Mick Jagger wrote 'masterpiece' memoir snubbed by publishers as it was 'light on sex & drugs'
Book publisher John Blake says he possesses a 75,000 word ‘masterpiece’ memoir penned by Mick Jagger in the early eighties that may never see the light of day.
Handed to him by a friend three years ago, Blake describes the book as “an extraordinary insight into one of the three most influential rock stars of all time” and the “rock ’n’ roll equivalent of the Dead Sea Scrolls.”
Dissatisfied with the plethora of unauthorised and inaccurate biographies hitting the shelves, Blake claims in The Spectator that Mick was persuaded to write his memoirs by publisher Lord Weidenfeld in the early eighties and was offered a handsome £1million cash advance.
Waxing lyrical about its contents, Blake dubs it a “masterpiece” and “a perfectly preserved time capsule written when the Stones had produced all their greatest music but still burned with the passion and fire of youth and idealism.”
Incredibly, the publisher rejected the manuscript as it was too “light on sex and drugs.” Blake adds: “In the early 1980s, when it was written, shock and awe was a vital part of any successful autobiography.”
Stories recounted in the autobiography include Sir Mick buying a historic mansion called Stargroves while he was out of his head on LSD, nearly losing his life riding an out-of-control stallion and the “tedium of looking at Keith’s scraggy, monkey-like bottom night after night.”
Having obtained the memoir three years ago, Blake says he immediately got in touch with Mick’s manager Joyce Smyth who said that “Mick could not remember any manuscript.”
However, once he saw it he offered to write a foreword to establish that the book was written at a very different time of his life – however, with the death of Mick’s girlfriend L’Wren Scott and a number of new Stones projects it was put on the back burner.
When Blake pushed recently, he says the “steel gates clanged shut” and “Mick wanted nothing further to do with this project. He never wanted to see it published.”
He ends his Spectator blog writing: “Apologies to the 10million people around the world who would love to read this story. After all, as the philosopher Jagger once said ‘You can’t always get what you want.’”