London Publisher Says He Has Mick Jagger’s Memoir — but Don’t Expect to Read ItBy CHRISTOPHER D. SHEA FEB. 16, 2017
Mick Jagger performing in Oslo in 2014. Credit Nigel Waldron/Redferns, via Getty ImagesLONDON — Drug-induced property purchases. Bathroom breaks while Keith Richards sings. Champagne and caviar feasts that were ordered and then ignored.
All that, and more, is in a decades-old memoir by Mick Jagger, according to the London publisher John Blake. But the management team for the Rolling Stones will not let him publish the work, and a representative for the group has declined to confirm or deny the authenticity of the manuscript.
Mr. Blake, in an
article published online by the British magazine The Spectator on Thursday, claimed to have a hard copy of the heretofore unknown memoir.
“It’s extraordinary,” Mr. Blake said in a telephone interview on Thursday. “I compared it to, like, the Dead Sea Scrolls.”
The 75,000-word manuscript chronicles Mr. Jagger’s early years in rock ’n’ roll, until around 1980, Mr. Blake said, adding that he believes the singer worked with a ghostwriter.
Mr. Blake, a former journalist, knew Mr. Jagger professionally as a young man and said that a “mutual friend” had given him a typed copy of the memoir, with notes scrawled in Mr. Jagger’s hand, around three years ago.
He said that he had first reached out to the musician about publishing it through the manager of the Rolling Stones, Joyce Smyth.
According to Mr. Blake, Ms. Smyth initially said that the singer did not remember the memoir, and had requested a copy. She subsequently confirmed its authenticity, he said, and asked if Mr. Jagger could write a foreword that explained that the work had been written early in his career.
In the months that followed, Mr. Blake reached out repeatedly, he said, but he was told that Mr. Jagger was too busy to cooperate on the book. Eventually, around the end of 2015, Ms. Smyth told Mr. Blake that he would not be granted permission to publish the work, a position she reiterated on Thursday.
“John Blake writes to me from time to time seeking permission to publish this manuscript,” Ms. Smyth said in a statement sent by her law firm. “The answer is always the same: He cannot, because it isn’t his and he accepts this. Readers will be able to form a view as regards the matters to which John Blake refers when Sir Mick’s autobiography appears, should he choose to write it.”
“Life,” the 2010 memoir by Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, which explores the band’s heyday and the sometimes tumultuous relationship between Mr. Richards and Mr. Jagger, was hailed by critics, including Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times, who called it “electrifying.”
Mr. Jagger, however, has made clear that he has no interest in writing a memoir. “If someone wants to know what I did in 1965, they can look it up on Wikipedia,” he told the Hollywood Reporter in an article published in early 2014.
Mr. Blake outlined a number of lively details from the book in his article for The Spectator: Mr. Jagger’s purchase of a historic house, Stargroves, in the English countryside, while he was high on a psychedelic drug; episodes in which the band demanded caviar and stuffed quails backstage, but didn’t eat them; and Mr. Jagger’s habit of drinking eight pints of water before concerts, knowing he would sweat it out in performance.
“It is delicious, heady stuff,” Mr. Blake wrote in the article. “Like reading Elvis Presley’s diaries from the days before he grew fat and washed-up in Vegas.”
In the phone interview, he said that the memoir also showed a side of Mr. Jagger that is in contrast with his reputation as a hard-living Lothario.
“It’s not sensational, it’s sweet, is what it is. It’s delightful,” he said, adding that Mr. Jagger appeared, to some extent, to hold back from revealing unsavory details of life on the road. “What I suspect happened is that because he didn’t really want to bear his soul, the publisher rejected it.”
Mr. Blake said he could not circumvent the Rolling Stones management team and publish the material because Mr. Jagger owns the rights to the manuscript. To his knowledge, he said, he has the only copy other than a photocopy he sent to Mr. Jagger.
That claim could not be verified.
Asked why he was making the matter public, Mr. Blake framed the issue as one of public service.
“People will be writing theses about the Rolling Stones in 100 years time” he said in the interview. “It’s such a rare primary document that I kind of, like — I just thought the world would be interested to know about this. That was all.”
[
www.nytimes.com]