A Prince Among Stones (9 page)

As I had no real idea who the Rolling Stones were, I made some telephone calls and Josephine told me the background of their success, and reminded me of the famous
Times
editorial which had been written the year before by William Rees-Mogg following Mick and Keith's conviction for drugs possession, the leader article headlined ‘Who Breaks A Butterfly On A Wheel?'. I did remember the piece. I, of course, had been on the side of the wheel.

One of the calls I made was to a friend of ours, Peter Denman, who was related to the Erlanger banking family. As managing director of the bank he had been central to the marriage between Erlanger's and Philip Hill Higginson & Co.

It turned out that I had met Mick a short time before at Peter's house in Chelsea. Cara, his wife, used to throw the new style of informal parties, to which we went. It was one of the occasions when we walked into the room and found everybody stoned. And one of the people whom I had tripped over was Mick.

4

 

 

‘Only sick music makes money today'

 

Friedrich Nietzsche

 

 

 

The second time I met Mick Jagger, in the autumn of 1968, was via a far more conventional arrangement, planned and by invitation, at the house that he had bought on the Chelsea Embankment, where he was living with Marianne Faithfull.

I had placed a number of calls to business contacts to try and gain some sense of what I might find myself getting involved in. Chrissie Gibbs had given me some useful advice. He told me that the image Mick projected was what he needed to satisfy the Stones' fanbase, but that he was far more intelligent than the image and that his ideas were well worth listening to. Yet I still did not know quite what to expect when I headed to Cheyne Walk.

I sat waiting in Mick's drawing room, reading a newspaper. Despite the upwardly mobile address, the décor of the house was extremely sparse, the rooms quite bare. He had not yet bought much furniture, but had picked up a few Moroccan objects from his trips there, probably much cheaper than they would have cost on the King's Road.

Soundlessly, Mick slipped into the room, wearing a green tweed suit. We sat and talked for an hour or so. It was a good long chat. His manner was careful. The essence of what he told me was ‘I have no money. None of us have any money.' Given the success of the Stones, he could not understand why none of the money they were expecting was even trickling down to the band members. That was the key point, and explained the paucity of furniture in the house. He had nothing to buy any pieces with.

I wanted to make it quite clear that I had not expected much wealth, but that I did expect that what he wanted someone like me to do for him was to establish a structure whereby he could indeed make some money. Even at that point, I said, without yet having looked at the documents and papers, I thought that the exchange control of the time meant that he would have to leave the country.

I also established my own credentials, letting Mick know that I knew Bill Paley, then the chief shareholder of CBS, socially, and that I had good banking arrangements with most of the leading banks in Switzerland.

At the end of our conversation it was clear to me that although our discussion had been quite professional, Mick and I had also clicked on a personal level. We got on very well straight away. There is something that exists between people which is an understanding or non-understanding of what a person is really like. I certainly felt that Mick was a sensible, honest person. And I was equally certain that he had been taken for a ride, and that I represented a chance for him to find a way out of a difficult situation.

I left saying that I would discuss things with my partners at Leopold Joseph, but I also invited him to come over to our house one evening a few days later. I had discussed with Josephine my thoughts on that initial interview with Mick, and so asked her to receive him when he arrived, as I was intrigued and amused to know whether she agreed that Mick was somebody with whom I ought to be doing business. She remembers that her first impression of Mick was that he was smartly dressed, with a large hat over his long hair, trousers that looked as if they had been made out of a patchwork of tapestry, mixing stripes with a floral pattern, and white patent leather shoes.

While I remained upstairs, Josephine invited Mick into the drawing room and asked him what he would like to drink. He didn't seem to want anything, but she persevered, and offered him some sherry, which in the end he accepted. So they sat down with their glasses of sherry and chatted. As I had done, Josephine found Mick very easy to talk to. After a quarter of an hour or so, she said she would go and find me. She came upstairs, like a canary returning from the coalface, and reported that she thought Mick was charming. Having secured – to her relief and mine – Josephine's approbation, which was important to me, I came downstairs to continue the conversation.

As Mick and I talked more, I realised that, looked at sensibly and without being distracted by the showy trappings of the music business, the problems that Mick and his fellow Stones were experiencing were not unusual. They were straightforward, in fact. I was intrigued.

On the surface Mick and I might have been seen as unlikely business associates. Certainly so far as the Stones' music was concerned I was not in tune with them, far from it. Rock and pop music was not something in which I was interested or listened to. Josephine was hardly any more interested in pop music than I was, but she had a greater awareness of what was going on from reading the popular newspapers, and she had been to one of the Beatles' concerts in Paris where she experienced the awe and terror of being in the middle of the hysteria that surrounded them.

I had first come across the Beatles (and naturally, not being particularly aware of them, when I first heard the name of the group in my mind the word was spelt like the insects) when we stayed with some cousins in Kitzbühel and as a gift Josephine brought along the latest Beatles LP for our hostess, Sunny Auersperg – later to become, after remarrying, Sunny von Bülow – who was delighted to have it. Sunny played the record while we were there and so I had heard some of the Beatles' music. Their music was sufficiently harmonic to be acceptable to people like me who only liked classical music. I only really took against rock'n'roll when I heard the Stones.

One of the first times I heard the group play live was very shortly after meeting Mick at one of the theatres in London's West End which had started putting on rock concerts. Mick had invited me to see them perform, and Josephine and I sat at the front of the dress circle.

What impressed me enormously was the quality of Mick's performance. I thought it was first class, even if the music itself did little for me. I could immediately understand why the band were such a draw for the public.

I remember being amused by one aspect of the show that night. At a point when Mick was completely energised and excited, he told the audience, ‘What are you all sitting down for? Get up and let us know what you think.' How odd, I thought. Surely he must be impressed by us sitting here in silence to admire and take in everything that was going on, rather than getting on our feet and not being able to see properly.

The offer to look at the Stones' financial situation had come at a very good time for me both professionally and psychologically. I was becoming, to be perfectly frank, rather bored with my work at Leopold Joseph, and had come to the conclusion that running a small merchant bank was not going to satisfy me if it was my sole activity.

The alternative, it seemed to me, would have been to go and work for a company like Bache in America, where there was good money to be made in the banking and investment advisory work. Although the prospect of making money was certainly attractive, it would have entailed uprooting my family, my children, my home, everything that was part of my life, a life I rather enjoyed. I was not at all convinced that I wanted to do that. The conversation with Mick seemed to offer a glimpse of a new direction and a problem that I could use my particular skills to unpick.

Many rock musicians prided themselves on their anti-Establishment credentials, but by the time I was sitting down to chat with Mick in Cheyne Walk there had been something of a coming together between the fringes of the rock world and the British upper class. The younger members of the aristocracy, who previously might have been dispatched into the military, the City, a diplomatic career or the priesthood, had discovered a new career by dropping out – a human response, perhaps, to the alarming decline and dispersal of the agreeable country houses they had been born into and the 98 per cent taxation which had impoverished their parents – so that hanging out with musicians, whom they actively courted and introduced into their world, was a rival use of their time and energy.

I remember Harold Macmillan once saying that when he was young he met ‘everybody' since there were parties in private houses night after night where young MPs like himself got to know ‘the world' and how sad it was that that was no longer the case. It is odd to think that nowadays the new rich are so much richer than the old rich ever were, even making allowance for inflation, but that the old aristocratic life which was so emulated by the new rich of 100 years ago is no longer, save for very rare exceptions.

The Stones were very much part of the shift in society and Mick in particular had enjoyed crossing the portal into a different social world. With Marianne and Christopher Gibbs, he had been to stay with Desmond Guinness at Leixlip Castle in Ireland, for example. As a result of such adventures, the musicians became less scornful of the Establishment and the potential money-making machine through getting to know these younger, empathetic scions of aristocratic families. The elder members, mind you, as a general rule still disapproved.

Through these social interactions the musicians became much more open to accepting the fact that not all upper-class people were necessarily stupid and unpleasant, and the upper-class people slowly got round to thinking that musicians were not all depraved and foolish.

I am sure that, even if the Stones' music did not thrill me, I was more open to and less judgemental about their world than others in my position as an active director of a merchant bank. Working with musicians was not such a quantum leap for me. I had grown up in an artistic milieu. My mother was a sculptor, and I had been brought up in a world where art and literature were highly regarded. I had spent time in and enjoyed the company of my mother's friends, who blended together in a similar way, though in a different generation, the Establishment and the aristocracy with powerful artistic and bohemian temperaments.

In my role with Bache I had learnt how to operate and do business with people from a range of backgrounds and cultures. And I was still only in my early thirties. For those times I was, if not a unique specimen, certainly a
rara avis
amongst the traditional and soon to be endangered species that inhabited the square mile of the City.

My work with the Stones formed part of what would become a new way for bands to do business. Previously band managers had either been concert promoters, roadies with ambition or friends who were at a loose end and found themselves with granny's inheritance to fritter away.

I flatter myself by thinking that when I started working for the Rolling Stones I opened a completely different door for other people to find a career in music management, because the musicians themselves were beginning to realise that the same newly well-off friend who had stumped up a hundred pounds to buy a van or purchase a better guitar was now cheerfully taking half their profits, even more cheerfully when success arrived. It was a period when many bands were starting up, and most of those lost money or, rather, did not receive the money that should have been coming to them.

The brighter musicians knew that things had to change. They now realised that they were running a business, and they had to start thinking in a businesslike way, which they themselves I think despised: the idea of making money in a conventional way and abiding by all the tax rules and regulations and the exchange controls then in force.

I was fortunately able to move on from the constraints of those preconceptions and see the potential benefits for both parties – unlike my partners in Leopold Joseph, a number of whom were initially horrified until we had discussed the matter very fully. It was the two working directors who had previously been at Rothschilds who were the most appalled, whereas Jonathan Guinness, Tony Berry and Alexis de Redé were not at all surprised.

These other partners were much concerned that the Rolling Stones were inappropriate clients for Leopold Joseph and that they would bring very little reward but a high level of anxiety to a conventional and small merchant bank.

They saw nothing but the disadvantages of getting involved with people whose character and the image they projected were diametrically opposite to those of the City of London. This was an age when to the Establishment rock bands were categorised as ‘long-haired layabouts', and the music industry as a fringe activity with dubious accounting practices. A small merchant bank like Leopold Joseph was anxious not to get caught up in anything which in any way seemed to be on the boundaries of finagling.

However, I eventually managed to persuade them that the financial problems of a prominent rock band were no different in essence from the problems of any other financial organisation which sought advice in the City of London. Indeed, I also made the point that many directors of any number of well-known companies listed on the Stock Exchange led unconventional lives.