Wigs! Urns! Keef's shepherd's pie! What the Rolling Stones shop should be selling
The Rolling Stones have opened their first high-street shop in London, selling everything from crystal decanters to bomber jackets to, you know, music. But, given the band’s storied history, what other artefacts should it be selling?
Mick Jagger stately homes – £15m According to Jagger’s unpublished memoirs, seen by the publisher John Blake, the Stones frontman looked around Stargrove House in Hampshire in 1970 off his noggin on LSD, climbed on to a horse and purchased the £55,000, 850-acre estate there and then. Jagger resided at Stargroves until 1979, Rod Stewart bought it for £2.5m in 1998, and it last sold for £15m in 2012. Kerching.
Bill Wyman signature detectors – £185 on eBay
What do all bassists do after quitting the world’s No 1 rock’n’roll band. That’s right: take up metal detecting. Wyman released his own brand of metal detector in 2017. “My Bill Wyman Signature is lightweight, easy to use metal … the ideal metal detector for anyone starting out treasure hunting,” says Wyman.
Rolling Stones fire extinguishers – £69.99
Stones guitarist Keith Richards and saxophonist Bobby Keys set the Playboy Mansion on fire in 1972 while inno
cently doing drugs in the bathroom. “Bobby says: ‘It’s smoky in here,’” says Richards in his 2010 autobiography, Life. “Waiters and guys in black suits [started] bringing buckets of water. We’re sitting on the floor, our pupils pinned.”
Rolling Stones wigs – £35.99
After being harangued about their long hair, the Stones placed a Christmas newspaper advert in 1963: “Best wishes to all the starving hairdressers and their families.” Since then, hair transplants have been rumoured. In 2015, Ronnie Wood said in a Twitter Q&A: “My hair is the biggest gift anyone could ever be born with.” After refusing chemotherapy for a cancer scare in 2017, Wood told the Mail on Sunday: “This hair wasn’t going anywhere.”
Rolling Stones urns – £150
Keith Richards to NME in 2007: “What’s the strangest thing I’ve tried to snort? My father. He was cremated and I couldn’t resist grinding him up with a bit of blow. My dad wouldn’t have cared, he didn’t give a shit.” Right you are, Keith.
Beggars Banquet custard pies – Four for £5
To celebrate the launch of their seventh album, the Stones invited the press to a medieval banquet at London’s Gore Hotel and pelted them with custard pies. They don’t do press conferences like that any more.
Keith Richards shepherd’s pie for one – £3.99 During their 1989 Steel Wheels tour, the Stones had a functioning pub created backstage. When Richards discovered someone had tucked into his shepherd’s pie in Toronto, he refused to go onstage. “It’s now famous, my rule on the road,” he wrote. “Nobody touches the shepherd’s pie until I’ve been in there.”