Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’ 1967 trial for drug possession at Chichester crown court docket is without doubt one of the most infamous incidents within the historical past of 60s rock. Everybody with even a passing curiosity within the Rolling Stones is aware of the salient particulars: the grim position of the Information of the World in organising a police raid on Richards’ nation pile, Redlands; the totally apocryphal rumours about Mars Bars and Marianne Faithfull; the band’s transient try to flee the press consideration by travelling to Morocco, the place Richards started a protracted relationship with guitarist Brian Jones’s then-girlfriend Anita Pallenberg; the surprising intervention of the Instances’ editor William Rees-Mogg, protesting towards the severity of the sentencing in an editorial headlined Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?; their subsequent launch, Mick Jagger’s look on a rapidly convened version of the TV present World in Motion, debating the entire enterprise with Rees-Mogg, former house secretary Frank Soskice, the Bishop of Woolwich and Fr Thomas Corbishley (“a number one British Jesuit”).
However when playwright Charlotte Jones was studying up on the Redlands bust and trial, it was one other, extra neglected facet of occasions on which she alighted. Michael Havers was an intriguing selection of defence counsel for Jagger and Richards. He was not a barrister like John Mortimer, who appeared to please in taking up the institution on behalf of everybody from the editors of Oz journal to the Intercourse Pistols to the publishers of Hubert Selby Jr’s Final Exit to Brooklyn. Havers was the institution, a Garrick Membership member who helped wrongly convict the Guildford 4, turned a Conservative MP and finally lord chancellor underneath Margaret Thatcher.
Moreoever, on the time of the trial, he was coping with a really totally different form of youth riot from Jagger and Richards’ LSD-soaked weekend within the nation. Having already declined to attend Eton as per household custom, his son Nigel had introduced his intention to not comply with his father, grandfather and older brother right into a authorized profession however as a substitute to grow to be an actor. “After I realised Michael Havers’ son was Nigel Havers – everyone is aware of who he’s! – I assumed: there’s a father-son story, a home riot story that an viewers can actually pay money for, even when they’re alienated by the larger political or international story of the Rolling Stones,” Jones says. “They have been such a logo of riot however I wished to reflect it and see how the smaller, private riot is influenced by what the Stones are doing.”
To her delight, she found that not solely had Nigel Havers been across the trial, he had grow to be near Faithfull, who – as Jones notes – was in some methods the most important sufferer of the Redlands controversy, regardless of not really being on trial nor even giving proof. “I went to go to Marianne in Paris just a few years in the past, and she or he was actually offended about Redlands. She felt it ruined her life. I actually empathised with this lady who wasn’t allowed to talk on the time, however on the identical time, the tabloids have been writing about as Miss X.”
She goes on: “You realize, they have been writing about her in the identical approach that they wrote about Caroline Flack just lately. She was actually, actually delighted that somebody would inform her aspect of the story. She instructed me Nigel was ‘like my little brother’. There’s such a touching, lovely unknown superstar story in the midst of this. She helped Nigel out on his journey, however she’s form of trodden on by the court docket case and shut out – the Nineteen Seventies have been horrible for her” – Faithfull ended up an anorexic heroin addict, at one level dwelling on the streets of Soho – “and she or he traces all of it again to Redlands.”
We’re speaking in a London studio throughout rehearsals for Redlands, which was commissioned by the Chichester Competition theatre: “a no brainer” in keeping with director Justin Audibert, given its setting. Folks can nonetheless bear in mind bunking off faculty to attempt to catch a glimpse of the Stones at court docket, he says, and Richards – who nonetheless owns Redlands within the close by village of West Wittering – stays one thing of an area hero. “There are a great deal of wonderful tales about Keith doing good issues locally: contributing cash to the chapel roof repairs, becoming a member of the protests once they have been going to shut Chichester hospital. They love him, everybody’s received a narrative about him as a result of he used to go to the pub loads and so forth. We made contact together with his son Marlon, who’s been wonderful. He lives in Chichester nonetheless, he’s received actually native roots, he’s very beloved.”
When the rehearsals recommence, it’s very clear that Redlands isn’t a regular courtroom drama, not least as a result of proceedings are interrupted by Jagger and Richards – performed by Jasper Talbot and Brenock O’Connor respectively – breaking right into a rendition of Mercy, Mercy, the Don Covay music the Rolling Stones lined on their 1965 album Out of Our Heads. Jones says she all the time wished the present to function music – “I used to be writing in lockdown, I assumed: ‘I desire a huge forged, a large stage, music, I would like it to be humorous, as a result of we’ve received no theatre in the mean time’” – however she doesn’t consider it as a musical, “despite the fact that there’s eight songs in it”, using which the Stones’ administration has authorized.
“We despatched the play to their individuals, we didn’t know if we’d get the rights. It’s been a little bit of a journey, however we received there,” says Audibert, who provides that the songs used are all “pre-1967 stuff”, supposed to underline what had fuelled the Stones within the first place, behind all of the lurid headlines. “It was actually vital to me that we paid homage to the truth that what these two children have been actually taken with was R&B, that bluesy, rootsy really feel. We’re making an attempt to inform that story as effectively.”
Judging by the rehearsal, they’ve managed to keep away from what you may think was the most important pitfall in depicting Jagger and Richards on stage. Each have ingrained public photographs that border on the cartoonish – certainly, Richards has claimed his piratical outlaw persona was born throughout the Redlands listening to, the place “the choose managed to show me into some people hero in a single day – I’ve been enjoying as much as it ever since”. When somebody’s spent a long time build up a facade, how do you break by means of to disclose the particular person beneath?
“What you’re making an attempt to do is get the essence of an individual, avoiding all direct mimicry,” Audibert says. “You must ask your self a few 24-year-old Mick Jagger: he’s a bit fearful of the trial, but in addition perhaps not taking it critically to begin with – how would that really feel? If it was only a form of Stella Avenue impersonation, the viewers wouldn’t care and the viewers have gotten to care about them.”
The Redlands trial was an occasion that started to be mythologised nearly the minute it completed, not least by the Stones themselves. Inside weeks of its conclusion, they launched the only We Love You, with an accompanying promotional clip that depicted Jagger and Faithfull as Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, with Richards because the choose presiding over Wilde’s trial. It subsequently impressed every thing from books to visible artwork – Richard Hamilton’s portray Swingeing London 67 featured Jagger handcuffed to fellow defendant, artwork supplier Robert Fraser, at the back of a police van – nearly all of which have hailed it as a hard-won victory for the youth counterculture over the repressive forces of the institution.
However the reality is extra advanced. A recent ballot, talked about within the World in Motion documentary, revealed that 85% of younger individuals thought Jagger and Richards deserved to go to jail: proof that, regardless of Richards’ celebrated line in court docket about younger individuals not caring about “petty morals” , the counterculture hadn’t unfold a lot past a clique of London hipsters.
The actual fissure wasn’t between young and old, however throughout the British institution, between these broadly sympathetic, like Rees-Mogg, and people who felt it represented an assault on British values: if latest years have proven us something, it’s that mentioned fissure definitely didn’t end in an entire collapse, nor did it do a lot to curb the behaviour of tabloid newspapers. Jones says Nigel Havers thought the trial modified his father a little bit – “he thought Mick and Keith have been actually vivid, it form of softened him; definitely he relished his son’s profession as an actor” – however it clearly didn’t flip him right into a liberal, as his controversial tenure as lawyer basic proved.
“I don’t suppose there’s a single message to the play,” nods Jones. “It’s advanced and imperfect, as life is. I really feel that we’re in a world that’s so polemical in the mean time, it’s a play about being compassionate in regards to the people who find themselves round you. It’s about individuals accommodating one another; coming collectively fairly than going through one another off. Even the Stones dressed up in good fits for the enchantment.”
Supply hyperlink
