Jagger told me he was scared of being assassinated like Lennon
ONE of the most memorable encounters of my journalistic career was a week in the Brazilian rainforest with Mick Jagger to mark his first solo album. Jagger granted me exclusive access to this jungle frolic, which was due to end with a formal interview in Rio, where he was installed in the Presidential Suite at the Copacabana Hotel. There, in a humbler room down below, I waited several days as he was besieged by agents, publicists and financial advisers, before I booked a flight to London – Christmas was coming and I wanted to be back home with my family. I had just fixed myself an overnight flight when the phone in my room finally rang. ‘Hello, Tone, it’s Mick. Wanna come on up?’ Of course I did. I had a few hours before heading to the airport. ‘Whatcha doin’ tonight?’ he asked. ‘Heading home.’
‘Aw, but it’s the Brazilian Cup Final,’ protested Mick. He was like me, an avid Arsenal fan. ‘The president just rang me and offered a couple of seats in his box. Thought you might like to come wiv?’ ‘It’s not in the Maracana, is it?’
‘Course it is. Two hundred thousan’ seats!’
This – the world’s largest soccer stadium – was the only major world football venue my grandfather Ivan, a veteran sports journalist, had never visited. There was a fold-out picture of it, then brand new, in his memoirs. I need exaggerate only a jot to say that on his deathbed, Ivan had urged me to go there one day on his behalf. So I naturally said yes to Mick and delayed my flight home.
Riding to the stadium beside Jagger in the back of his limo, I couldn’t help noticing that, for all its tinted windows, he was nervously flinching, hiding his face with his hands, as we picked our way through the crowds flocking to the game.
‘You OK, Mick?’ I asked. ‘Not really, Tone. I’m thinking of poor John…’
John, of course, was his friend John Lennon, shot dead by a crazed fan in New York only four years before.
But we made it to the Maracana intact, to be greeted by the president of Brazil himself and most of his cabinet, before joining them in the presidential box.
Mick was pleased with the article I wrote later, to the point where he asked me to ghost-write his autobiography.
But in a meeting in London, he told me he couldn’t remember a thing about the 1960s, or indeed much before or since, so I’d have to do an awful lot of research.
Despite the prospect of a huge advance from a publisher, I decided against it.
The task of chronicling Mick’s life and times eventually fizzled out – no book ever appeared.