Does long-lost snap by Stones’ ‘fixer’ show Mick snorting cocaine?
CAPTIONED simply: ‘Mick Jagger backstage, USA, early 1970s’, this arresting long-lost image appears to show Rolling Stone Mick Jagger preparing to snort cocaine from a knife.
Jagger, now 80 and a knight of the realm, is wearing a jumpsuit designed by Ossie Clark for the Stones’ 1972 tour. The picture was uncovered in a treasure trove of snaps taken by bandmate Keith Richards’ friend — and drug dealer — Tony Sanchez, known as ‘Spanish Tony’.
It has just come to light and will be among candid images of the band in an exhibition which opens in London’s Notting Hill next week. Richards’ son Marlon is to attend the private view on Wednesday.
Spanish Tony was the Stones’ fixer in their pomp and documented their life in hundreds of photographs which were thought for decades to have been lost.
In 1979, he wrote Up And Down With The Rolling Stones, an insider’s account of eight years at Richards’ side, on a £150 retainer. His duties included buying drugs for Keith, his bandmates and friends.
Sanchez died in 2000, having given boxes of photos and negatives to his son Steve. When Steve himself became ill, he told his children they should look in the attic of his home in Biggin Hill, Kent, to find pictures of the Stones, and to do what they wanted with the archive.
ART and rare books dealer Oliver Bayliss, whose company Bayliss Rare Books is putting on the exhibition at the J/M Gallery, told me: ‘Steve only discovered later in life that Tony was his father.
‘Tony had lived a freewheeling life and could not handle having a kid, so Steve had been raised by his grandparents, who he thought were his parents.
‘Steve had children of his own but didn’t talk much about Tony, or his links with The Rolling Stones, until a few years ago.
‘He said to his boys Matt and Nick: “You don’t really know about the life Tony lived but there is this archive of pictures in the loft and you have my blessing to do whatever you want with it.”’
Tony’s grandchildren connected with Bayliss while trying to find a copy of Up And Down . . . (now out of print) to help make sense of the photos. Bayliss said: ‘Tony had amazing access, obviously; and was with the Stones in the South of France, in Morocco, and everywhere else. What was a surprise was that he was also a good photographer. There were thousands of pictures. I spent about four months going through them and have selected 28 for the exhibition. Clearly Tony got very close to Anita Pallenberg, as there are some racy ones of her and him, which I haven’t included.’
The pictures are available to buy from the Bayliss Books website; and a coffee table book may be published in due course. There are hundreds of shots of Keith and the Stones at his house, Redlands, in Morocco and on tour; plus photos of the band hanging out with friends including John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
In his autobiography, Life, Keith Richards wrote: ‘Spanish Tony was a hard man. Biff bang! He ran a gambling casino for Spanish waiters, after hours. He was a dope dealer . . . with a Mark 10 Jaguar, two-tone, all done up pimpstyle.’ Sanchez, meanwhile, wrote that Jagger and then-girlfriend Bianca were ‘passionate users of cocaine’ in the early 1970s, along with oil heir Paul Getty and his model wife Talitha, who later died of a suspected heroin overdose.
Tony recalled bringing cocaine, at Jagger’s request, to his wedding with Bianca in St Tropez. ‘A guy needs a little coke to get through his wedding day,’ Jagger is said to have told him. The singer’s former fondness for cocaine is a matter of record, with Jerry Hall famously saying he kicked his habit cold to win her love.
A spokesman for Jagger declined to comment.
The Rolling Stones will be touring their recent album, Hackney Diamonds, later this year.