Lesley-Ann Jones - The Stone Age: Sixty Years of The Rolling Stones

Lesley-Ann Jones

International Bestselling Author

The Stone Age

Sixty Years of The Rolling Stones

Christopher Robin Milne, 19201996

Ahmet Ertegun, 19232006

Ronald Schatt: Ronnie Scott, 19271996

Giorgio Sergio Alessandro Gomelsky, 19342016

Ian Andrew Robert Stewart: Stu, the Sixth Stone, 19381985

Charles Robert Watts: Charlie Watts, 19412021

Lewis Brian Hopkin Jones: Brian Jones, 19421969

Jimmy Miller, 19421994

Anita Pallenberg, 19422017

Robert Henry Keys: Bobby Keys, 19432014

Roger Scott, 19431989

Nicholas Christian Nicky Hopkins, 19441994

Richard Roman Grechko: Ric Grech, 19451990

Ian Patrick McLagan, 19452014

William Everett Preston: Billy Preston, 19462006

James Aaron Jim Diamond, 19512015

Meredith Curly Hunter, 19511969

Judy Elizabeth Totton 19522021

James Jimmy McCulloch, 19531979

David Bolton, 19562020

Gavin Thomas Martin, 19612022

Laura Luann Bambrough: LWren Scott, 19642014

Tara Jo Jo Gunne Richards, 1976

Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic.

W ALTER B AGEHOT, 182677

A new band of pierrots, The Rolling Stones, came into existence yesterday at the Queens Hall. Their entertainment is described as A series of Pierrotical Fantasies. We understand that, in the main, it is intended for the benefit of children, but one or two of the items are likely to cause children a little surprise and their parents no little perturbation.

The programme contains a dozen items, of which half are calculated to please the very best type of child, while the others are more suited to amuse sophisticated elderly men. Many of the more sophisticated items are extremely clever and all are amusing. The only criticism is that they do not somehow seem to have got into the right programme.

T HE T IMES , D ECEMBER 1921

It does get boring, people asking me, Is this the last Stones tour?

Theyve been asking that since 1964.

M ICK J AGGER

Five strings, three notes, two fingers, one arsehole

and youve got it.

K EITH R ICHARDS

Such psychic weaklings has Western civilisation made

of so many of us.

B RIAN J ONES

I was listening to music long before rocknroll.

B ILL W YMAN

I find it hard to get old and hard to say no.

R ONNIE W OOD

Thats our claim to fame, yknow. Carry on lads, regardless Were a terrible band really. But we are the oldest. Thats some sort of distinction, innit? The only difference between us and Westminster Abbey is that we dont do weddings and coronations.

C HARLIE W ATTS

Saturday 5 March 2016

T ranslucent, triumphant, the pale-eyed bride wears the icy blue of a Disney Frozen princess. The Dress, an 8,000 silk and tulle Vivienne Westwood confection, is draped, layered and looped around her statuesque six-foot form. On the arm of her son who is giving her away, she glides the length of the marbled nave in flat Roger Vivier silver pumps, chosen to avoid towering over her shorter husband (she generally favours Manolo Blahnik heels). Her head nods like a sprung toy dogs on a parcel shelf. Her yellow hair hangs loose beneath a handkerchief of net. Never partial to professional make-up artists, she has painted her face herself. She smiles broadly, laughter lines crinkling, matte cranberry mouth framing the slightly crossed front teeth that she couldnt be bothered to fix. Clutching a white beribboned posy, she floats so closely past me that I smell her toothpaste. Her engagement ring dazzles. A little large on her finger, the huge stone, a cool 2.8 million worth of twenty-carat marquise-cut diamond, has slipped to one side.

This is not a wedding, as such. The marriage itself took place yesterday at Spencer House, eighty-four, and reformed rock chick Jerry Faye Hall, a quarter of a century his junior. Though the full-lipped, fox-eyed features of love of her life Mick Jagger are everywhere you look, thanks to the presence of their four children, there is predictably no sign of the rocker himself. Delicious, then, the swishy arrival of his first wife Bianca, whom he left for the leggy Texan supermodel celebrating marriage today. Their differences long buried, Micks glamorous exes are devoted friends.

Who else have we got? A hundred or so guests, including Cabinet minister Michael Gove and his columnist wife Sarah Vine; celebrity snapper David Bailey, who has come as a tramp, in trainers, plaid donkey jacket and knitted beanie hat, and who will be photographing the clan in due course; Rebekah Brooks, controversial Leveson Inquiry figure, infamous former editor of the News of the World and the Sun, now CEO of Murdochs British newspapers, who is matronly on the arm of her husband Charlie; Sir Michael Caine and his exquisite wife Shakira, the Lord Lloyd Webber and Lady Madeleine, Bob Geldof and Jeanne Marine, unmade-bed artist Tracey Emin and playwright Tom Stoppard. There is also Karis Hunt Jagger, Micks daughter with actress Marsha Hunt, paternity of whom he denied before giving in and coughing up, as economically as possible. She is a picture.

Bridesmaids? A frock of them. Come in The Daughters, in hues of blue. Dear Prudence, Murdochs first-born, is elegant in teal. His second daughter Elisabeth blooms in bluebell. Micks third daughter Lizzy, his first with Jerry, is sweetly wrapped in lazuline. Her sister Georgia May rocks delphinium. Flower girls Chloe and Grace, Ruperts offspring with his latest ex Wendi Deng, are coy in little-boy blue.

St Brides Church is our location. The one with the wedding-cake spire at the Ludgate Circus end of Fleet Street, which has been a familiar landmark on Londons skyline since 1703. It remains the spiritual home of the British media, despite the newspaper industrys exodus thirty years ago. I remember it well. I was stationed on the Street of Shame at the time, as a music and showbusiness journalist for the Daily Mail. It was Rupert Murdoch, the octogenarian groom at the altar today, who was responsible for the devastation. Damned if he was going to be held to ransom by print unions past their sell-by date and galvanised by Prime Minister Margaret Thatchers stance against unions in general, he sacked 6,000 striking print workers, offloaded hundreds of journalists who refused to embrace his new technology, and moved his papers the Sun, The Times, The Sunday Times and the now-defunct News of the World to Docklands. Barbed-wired Fortress Wapping became the epicentre of hellish dispute, and 1986 concluded in mass demonstrations, bloody riots, the violent death of a teenage labourer and crushing defeat for the unions. Within two years, most of the nationals had followed suit, relocating to more accommodating postcodes and switching to computerised technology.

For nearly three hundred years, the Street had been the mecca of hacks and scribes. Pre-rolling TV news, pre-internet and social media, ninety per cent of information reached the public via newspapers. Thanks to the Murdoch revolution our vibrant village, the crucible of the childhood dreams of we who had grown up longing to be journalists, was decimated.

Those who remember what happened may be forgiven for wondering how Murdoch has the nerve to show his face in this holy place, known variously as the journalists church, the cathedral of Fleet Street and the parish church of journalism. Some regard as a bit rich his return to solicit the blessing of the street he destroyed. Others describe it as a laundering, a whitewashing of history, a bare-faced quest for absolution of his crimes. The cynics weigh in with retorts that Murdoch has always been in the habit of thumbing his nose, so why would he stop now? This is comparable, quips one, to Dracula getting married in a blood bank.