I met them I was working with Delaney & Bonnie in California and they came over to rehearse near us. One night they came to listen to us playing and the next day I got a call asking me if I'd like to put a horn solo on a track on the Let It Bleed album. It was 'Live With Me'.

          “I didn't see or hear anything from them until I came over to England to work on the George Harrison album [All Things Must Pass]. I got another call from them and went to Olympic studios to work on their album and ever since then I've been really involved. They're a damn good band, and I really dig going on the road with them.”

          Bobby has always been content to trade his skills wherever they are needed, and seems uninterested in being part of a permanent group. “This idea of a floating rock and roll band appeals to me. The Joe Cocker tour was one giant affair where you just came along and played. It was the same with Leon Russell and Delanie & Bonney.”

          Bobby's hometown is in Texas and it was there he met up with Buddy Holly. “I was just a little kid seven years old when I heard my first rock and roll. I went down to see Holly and he was really doing something different.

          “I started hanging around with Buddy and learning to play the horn and eventually I got a gig with Buddy Knox. I joined him for some recording and went to work with Bobby Vee after that.

          “Of all the bands I've worked with I think I prefer the Stones. They have a personal relationship which makes them a really together group.”

ROLLING STONES & BOB DYLAN - Close Encounters

Yesterday’s post about Marianne Faithfull prompted me to rework one about The Rolling Stones that I wrote on Facebook last year and, because it happened at a Stones gig, add a bit on the end about the one and only time I met Dylan.

Although I had the odd close encounter with The Rolling Stones I never interviewed them at any length for MM or travelled around with them like I did with The Who, Led Zep, Slade etc. Other writers got there first, and this was fine by me. The first time I saw the Stones was from the balcony of London’s Roundhouse on March 14, 1971, and I came away impressed, but eight nights later at the Marquee Club things were very different. This was an invitation-only affair at which they were being filmed for a German TV special ‘Live From London’s Marquee’. During a break between numbers Keith Richards decided he didn’t like a Marquee sign that hung over the stage and tore it down. Harold Pendleton, the Marquee’s owner, objected and in the ensuing argument Keith bashed him over the head with a translucent Perspex guitar. I believe it was a delayed reaction to a number of grudges the errant Stone bore against Pendleton that stretched back to the days when the Marquee preferred trad jazz to the kind of music the Stones played.

Either way the incident soured an evening that was already in terminal decline, largely because the Stones seemed unable to perform competently or even finish a song. Time after time they came unstuck midway through a number and had to begin again. After an hour or so of this many of those present sloped off to the bar, which caused Mick to lose his rag and order everyone out. We all trooped outside to where a large crowd of fans had blocked Wardour Street, smirking somewhat and heading for nearby pubs. The official word was that the ‘audience was not showing sufficient enthusiasm’ but it was a PR disaster on the eve of their self-imposed tax exile to France.

Just over two weeks later, on April 6, I was among a press contingent celebrating the Stones’ signing with Ahmet Ertegun’s New York-based Atlantic Records label which was about to release Sticky Fingers, the prologue to their masterpiece Exile On Main Street, for my money the greatest album they ever made. At Atlantic’s expense I and maybe ten others flew on a private jet to Nice, attended a party with the Stones at a beachside restaurant in Cannes, and spent the night in the swish Carlton Hotel. The host on this trip was former Beatles PR Derek Taylor, then the Special Projects Manager at WEA in London, who was in his element orchestrating a lavish knees-up like this.

My report on the party (and brief chats with the Micks Jagger and Taylor) can be found on Rock’s Back Pages but what I didn’t mention is that Keith nicked my gold-plated Ronson cigarette lighter, a 21^st birthday present from my dad, which I was foolish enough to leave on the table where he was sat when I nipped off to the loo. Of course, I can’t say for certain that he was the culprit but he was certainly sitting opposite my fag lighter when I left the table and he was sitting there when I came back and noticed the lighter had disappeared. Bearing in mind how Keith had dealt with Harold Pendleton at the Marquee, confronting him seemed unwise so I stayed silent. Never forgot though.

The next day the private jet took us to Geneva for the simple reason that Derek was fond of a restaurant that overlooked the giant fountain that gushes upwards from the lake. Limousines ferried us into town and we took lunch there, and a very nice lunch it was too, then flew home. Looking back on the jaunt now, it seems to typify the ridiculous extravagance that was endemic in the record business in the early seventies. Still, I wasn’t complaining.

The next time I saw the Stones was on May 1, 1975, in New York, playing on the back of a flatbed truck on 5^th Avenue at 9^th Street, a surprise press stunt to promote their forthcoming tour of North America. I and many others were waiting in the nearby Fifth Avenue Hotel where they were expected to arrive for a press conference and we all rushed outside when we heard ‘Brown Sugar’ being played. Traffic was halted, a rapidly accumulating mass of fans blocked the streets and after distributing leaflets to astonished passers-by Mick and his men jumped off the truck into waiting limousines and sped away.

I caught one of those shows at Madison Square Garden at the end of June, but what I remember most about it is not the giant inflatable cock that appeared on stage and caused so much trouble in the God-fearing states down south but being introduced to Bob Dylan, my only encounter with the great man. My friend Peter Rudge, then tour managing the Stones, had given me a couple of backstage passes and among those lingering in the corridor that led to the dressing rooms was Dylan himself, carrying a large flagon of white wine from which he was drinking copiously. I had never met Bob Dylan and when I spotted Rudge I asked him to introduce us. We walked over to where he was standing and Rudge tapped him on his shoulder, interrupting a conversation he was having with a pretty girl in a red dress.

        “Bob, this is Chris Charlesworth from Melody Maker,” said Rudge.

        Dylan looked at me and squinted. I was pretty sure he was drunk.

        “Melody Maker?” he slurred. “How’s Max Jones?”*

        “Max is fine,” I said. “I’ll tell him you asked after him.”

        “You do that,” said Dylan. Then he turned away and resumed the conversation he was having before I intruded.

        Come to think of it I’d have preferred to talk to the girl in the red dress too.

---

* Max Jones was Melody Maker’s long serving and much distinguished jazz writer who in late 1962 had encountered Dylan on his first ever visit to London. Max met him and, unlike many others, was supportive, and two years later interviewed Dylan on his second visit to the UK. Dylan never forgot. 

JIMMY SAVILE - Two close encounters

The reason why I put single quotation marks around DJ before Jimmy Savile’s name in yesterday’s post was because it came to light after his death that no records, CDs or music software whatsoever was found in his various homes, nor any record or CD players on which to play his non-existent record collection. This suggests that he had no interest in, knowledge of, or liking for pop music whatsoever, and used pop music merely as a means to an end, as he evidently did with his charity work, in his case to meet and sexually assault young people.

I had two close encounters with Savile, both in the early eighties after I’d left Melody Maker. I had been warned by my predecessor as News Editor on MM, Laurie Henshaw, who was a bit longer in the tooth than me, to avoid him at all costs. Laurie told me that most everyone in the industry thought he was a nasty piece of work, largely because no ‘DJ’ took more bribes to play records than him. Want your record played on the radio? Drop Jimmy twenty quid and it’ll happen.

My first encounter with Savile occurred in 1979 when I was the PR at RCA Records in London. Among the acts I ‘looked after’ was Sad Café, then enjoying a hit with ‘La De Da’ which they had been invited to perform on a Channel 4 TV chat show that was filmed at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith in West London. Among the other guests was Savile and, if I remember rightly, George Wendt, the actor who played Norm in Cheers, one of my favourite TV shows. I was in the backstage bar with the members of Sad Café when Savile and his minders arrived. He was dressed in his usual downmarket yellow track suit with gold medallions dangling from his neck, smoking his big cigar and giving it his usual “guys and gals I’m Jimmy Savile me everyone and all right top of the pops I’m groovy doing this for charity me” patter to everyone within earshot even though he was off stage. Then he walked up to the bar and ordered a glass of milk. “Jimmy Savile doesn’t drink alcohol, it’s bad for you,” he said, strangely referring to himself in the third person and somehow implying that his abstemiousness implied a higher degree of morality (Jimmy Savile for fuck’s sake!) than Sad Café and myself since all of us were drinking beer. He walked over to our table and introduced himself. We did likewise. “Sad Café. Great band, fab gear,” he said, implying that he had some knowledge of the group and knew their music. I thought this unlikely. I also thought he was an idiot. And only children drink milk.

My second encounter, oddly enough, was in Leeds, back stage at a Rolling Stones concert in July 1982 at Roundhay Park where I chanced to catch him in a rather difficult situation with Mick Jagger who had evidently been called to explain why Savile hadn’t been permitted to enter the backstage VIP area. It seems Savile had tried to enter and had been denied access by a security bloke because he didn’t have the required pass, whereupon he’d asked for the Mick who eventually came out and tactfully explained to him that access was denied. No doubt it was because everyone in the Stones camp knew he was a creep though quite what Mick said I didn’t hear. Savile eventually stormed off and Mick went back inside. Ten out of ten for that Mick, I thought.

BTW, this was the gig where I learned that my old friend Bill Zysblat was doing the on-tour accountancy for the Stones from a caravan backstage. Bill had been a colleague of mine when I worked for Pete Rudge, his in-house accountant in the days when Rudgie managed The Who’s US affairs and was tour manager for the Stones, so I wandered in to have a chat with him. Every so often big blokes came in with briefcases full of cash, which they emptied out in front on him, the proceeds from sales at merchandise stands dotted around the arena. Bill would then count it, make a note and stash it away in a case guarded by a bloke bigger than any who’d delivered it. After a while there was a knock on the door and when the big bloke answered it he went over to Bill and whispered in his ear. Bill asked me to step outside for a moment and when I did so I passed Ronnie Wood on the way in. Two minutes later Ron stepped out and Bill asked me in again. What was all that about, I asked. Oh Ronnie wanted a sub, he said. How much? Ten grand, cash.