Mick Jagger’s ‘forgotten’ memoir
IT MIGHT be news to you that Sir Mick Jagger wrote a 75 000-word memoir but it is also news to the rock star.
The Rolling Stones frontman reportedly cannot remember writing his own autobiography.
A publisher has revealed three years ago he was handed the secret memoirs which were written by Sir Mick in the early 1980s.
John Blake, the publisher, has now released some choice anecdotes from the autobiography which has never been published and lives in a secret hiding place.
The tales include the singer apparently buying the historic Stargroves houses and estate in Hampshire while high on LSD and having a near-death horse riding experience because he attempted “the life of a horse-riding country squire” without having ever been on a horse.
“He leapt on to a stallion, whereupon it reared and roared off ‘like a Ferrari’,” Blake writes in The Spectator.
“Summoning his wits and some half- remembered horse facts, he gave the stallion a thump on the forehead right between the eyes and slowed it down.”
Blake said the musician was initially keen for the autobiography to be published with a foreword explicitly explaining that he had written it “long ago and far away”, in other words, “Mick could not remember any manuscript”, but it got pushed further and further back as life got in the way.
According to the publisher, Sir Mick later decided he no longer wanted it published.
“Apologies to the 10 million people around the world who would love to read this story.
“After all, as the philosopher Jagger once said, ‘you can’t always get what you want’,” Blake said.
The publisher, who thinks the “financial potential” of the memoirs is “almost JK Rowlingesque”, suggested the autobiography provided profound insight into one of Britain’s greatest rock stars.
He described the autobiography as a “perfectly preserved time capsule written when the Rolling Stones had produced all their great music but still burnt with the passion and fire of youth and idealism”.
Nevertheless, he said it also presented a “quieter, more watchful Mick” than the party animal rock star stereotype.
Keith Richards, his bandmate, published his autobiography, Life, in 2010. It fast became one of the best-selling rock memoirs. – The Independent