‘Lost’ Stones Photos Found
Previously unseen Rolling Stones photos discovered in the home of former band ‘minder’.
A COLLECTION OF previously unseen photographs of the Rolling Stones taken by the band’s associate ‘Spanish’ Tony Sanchez has been discovered in a loft by his grandson Matthew Dominguez. The collection is of photos from the Stones’ heyday from the mid-60s until the late 70s, up to when Sanchez left the band’s employment following the publication of his infamous book Up And Down With The Rolling Stones.
“The photos are mainly shot from the point of view where Tony was working for Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg,” says Dominguez. “There are shots of their son, Marlon, as well as the band and all of their friends and associates. There are some standout locations such as Keith’s Sussex home Redlands, lots of Polaroids from Ronnie Wood’s house in Richmond, the Wick, and their exile to France – we’ve got a lot of pictures from that period from Villa Nellcote.”
Among the stand-outs from the collection are a shot of a wide-eyed Brian Jones tripping on acid at the South Kensington flat that he shared with Pallenberg, and one of Richards working the mixing desk at Olympic Studios during the recording of the Stones’ 1969’s album Let It Bleed. Other unseen shots feature Richards, Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithful visiting Tangier after the police drugs bust at Redlands in early 1967.
“Tony was one of two photographers that had that sort of access,” says Dominguez. “He was there day and night taking very primal and candid shots.”
As well as not previously knowing about the photos, Dominguez says he was unaware of his grandfather’s association with the Stones, including some of the more unsavoury aspects that he was involved with, such as attending to Richards’s chemical needs.
“My mum would have him over for Sunday dinners and he was quiet, just sat on the sofa and he didn’t say a lot,” he says. “I had no idea that he was that guy.”
According to Dominguez, the collection came to light after the passing of his father – Spanish Tony’s son – in 2021.
“My [maternal] granddad went up in the loft and he sort of moved some boxes and saw some pictures and he said: ‘Have you seen these?’ Obviously my dad knew they were there, but he didn’t want to do anything with them because it was probably a reminder that Tony wasn’t a great dad to him. Those pictures probably brought up a lot of bad memories. And then, slowly but surely, my brother began to piece together how priceless and valuable and important these pictures are. When my dad passed away last December, we decided that we should do something with them.”
Dominguez has formed Spanish Tony Media in order to deal with commercial and others aspects of making the photos available, and some of them have already made their way into the public domain.
“We released some images to the BBC, and so we had three Polaroids in the Charlie Watts edition of My Life As A Rolling Stone,” Dominguez explains. Other plans for their use include an upcoming documentary about Anita Pallenberg.
In addition to a mooted coffee-table book and exhibitions, fans will be able to own their own copies. “We’ll showcase the pictures we like best and they’ll be available as limitededition prints of about twenty-five or fifty,” says Dominguez. JM