Fortuitously, just as I committed to the project, the Stones announced a 20th anniversary world tour, to kick off at the John F. Kennedy Stadium, Philadelphia, on September 25, 1981. With the Sunday Times (and now also Shout!) behind me, I was given accreditation to cover its American leg.
When one says one has been on tour with the Rolling Stones, people’s eyes tend to light up with visions of Bacchanalian orgies. Actually, it was one of the most arduous, frustrating and, often, humiliating experiences of my career. Unlike previous chroniclers such as Truman Capote and Terry Southern, I was not embedded with the tour: I had to make my own way to each venue, then apply for show-tickets and backstage access to the Stones’ American publicist, Paul Wasserman.
This Wasserman was an overweight, bearded man with a bald head oddly like a tortoise’s, who constantly shed paper napkins from the ice-cream parlours to which he was addicted. Wherever he appeared, so did a crowd of journalists from newspapers, magazines and broadcasting organizations from all over the world, myself among them, pleading, expostulating, at times raging, at the inadequate media facilities he had provided. Nothing, however, moved Wasserman, whose fear of his clients overrode all normal PR instincts, to keep the press sweet. Under our onslaught his tortoise head would retract defensively into its shell and another paper napkin or two would float free: the Porter’s words in Shakespeare’s Macbeth – ‘Have napkins enough about you, here you’ll sweat for ’t’ – might have been written for him.
At the tour’s opening venue, Philadelphia’s vast, cheerless JFK Stadium, only photographers were allowed front-of-stage, for a few minutes each at a pre-ordained and immovable camera angle. The writing contingent were imprisoned in the bleachers, the block of empty seats behind the stage, under the hostile glare of innumerable thuggish-looking security guards, unable to see a thing or even hear very well. For my first unrestricted view of the Stones in performance, I had to travel to the tour’s third stop, Rockford, Illinois. There, and again in Boulder, Colorado, and again in Buffalo, New York, I asked Paul Wasserman if I could interview Mick and Keith; each time, the only response was a blank stare and more falling triangles of porous paper.
In despair, I filed a perfunctory story to the Sunday Times and flew back to London to try another tack (journalism was different then). I approached the Stones’ UK publicist, Keith Altham, himself a former music journalist, and said that the Times had guaranteed me the front of its prestigious Weekly Review section if he could deliver me Mick and the other Keith. A few weeks later (this is how different journalism was then) I returned to America with Altham to pick up the tour again in Orlando, Florida.
So, backstage at Orlando’s Tangerine Bowl, I was finally ushered through concentric rings of security into the enclosure where the Stones foregathered with a few selected VIPs before each show. In one corner, away from the social chit-chat, Mick was limbering up for his two hours onstage, wearing a bright yellow puffer jacket and American football-player’s knickerbockers. When Altham took me over for an introduction, I thought I’d better make it brief; a rock megastar about to face an 80,000-strong audience would hardly be in the mood for small talk.
How wrong I was. Even when psyching himself up to a feat of endurance that seemed remarkable enough for a 38-year-old, the sharp Jagger brain remained ever alert. He told me he’d read Shout!, then, while never slackening his workout, proceeded to correct a minor point of fact about Allen Klein, the manager whom the Beatles and Stones had once shared.
I interviewed him next afternoon beside the pool at his hotel, getting the quiet, thoughtful Mick he puts on for the broadsheet press – and hearing the bizarre claim, to be repeated many times later, that he recalled almost nothing of his career as a performer. That evening, I visited Bill Wyman in his room with the computer – still a great novelty then – on which he claimed to have stored the names and addresses of a thousand different women he’d slept with. Neither Ronnie Wood nor Charlie Watts was difficult to reach: Woody could usually be found propping up some bar or other, while Charlie, who’d always hated touring, was often around in the early morning, wearing what I can only describe as grey flannel culottes and watching rather enviously as British film-crews packed up to go home.
I even joined a trip to nearby Disney World with Keith Altham’s family and Ian Stewart, one of the original members of the band, who later became their roadie and back-up pianist. So I could legitimately say I’d been on Space Mountain with a Rolling Stone.
Confident I finally had my ‘in’, I followed on to the next gig, the giant Astrodome in Houston, Texas, where I saw Mick doing his pre-show recce of the arena, unrecognizable in combat trousers and a camouflage hat pulled down over his eyes. But at the entrance to the VIP enclosure, I was stopped by Jim Callaghan, the hulking Cockney security chief in a crumpled green caftan who’d waved me through so genially a few days before. ‘Where’s yore press-card?’ he snarled. VIP that I now thought myself, I’d left it at the hotel. ‘No press-card, no entry!’ I remember walking away from the Astrodome’s sparkly red lights, thinking, ‘Even when I went to Libya to interview Gaddafi, I wasn’t treated like that.’
Getting to Keith, as might be expected, was an odyssey in itself – one delayed until the following spring, when the 20th anniversary tour reached Europe. First, I was called to see him in Glasgow, where I hung about outside the Apollo Theatre for a whole afternoon and evening under the supervision of police as thuggish as any Stones minders. As I watched one officer roughly disperse a knot of inoffensive girls, he fixed me with a Jim Callaghan glare and demanded, ‘Are you lookin’ at me?’ Only by swiftly moving away did I avoid being put into the back of a van. Eventually, I received word that Keith would be very busy in both Scotland and England, so preferred to see me when the tour moved on to Paris.
At the Hotel Warwick just off the Champs Elysées I waited in the lobby, then in my room, for a total of fourteen hours. The summons into Keith’s presence did not come until past 3 a.m. We had been talking for only about five minutes when Paul Wasserman’s assistant, Alvinia Bridges, marched in and told me I’d have to stop there as it was ‘time for Keith to have some fun’. I’ve never wanted to strangle someone so much as at that moment.
Back in London, it was some consolation to talk again to Bill Wyman, the Stones’ unofficial archivist, over lunch at an old-fashioned French restaurant named Boulestin, which served Bill’s favourite Provençal rosé, Domaine Ott.
Afterwards, he and his then girlfriend Astrid Lundstrom were due to be photographed by David Bailey, and they invited me to go along. We’d talked so much that we arrived more than an hour late; the great photographer was fuming, but I just shut my eyes and told myself it wasn’t my fault. I expected Bailey to pose his subjects with a lot of Sixties schmoozing and cries of ‘Super!’. His only instruction to Bill, however, was ‘Stand over here, you cunt.’
I didn’t get the Keith interview until two months later, in his suite at the top of London’s Carlton Tower Hotel. I came away charmed by his articulacy and humour, and the honesty and directness that were such a contrast with Mick. Thanks to years insulated from reality by thick-eared bodyguards (quite as harmful to the brain-cells as drugs) he was also a bit of a malapropist. When I think of excitement pumping at a Stones concert, I remember Keith’s word for it: ‘andrenaline’.
Elsewhere I had a somewhat easier time. In 1982, most of the principal supporting characters in the story were still alive – miraculously so in some cases – and all of them agreed to talk to me.
My very first interviewee, in fact, was Andrew Loog Oldham, the inspired young PR man who moulded the Stones into British pop’s first anti-heroes, who almost singlehandedly created the Mick Jagger we know today, and remains unequalled