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TO SUE, WITH LOVE
CONTENTS
Prologue: Sympathy for the Old Devil
PART I: ‘THE BLUES IS IN HIM’
ONE India-Rubber Boy
TWO The Kid in the Cardigan
THREE ‘Very Bright, Highly Motivated Layabouts’
FOUR ‘Self-Esteem? He Didn’t Have Any’
FIVE ‘“What a Cheeky Little Yob,” I Thought to Myself’
SIX ‘We Spent a Lot of Time Sitting in Bed, Doing Crosswords’
SEVEN ‘We Piss Anywhere, Man’
EIGHT Secrets of the Pop Stars’ Hideaway
NINE Elusive Butterfly
TEN ‘Mick Jagger and Fred Engels on Street Fighting’
PART II: THE TYRANNY OF COOL
ELEVEN ‘The Baby’s Dead, My Lady Said’
TWELVE Some Day My Prince Will Come
THIRTEEN The Balls of a Lion
FOURTEEN ‘As Lethal as Last Week’s Lettuce’
FIFTEEN Friendship with Benefits
SIXTEEN The Glamour Twins
SEVENTEEN ‘Old Wild Men, Waiting for Miracles’
EIGHTEEN Sweet Smell of Success
NINETEEN The Diary of a Nobody
TWENTY Wandering Spirit
TWENTY-ONE God Gave Me Everything
Postscript
Picture Section
List of Searchable Terms
Acknowledgements
Also by Philip Norman
Copyright
About the Publisher
The British Academy of Film and Television Arts is not normally a controversial body, but in February 2009 it became the target of outraged tabloid headlines. To emcee its annual film awards – an event regarded as second only to Hollywood’s Oscars – BAFTA had chosen Jonathan Ross, the floppy-haired, foul-mouthed chat-show host who was currently the most notorious figure in UK broadcasting. A few weeks previously, Ross had used a peak-time BBC radio programme to leave a series of obscene messages on the answering machine of the former Fawlty Towers actor Andrew Sachs. As a result, he had been suspended from all his various BBC slots for three months while comedian Russell Brand, his fellow presenter and accomplice in the prank (who boasted on air about ‘shagging’ Sachs’s granddaughter) had bowed to pressure and left the corporation altogether. Since the 1990s, comedy in Britain has been known as ‘the new rock ’n’ roll’; now here were two of its principal ornaments positively straining a gut to be as naughty as old-school rock stars.
On awards night at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, a celebrity-packed audience including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Meryl Streep, Sir Ben Kingsley, Kevin Spacey and Kristin Scott-Thomas received two surprises outside the actual winners list. The first was that the bad language everyone had anticipated from Jonathan Ross came instead from Mickey Rourke on receiving the Best Actor award for The Wrestler. Tangle-haired, unshaven and barely coherent – since movie acting also lays urgent claim to being ‘the new rock ’n’ roll’ – Rourke thanked his director for this second chance ‘after fucking up my career for fifteen years’, and his publicist ‘for telling me where to go, what to do, when to do it, what to eat, how to dress, what to fuck . . .’
Having quipped that Rourke would pay the same penalty he himself had for ‘Sachsgate’ and be suspended for three months, Ross moderated his tone to one of fawning reverence. As presenter of the evening’s penultimate statuette, for Best Film, he called on ‘an actor and lead singer with one of the greatest rock bands in history’; somebody for whom this lofty red-and-gold-tiered auditorium ‘must seem like one of the smaller venues’ (and who, incidentally, could once have made the Sachsgate scandal look very small beer). Almost sacrilegiously, in this temple to pure acoustic Mozart, Wagner and Puccini, the sound system began chugging out the electric guitar intro to ‘Brown Sugar’, that 1971 rock anthem to drugs, slavery and interracial cunnilingus. Yes indeed, the award giver was Sir Mick Jagger.
Jagger’s entrance was no simple hop up to the podium but a lengthy red-carpet walk from the rear of the stage, to allow television viewers to drink in the full miracle. That still-plentiful hair, cut in youthful retro sixties mode, untainted by a single spark of grey. That understated couture suit, worn in deference to the occasion but also subtly emphasising the suppleness of the slight torso beneath and the springy, athletic step. Only the face betrayed the sixty-five-year-old, born at the height of the Second World War – the famous lips, once said to be able to ‘suck an egg out of a chicken’s arse’, now drawn in and bloodless; the cheeks etched by crevasses so wide and deep as to resemble terrible matching scars.
The ovation that greeted him belonged less to the Royal Opera House or the British Association for Film and Television Arts than to some giant open-air space like Wembley or Dodger Stadium. Despite all the proliferating genres of ‘new’ rock ’n’ roll, everyone knows there is only one genuine kind and that Mick Jagger remains its unrivalled incarnation. He responded with his disarming smile, a raucous ‘Allaw!’ and an impromptu flash of Rolling Stone subversiveness: ‘You see? You thought Jonathan would do all the “fuck”-ing, and Mickey did it . . .’
The voice then changed, the way it always does to suit the occasion. For decades, Jagger has spoken in the faux-Cockney accent known as ‘Mockney’ or ‘Estuary English’, whose misshapen, elongated vowels and obliterated t
