Original subtitles

Mick and l, sometimes, just before we start making an album,

say, "What kind of album do we want to make?"

And I say, "Make a Rolling Stones album."

That's about as far as I can narrow it down.

It's really a matter of surprising yourself,

it's about what's coming out.

If I knew everything that was to be played

it would probably sound as dead as a doornail, you know.

You kind of tend to write songs no matter what else you're doing.

It's not one of those things where you sit down and say,

"Songwriting time."

It's just something that happens during the day.

You might pick up a guitar to tune it, and before you know it you've got a song.

If you're lucky.

I never pushed songwriting.

It's a... Idea comes in.

Like an antenna. You know, "Incoming, transmit."

Albums, what you get, you say, "That's that album,"

a lot of albums roll over into the nex one.

Some of the stuff that you do...

And, say, Sticky Fingers, towards the end you've got more stuff than you can use,

you say, "We'll just save it."

So you kind of roll over material that way,

and the album becomes what gets on there,

but to us the process is continual, usually.

But it's, "Let's use these 12 songs, and what do we call it?"

"I know, Beggars Banquet. I know, Let It Bleed, Exile On Main St."

So you kind of take snippets of something that's going on all the time.

Still is. On a good day I can still write a song.

It interested me, and I think probably the other guys,

of actually not recording in a recording studio =

that was a novelty.

Because before then, you always thought...

"To make a record you've got to go in the studio."

This kind of if you've broken a leg you've got to go to hospital.

We found out you could break legs just as simply and easily without bothering,

that you could actually make an environment that you could work with.

I think we first thought it would be a bit of an experiment

and then we'd move on to another studio.

But by the time we'd got settled in and things were starting to happen,

it was just, "Why bother? We've got what we want here."

So it was a matter of experiments, a lot of that.

I mean, getting lost in those damn basements... It was enormous.

So you could say, "Let's try the drums in that one for this song

"because it's got more echo, more snap."

Or you put the bass in another room.

You could experiment with the place like that,

find the best spot for each instrument.

It's got a kind of very dense sound,

that you can pretty much tell that it was recorded there.

I'd say the beginning, the first month, was probably a little bit touch and go

whether we'd actually pull it off,

but then it started to flow,

and as I say, we said, "We don't need to go anywhere else, we can do it all here."

And I said, "Great. In that case, I'll stay. I'll unpack."

I think we always wanted to be a bit of a soul band as well,

and horns...

they were...

I wouldn't have said...

Maybe it was because it was Bobby and Jim Price,

it was just the two cats,

it wasn't like a whole full horn section

which can be a lot to take care of.

With just the two guys, they fit into the size of the band real well.

It just gave us that exra texure that we'd been looking for.

So we basically just were a bit of a soul band, in a way, at that time.

Bobby and I were working together for a couple of years

before we realized that... actually born on the same day, same everything,

within hours of each other.

I said, "The only problem with Bobby is that he's a Texan.

"Otherwise he's great."

We'd never even intended it to be a double album

until finally we'd sort of run out of songs

and said, "Wow, there's too much for one album

"but there's too much good stuff.

"We can't cut this baby up."

So we decided to go for the double.

Sometimes it's the hardest part of making albums =

what order do the songs come in?

And you kind of get used to listening to them, jumbling them up,

and saying, "That one works nice off of that,"

and you kind of work it like that.

It's a bit like a jigsaw puzzle.

Sometimes you have a good track

but it doesn't somehow work

coming out of that track or going into that.

And of course there's always the thing

that somebody else has a different feeling about it,

and so you've got to... "Well, do we flip a coin or what?"

But it's quite a process.

We were successful, I suppose,

in that respect,

that it hangs together well.

That's an important thing with a record.

You can have the same record, the same songs,

but if they're in a sort of order

that sometimes can jar and not quite hang together.

And that's the difficult thing =

you've made a great record and you know it's good stuff,

but will it hang together?

With Exile I think we did it.

It's just having, I think, maybe the exra amount of space to play with.

You know, more songs, more time.

Firstly it was received

with a little bit of doubt and scepticism,

but then it just started to pick up

and then it kept going and going and going

until some people now say, "It's the best album you've ever done."

I don't know about that, but I'm still very proud of it.

I can never pick... I mean, what do I think's the best?

I could never think in those terms.

It's just, "Well, that was what was the best of what I did then."

You're kind of used to seeing us chopping and changing in this life,

but yeah, we'd also been off the road for quite a while,

and quite honestly we had to get used to how things had changed

in the about two years that we were off.

Technology had changed immensely.

I mean, they actually... You had PAs, which sounds weird now,

but when we used to work in the '60s...

most PAs were a couple of little speakers

hung on a side of a wall,

one of which usually worked, and that was just for the vocal.

So we had to get into learning miking up, monitors,

so we had to do a lot of catch=up to start with.

It didn't take long, but it's a lot more to consider.

Before, you just went on stage and hoped they heard you. That was it.

It was kind of exciting to go to Cannes and walk along the beach

and see all the topless girls, which you didn't see in England,

and naked girls and all that.

That was a bit of fun.

And just getting into that,

and then, much later, meeting...

famous artists, painters.

I did, anyway. I don't know about the others, they left earlier.

It was...

And living in a really nice house.

I lived in a place called the Bastide de Saint Antoine

which was near Grasse where they do the perfume.

And... I had these beautiful gardens

with high wild flowers and all that,

and they had their own vineyards

and they used to have their own wine.

Used to have about 400 or 600 bottles of wine every year from their grapes,

which you drank, it was the house wine.

And I would go in the gardens and I could just take photos of nature

and see massive great grass snakes about seven foot long.

And it was really, really interesting.

I've always loved nature anyway.

And I did a lot of movie films

of a praying mantis eating insects and things.

I just enjoyed all that. But then, when it came to recording,

when they finally got the Stones' mobile studio over to Keith's house,

very convenient for Keith, wasn't it?

There was this stairway that came down from upstairs,

and it turned, at the bottom of the stairway it turned,

and there was a room.

It was probably nine foot square, maybe ten.

That was where we recorded.

And it used to get so hot in there

that condensation used to run down the walls and all that.

My bass amp used to be under the bloody stairs,

out round there.

The horn players used to be down the corridor in the kitchen,

when they were doing things, or vocals.

It was all spread.

We couldn't see the engineer

and he couldn't see us = Andy Johns, and Jimmy Miller the producer.

They couldn't see us, we didn't have a contact with them.

So it was always speaking.

And it was just like an oven.

It was not very conducive to making music, really,

and it was a bloody miracle we did.

I suppose we had the band there, the whole band there,

probably 30%, 40% of the time.

The rest of the time it was just bits.

Me and Charlie, and... Mick hadn't come, Mick Taylor didn't come,

me, Charlie and Keith, so we'd work on something.

Nex day Keith wouldn't come because Mick wasn't there

so then Mick'd come and then he'd see Keith wasn't there

so the nex day he wouldn't come.

And sometimes we'd all get there to do a session

and Keith wouldn't even come, he was upstairs sleeping,

and we'd... Charlie had come five hours,

me and Mick Taylor had come two hours, Mick had come an hour,

and Keith's upstairs,

and he didn't come down to the session.

It was like madness.

Musically, he was a better musician

than any of us in the band, definitely.

He was young, he was...

God, some of the things he did were...

just amazing.

He was incredibly boring on the stage.

He'd just stand there and look at his guitar

and just do these most amazing licks and riffs

and solos,

but he'd just... like that, you know.

God, the audience would see the top of his head all the time.

And I always thought he could have been a bit more... to the public...

But then I'm not a good one to talk, am I?

I don't leap about much.

In 30 years with the Stones I've probably made three steps on the stage.

By the time it gets to that stage

it's quite different from the way it starts,

and you've got names of songs, and you think...

and you think, "Tumbling Dice? Which one's that?"

And then you hear it and you say, "Oh, yeah,

"that's the track we called so=and=so, that had a different name."

And Keith used to think of funny names.

He'd call one, like...

General Election or something, you know.

And it'd turn out to be All Down The Line or...

So when you saw the list of the tracks on the album, what were going on,

you didn't know which one was which, cos you didn't know them by those titles.

Cos Mick wrote the lyrics much later, often,

we did the tracks, and then he did the lyrics later and put them on.

You'd heard them so many times

that they were just like...

you didn't really want to listen to them for a while.

And Charlie's the same.

He says, "I don't listen to it. Once you get the album, I don't listen to it."

I'll say, "I don't either." I don't put the record on.

When you get the record, I don't put it on my turntable and listen to it.

Keith does. Keith'd put it on and play it for the nex three weeks solid,

every night, morning, noon and night, at full volume.

And he does that, bless him, that's what he does.

We went back to our roots with Beggars Banquet

and then we just continued in that way.

I don't see a lot different on Exile On Main St.

from the two albums before it or the one after it, actually, Let It Bleed.

They're all my favourite albums, those four albums are my favourites,

of all the career.

I think that's when we were at our peak

musically, inventively, creatively,

and on stage we were dynamite.

No one could come near us on stage, no one.

That whole period was incredibly intense and creative for all of us

because it was a new beginning for the band

and they'd signed a new contract with Atlantic Records

and we had to, in theory at least,

we had to come up with at least six albums in six years.

If we weren't hanging out together or recording...

we were touring.

I just remember most of the time we were either in the studio

or we were socialising together

or we were on the road.

The enduring thing about being with the Stones,

right from the very beginning, actually,

I mean, right from when I first joined them,

I'd be going over to Mick's house in Cheyne Walk

and he'd be playing old blues records.

Same with Keith. It always had this underlying...

sort of rootsy blues feel,

which was what really...

you know,

made it so special.

I think it was a real struggle for Keith and Anita

once we started the recording process,

because you're mixing domesticity, in a way, with...

not to put too grand a term, art.

Domesticity and art don't necessarily mix.

Although we were recording down in a basement

that was separate from what was going on above...

There were constant power failures, and...

Compared to the way records are made today, it was quite primitive

and quite basic.

You know, I remember Mick having to sing using...

having to use a different part of the basement,

maybe a disused toilet, or something, to do his vocal overdubs in.

They basically had to turn it into their home,

and of course...

it ended up being like a holiday resort for all their friends

and everybody else's friends.

And in the midst of all this holidaying and partying

we were trying to make an album.

In those days all the other girls were, like, very kind of...

not middle class, but kind of very quiet and wanted to have a baby

and wanted to get married and all of that, and I...

For me it was not on the agenda.

I just wanted to live out the dream.

That place was just amazing,

it was just exraordinary, it was very decadent.

And it belonged to an admiral called Alexandre Bardes or Bordes,

and he was an admiral, an English admiral,

and he collected exotic plants.

And so from every trip that he went he brought these plants home

and he just filled up the garden with all these monkey trees, baobab,

I mean, it was like a jungle.

There were places where I wouldn't even go.

And the whole house was like... it was majestic

and very big, very, very kind of decaying.

No furniture = I remember bringing some rugs.

They're in all the photographs of Dominique Tarle.

I say, "Oh, that rug..."

We brought along the rugs. So we kind of lived in that kind of style anyway,

rock'n'roll, hippy, whatever, all on the floor basically.

Everybody that came there, they were shocked.

You know, they said, "How can a beautiful place

"have all these toys on the floor and silly guitars..."

The best places were for the guitars =

all the nice couches and everything, all guitars.

You always had to sit somewhere...

I mean, Keith still does that,

he's always got the guitar in the best place, his best seat.

It was great. They all took part.

I don't know, in the evening we put them to sleep, and that's it.

I don't know how you could sleep with all that noise,

but kids are kids, so...

And then they had a great attitude towards the grown=ups as well,

and the grown=ups had to deal with them as well,

especially Jake and Charley who were older than Marlon,

Marlon was still a toddler, two years old.

But the other ones were always very demanding

and kind of confronting them and playing with them.

No, it was really good, a good vibe.

Lunch was always outside, and dinner was always...

I remember running in the kitchen, like, all the time.

"We need more of that, more of that..."

It was really... I don't know who paid for it,

but I'm sure it cost a bomb.

And all the wines and all of that,

and we always had liquor in the house.

It was like a freeloading kind of brigade, basically.

And some of them were really annoying,

and I got more and more bored with all these people

and I became a bouncer.

I kind of remember standing at the top of the stairs

and just throwing... emptying a room out that somebody had slept in

and just throwing all these clothes down.

And everybody was like, "She's a monster!"

That's what I ended up doing, just throwing everybody out.

Then I started to move around rooms,

and for a period I moved into a room just above the truck.

But that was also part of our escape route in case we got busted.

We had this escape route that we planned

so you could jump out the window where I was sleeping,

and then jump on the bus and get out really quickly,

because otherwise it was all these corridors and staircases.

So we had it all sussed, we had it pretty sussed.

It was really incredible, yachts...

it was, like, the deepest harbour in the Mediterranean,

and then there was the Sixh Fleet,

the Germans were there, all the navy people were there.

The Sixh Fleet would come in, they'd have LSD,

and all the village would open

and all these people would ravage the village,

and shoot=outs, and it was like a...

Yeah, it was like a frontier, like being in the Far West.

All these sailors, like, running around.

That was more interesting than what was going on in the house for us.

So we used to go up and drive up to them

and pretend to be pirates and do all kinds of nonsense.

A couple of them had skull and bones flags as well,

so there was, like, this element of bonding with these people,

but they didn't think so.

And then, I mean, Keith, he drove out with his motorboat,

and then he ran out of gasoline

so then he sent flares and we had to go to Villefranche and pick him up.

But that happened a lot.

When you live with them, that's what you see. You don't see...

all the other people from the outside see...

It's a kind of reality that you live with.

And I've always found it really sad

that people always say, "It was all sex and drugs and rock'n'roll."

It was rock'n'roll and drugs and sex, in that order.

When it came out, yes, I was really proud of them.

I was really proud of Keith as well.

I loved it right away, from Rip This Joint all the way down.

It's amazing, it really is special.

I actually went to France and bought a house

and set up home there.

Everybody else rented a place or something.

And I chose somewhere, typically me,

right in the middle of sort of North Wales, the equivalent thereof.

So it was miles from anywhere, right in the mountains, so...

But I still have it.

It was an old = well, old = it was an Edwardian villa, beautiful thing.

Keith had this fabulous balcony that he overlooked the end of the thing...

Where was it, Nellcote? At the Cap Ferrat or something.

Good sound in the cellar, it was a huge cellar.

It wasn't a little place.

I think I was in the sort of coal bunker bit,

but it was a good sound for the drums, the drums were great.

Time to Keith was a very loose thing.

It was a very small T=l=M=E because it meant...

He's like it even now he's straight.

Keith's time is...

I don't mean his playing time but his time of getting up and going...

It's quite normal for Keith to work from sort of eight in the evening

till three o'clock the nex afternoon.

And Mick works from eight at night till twelve at night,

and goes home.

So as a drummer you're in the middle of doing it all.

That's why it was good at Nellcote, cos you could do that.

Didn't matter when I went to bed.

No, I'm serious. Keith works like that.

Anyway, and with various other things going on,

you might not work for two days

and then do a whole two days without sleep the nex.

Keith likes to do a good track, keep it,

and play it over and over again,

for at least a year.

He likes that.

Mick and I tend to do it and hear it back

and never play it again ever.

And Mick will just hear it when he mixes it and that's it.

Keith will play them endlessly.

That's why Keith's a good one to...

if you ask him about a track you did two years ago,

he'll have it on his thing and know...

If it's a good one he'll know it and play it.

It's very good...

What I meant about him being a jazz player is he plays like that,

his playing is... it's very easy playing with Keith.

Very easy.

Your only critic is yourself, really.

He doesn't say, "Ooh, that's horrible."

And he doesn't stop playing if whatever.

It's like, "If that's how you want to do it, see what happens.

"I didn't like it, but you liked it."

He's very easy like that, very easy to play with.

And if it's good he's very complimentary about it.

So he's very easy to play with.

Well, it's a long time I've played with him.

Very comfortable to play with.

What I think happened with Exile is that we had all these odd things going,

and the songs that were done for the albums that we used...

so we had these other things that were actually...

like Casino Boogie and all those things,

normally they're pushed, not used,

but they'd slowly come to the surface

and we needed them to do this thing and they...

That's how...

And sometimes you miss the best things.

You do, no matter who you are.

Mick won't like using something from two days ago, so you'll miss it.

Not his fault, it's just how it evolves.

And sometimes you have an idea of an album, that it should all be this,

and so you dismiss the other stuff.

And that's kind of what happened with Exile.

We picked up a lot of stuff that was dismissed off the albums before,

couple of albums.

They always say that about great writers.

"All great writers are alcoholics." And you go, "No, they're not."

And you look at them and you think, "Bloody hell, the great ones actually were!"

Mostly.

Fitzgerald, all that lot. It's like, "Whoa, wait a minute."

So maybe that's true. I don't know.

That's been said about jazz musicians for years.

I was going to ask that as well...

Now, you could be right. How many people copied Charlie Parker

cos he was so great and so fucked up at the same time?

Many people.

But I don't think it made him greater than he actually was.

It may have made him spend more time on it, I don't know,

cos that's what it does, it messes your...

I don't know, actually, about that one.

And also when you're younger you can cope with it.

It's when you're older you can't.

And it doesn't hang on you so well either.

I remember hanging out with the Stones in the Olympic,

when I first met them with the Faces, the Small Faces,

when I used to hang out with them.

They sang...

...the background vocals to Get Off My Cloud, things like that.

Many good memories of parties,

cos Olympic used to have three different studios.

You'd have the Faces in one,

the Stones in another, David Bowie in another.

Everyone would meet in the canteen, like, "How's it going? All right?"

I remember, yeah, it was a really big moment in my life.

Like, "The Stones have to leave England!" Yeah.

And then I got hit by the taxman as well.

So was the government starting to come after the big rich rock stars?

I got hit for 80 grand or something, which meant me having to leave England,

and I went, "Now I understand what Exile was all about."

Because, just like the general public,

it took them years to find out how good the album was.

When it first came out as a double album,

it was great to me,

but really...

not understandable by the general public.

It was like, "Double album?

"These guys really think they can do a double album?"

I mean, it's twice as many songs. They were all fantastic.

I was born with those songs in my mouth, anyway.

You can name any song off of there and I was with it.

I didn't have to learn it.

When I joined the band, back in '7 4 or whenever,

when I had to learn 160 songs or something,

that was my initiation down in Woodstock...

I ended up teaching them to the band.

I knew the songs. I'd never played them before but I just knew them.

Well, Mick will be a fusspot because he always is, to today.

He's mixing, he's remixing Exile now.

So that shows you.

It's never quite... perfect enough.

In his view.

But to my view...

it's different.

It hits the nail on the head whether the tracks are mixed or not.