The story of The Rolling Stones

Two boys from Dartford

The story starts in Dartford, a town in Kent just outside London. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were classmates at Wentworth Primary School in 1950, then lost touch when their families moved. On the seventeenth of October 1961 they bumped into each other on platform two of Dartford railway station. Mick was on his way to the London School of Economics, where he studied finance and accounting, and under his arm he had records by Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters, ordered by mail from Chess Records in Chicago. Keith spotted them, and that was that. Within weeks Keith had joined Mick's little amateur band with their friend Dick Taylor. They called themselves the Blues Boys.[1] [2] [3]

In the spring of 1962 the Blues Boys found their way to the Ealing Jazz Club in west London, home of Alexis Korner's band Blues Incorporated. There they met a young slide guitarist from Cheltenham called Brian Jones, a pianist named Ian Stewart and a jazz drummer called Charlie Watts. Brian wanted his own rhythm and blues group, so in May he put an advert in a paper called Jazz News. Stewart answered first, and Mick and Keith soon followed. Some purists at the first rehearsal walked out because they hated the Chuck Berry songs Mick and Keith kept pushing. According to Keith, Brian named the band on the spot during a phone call, after glancing at a Muddy Waters record on the floor with a track called Rollin' Stone.[1] [2] [3]

They played their first gig as the Rollin' Stones on the twelfth of July 1962 at the Marquee Club in London, and soon added the letter g to their name. For a year Mick, Keith and Brian shared a flat at 102 Edith Grove in Chelsea, which Keith called a beautiful dump. Brian and Keith spent whole days playing guitar along to Jimmy Reed and Muddy Waters records, working out how two guitars could sound like four or five. Brian also taught Mick to play harmonica. In those early days Brian was the undisputed leader. He even quietly paid himself five pounds a week more than the others, which caused real resentment when they found out.[1] [2] [3]

The rhythm section came together that winter. In December 1962 a bass player called Bill Perks, who would soon take the name Bill Wyman, auditioned in a Chelsea pub. He was older than the rest, already married, and by his own telling they were impressed less by his playing than by his Vox amplifier and his steady supply of cigarettes. Then they went after Charlie Watts, a graphic designer at an advertising agency who was considered one of the best drummers in London. At first they could not afford him. He finally agreed in January 1963, and on the second of February 1963 the settled line-up played the Ealing Jazz Club. Soon they had a Sunday residency at the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Oldham makes them the anti-Beatles

In May 1963 the band signed with a nineteen year old publicist called Andrew Loog Oldham, who had worked for Brian Epstein promoting the Beatles. Oldham was too young to sign contracts without his mother, so he teamed up with an older agent, Eric Easton. His big idea was simple. The Beatles were the lovable ones, so the Stones would be the dangerous ones, with messy hair, no matching suits and no smiles on the album cover. He even fed the press the question, would you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone. Bill Wyman later argued that the bad boy image grew by accident, and that Oldham simply exploited it for all it was worth.[1] [2]

One of Oldham's first decisions was painful. He removed Ian Stewart from the official line-up, saying the square jawed pianist did not look the part and that six faces were too many for fans to remember. Stewart could have walked away. Instead he stayed on as road manager, driving the van, changing strings and playing piano on the records for the next twenty two years. Keith later said he would have told Oldham where to go, but Stu had one of the biggest hearts around. Meanwhile Decca, the label that had famously turned down the Beatles, signed the Stones on unusually generous terms, including ownership of their own master tapes.[1] [2]

Their first single, a cover of Chuck Berry's Come On, came out on the seventh of June 1963 and crept to number twenty one, helped by fan club members sent to buy copies at chart shops. The breakthrough came from an unlikely friendship. John Lennon and Paul McCartney gave the Stones a song called I Wanna Be Your Man, and it reached number twelve. On the first of January 1964 the Stones were the first band ever to play on the BBC's new show Top of the Pops. Their third single, Buddy Holly's Not Fade Away, went to number three, and their self titled first album was mostly covers, with just one Jagger and Richards original.[1] [2]

Their first American tour, in June 1964, was by Bill Wyman's account a disaster. They had no hit there, and on the TV show The Hollywood Palace the host Dean Martin mocked their hair. But the trip gave them two days at Chess Studios in Chicago, the home of their heroes, where they met Muddy Waters and recorded a cover of the Womack brothers' It's All Over Now. It became their first British number one. Later that year Little Red Rooster, an old Willie Dixon blues, gave them a second. By the end of 1964 the Stones were seen as the only serious rivals to the Beatles in Britain.[1] [2]

Satisfaction and world fame

Oldham knew a band that only played covers would never earn songwriting money, so he pushed Mick and Keith to write. Their first efforts were soft pop ballads, and one of them, As Tears Go By, became a hit for Oldham's teenage discovery Marianne Faithfull. The real turning point was The Last Time, released in February 1965, their first self written number one in Britain. Keith said it gave them the confidence and the pathway to write for the Stones. Then, in May 1965, on their third North American tour, they recorded the song that changed everything, a song whose guitar riff Keith said came to him in his sleep.[1] [2] [3]

That song was Satisfaction. Keith played the riff through a Gibson fuzzbox as a rough guide for a horn section that was never added. He and Mick did not even think it should be a single. The others, along with Oldham and the engineer, outvoted them. In America it hit number one on the tenth of July 1965 and stayed there four weeks, and it topped the British chart too. The fuzzbox sold out across America by the end of the year. Satisfaction fixed the Stones' image as defiant troublemakers, although Mick later insisted he was just being himself, a kid from the suburbs singing in a band.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Fame came with real danger. On the third of December 1965, at a concert in Sacramento, California, Keith's guitar touched an ungrounded microphone during The Last Time. There was a flash and a bang, and he was thrown backwards and knocked out cold on the stage. He woke up in hospital, where a doctor told him that people either wake up or they don't. Doctors believed the rubber soles of his shoes had saved his life. Around the same time, the band brought in a tough New York accountant called Allen Klein to renegotiate their Decca deal. He won them far more money than before, but he also held on to a great deal of it.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1966 the Stones released Aftermath, their first album made up entirely of Jagger and Richards songs. It is often called the most important record of their early years. Brian Jones, sidelined as a writer, poured his talent into colour instead. He played sitar on Paint It Black, dulcimer on Lady Jane and marimbas on Under My Thumb. Paint It Black went to number one in Britain and America, the first chart topping single to feature a sitar. Mother's Little Helper tackled prescription drug abuse, rare for a pop song then. The American police who had to control the screaming crowds that summer were far less charmed than the teenagers.[1] [2] [3] [4]

1967: busts, jail and a butterfly

In early 1967 the tabloid News of the World ran a series on pop stars and drugs. One article claimed Mick Jagger had taken pills and offered hashish at a London club. It turned out the reporter had actually been listening to Brian Jones. Mick sued for libel. A week later, on the twelfth of February, the paper tipped off Sussex police, who raided a weekend party at Keith's country house, Redlands. George Harrison and his wife had left shortly before. The police found little, but Mick, Keith and their friend, the art dealer Robert Fraser, were charged. Andrew Oldham, afraid of being arrested himself, fled to America.[1] [2] [3]

At the trial in June 1967, Mick was sentenced to three months in prison for four amphetamine pills he had bought legally in Italy. Keith got a year for allowing cannabis to be smoked in his house. Mick spent a night in Brixton Prison and Keith a night in Wormwood Scrubs before both were bailed. Then something surprising happened. The editor of The Times, the conservative William Rees Mogg, wrote an editorial called Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel, arguing that Mick had been punished far harder than any anonymous young man would be. On the thirty first of July the appeal court quashed Keith's conviction and gave Mick a conditional discharge.[1] [2] [3]

Brian Jones was also arrested in May 1967, and was fined and put on probation after an appeal. His private life was falling apart too. On a trip to Morocco that March, his girlfriend, the actress and model Anita Pallenberg, left him for Keith. Brian had been violent towards her. Keith later admitted it was the final nail in the coffin between him and Brian, and that he did not blame Brian for never forgiving him. Keith and Anita would stay together for twelve years. The band thanked their fans for their loyalty with a single called We Love You, which opens with the sound of prison doors slamming shut.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In December 1967 came Their Satanic Majesties Request, the Stones' psychedelic album, with a 3D cover photographed by Michael Cooper, the man who had shot Sgt. Pepper. Critics dismissed it as a poor copy of the Beatles. It was recorded while three members were waiting for their court cases, and in the middle of the sessions Andrew Oldham walked out. Mick later said Oldham felt they were being childish and not concentrating. It was the first record the band produced themselves. It also gave Bill Wyman a rare moment. His song In Another Land became the first Stones single on which Mick did not sing lead.[1] [2]

Brian's death and the dark end of the sixties

In 1968 the Stones went back to their roots with a new producer, the American Jimmy Miller. Jumpin' Jack Flash came out in May, a song Keith says was named after his gardener, Jack Dyer, clumping past the window one morning. Then came Beggars Banquet, with Sympathy for the Devil and Street Fighting Man, which Mick wrote after joining a protest against the Vietnam War outside the American embassy in London. Decca refused the original cover, a graffiti covered toilet wall, and delayed the album for months. In December they filmed The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, with John Lennon and the Who. Mick disliked the Stones' own performance, and it stayed on the shelf for twenty eight years.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

By then Brian Jones was barely part of the band. Drink and drugs had made him unreliable, a second drug arrest in 1968 made an American work visa unlikely, and some days his bandmates simply switched off his amplifier. On the eighth of June 1969, Mick, Keith and Charlie drove to Brian's home, Cotchford Farm in Sussex, once the house of Winnie the Pooh author A. A. Milne, and told him the band would carry on without him. He was allowed to announce it as his own decision. His replacement was a shy twenty year old guitarist from John Mayall's Bluesbreakers called Mick Taylor.[1] [2] [3]

Less than a month later, around midnight on the second of July 1969, Brian Jones was found motionless at the bottom of his swimming pool. He was twenty seven. The coroner recorded death by misadventure, and noted that his heart and liver were badly enlarged from drug and alcohol abuse. Two days later the Stones played a free concert in Hyde Park, already planned as Mick Taylor's debut. Mick Jagger read lines from Shelley's elegy Adonais, and hundreds of white butterflies were released from the stage. Around a quarter of a million people were there. Only Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman went to Brian's funeral.[1] [2] [3]

Their last album of the sixties, Let It Bleed, opened with Gimme Shelter, featuring the soul singer Merry Clayton wailing the words rape and murder, it's just a shot away. The London Bach Choir sang on You Can't Always Get What You Want, then briefly asked to have their name removed after hearing the rest of the record. That autumn the Stones toured America, with bigger sound and lights than any rock band had used before. Their stage manager, Sam Cutler, introduced them every night as the greatest rock and roll band in the world. To answer critics of their high ticket prices, they promised a free show in California at the end of the tour.[1] [2] [3] [4]

That free show happened on the sixth of December 1969 at the Altamont Speedway, east of San Francisco, in front of roughly three hundred thousand people. Members of the Hells Angels were positioned around the low stage. Violence broke out all day. As the Stones played Under My Thumb, an eighteen year old Black man named Meredith Hunter, who was high and carrying a revolver, was chased into the crowd. A Hells Angel named Alan Passaro stabbed him several times, and others beat him. Hunter died. Passaro said it was self defence and was acquitted. Three other people died that day in accidents. The killing was caught on film for the documentary Gimme Shelter.[1] [2] [3]

Tongue, tax exile and Exile on Main St.

By 1970 the band wanted out from both Decca and Allen Klein. They discovered that Klein's company held on to their money and song rights, and, they later said, that their taxes had not been paid for years. To finish their Decca contract they handed in a deliberately filthy blues song that could never be released. Then they started their own label, Rolling Stones Records, distributed by Atlantic. It needed a logo. Mick asked a young art student called John Pasche for something based on the tongue of the Hindu goddess Kali. The result, the famous lips and tongue, became perhaps the best known logo in rock. Pasche was paid fifty pounds.[1] [2] [3]

The first album on the new label was Sticky Fingers, released in March 1971. Andy Warhol conceived its cover, a close up of a man's jeans with a real working zip. It held Brown Sugar and Wild Horses, both recorded in Alabama at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in December 1969, days before Altamont. It was Mick Taylor's first full studio album with the band, and it went to number one in Britain and America. In Spain, the Franco government censored the cover, and it was replaced with a picture of fingers in a tin of treacle. Sister Morphine, co written with Marianne Faithfull, was swapped for a live Chuck Berry cover.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Their new financial adviser, Prince Rupert Loewenstein, gave blunt advice. The band owed the British taxman a fortune, and they had to leave the country before the new tax year. So in 1971 the Stones moved to the South of France. Keith rented Villa Nellcôte, a sixteen room mansion above the sea near Villefranche, and they recorded in its sweltering basement with their mobile studio parked outside. Keith was using heroin daily, and the house filled with visitors like Gram Parsons and William Burroughs. Sessions ran all night with whoever turned up. Keith was later convicted in a French court over cannabis and banned from the country for two years.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The result was the double album Exile on Main St., released in May 1972. It went to number one on both sides of the Atlantic, although some critics were baffled at first. The critic Lester Bangs panned it, then changed his mind within months, and today it is widely rated as their best album. The 1972 American tour that followed was wild enough that the film made about it, Cocksucker Blues, has never been officially released. Keith and the Texan saxophonist Bobby Keys, who shared his birthday, were filmed throwing a television out of a tenth floor hotel window in Los Angeles.[1] [2] [3]

Next they recorded in Kingston, Jamaica. Goats Head Soup came out in 1973 with the ballad Angie, a worldwide hit, but critics were starting to cool. For It's Only Rock 'n Roll in 1974, Jimmy Miller was dropped as producer, because his own drug use had taken its toll, and Mick and Keith took over under the name the Glimmer Twins. Mick Taylor was growing unhappy. He felt he had co written songs without credit, and he was tired of the chaos. In December 1974, at a party at Eric Clapton's house, he told Mick Jagger he was leaving. The band was about to start recording in Munich.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Ronnie Wood, heroin and Some Girls

The Munich sessions for the album Black and Blue turned into open auditions. Jeff Beck, Peter Frampton and Rory Gallagher were among the guitarists tried out. Beck and Gallagher later said they did not realise they were auditioning. The man who fitted was Ronnie Wood of the Faces, an old friend of Keith who had already helped write the song It's Only Rock 'n Roll. He had turned Mick down once out of loyalty to the Faces, and Rod Stewart said he would bet money Ronnie would never join. Ronnie toured with them in 1975 and became an official member in 1976, though for years he was paid a salary rather than being a full partner.[1] [2]

This was the darkest stretch of Keith's heroin years. In June 1976 his infant son Tara, born that March, died in his cot while Keith was on tour. He was ten weeks old. Keith played that night, and later said performing was the only way he could cope. In February 1977 Canadian police found heroin in his Toronto hotel room, and he was charged with possession for the purpose of trafficking, which could carry a sentence of seven years to life. After a blind fan spoke up for him, he got a suspended sentence and was ordered to play a charity concert for the blind. The scare pushed him to get clean.[1] [2] [3]

By 1977, with punk rock in full cry, many people saw the Stones as old news. They answered with Some Girls in 1978, fast and stripped back, with the disco tinged Miss You, the ballad Beast of Burden and the punky Respectable. It became their best selling studio album in America. It was not without trouble. Stars including Lucille Ball and Raquel Welch objected to their faces appearing on the cover, which was quickly redesigned. The Reverend Jesse Jackson called a lyric in the title song a racial insult, and Mick refused to change it. Meanwhile Mick's marriage to Bianca had ended, and he was often seen with the model Jerry Hall.[1] [2]

Tragedy followed Keith's household again. On the twentieth of July 1979, a seventeen year old groundsman named Scott Cantrell shot himself with Keith's gun in Anita Pallenberg's bed at their house in New York State, while Keith was recording in Paris. Anita was arrested, but the death was ruled a suicide. Her heroin use continued, and the couple split up that year. In April 1979 Keith played his court ordered charity shows in Oshawa, Ontario. Later that year he met the model Patti Hansen, and they married on his fortieth birthday in 1983. Ronnie Wood's side band, the New Barbarians, toured America with Keith in tow.[1] [2] [3]

Emotional Rescue topped the charts in 1980, but a rift between Mick and Keith was growing, and there was no time to make a proper new album before the 1981 tour. So their engineer Chris Kimsey went through years of unused tapes and built one. Tattoo You included Start Me Up, which had started life back in 1975 as a reggae track called Never Stop. The jazz great Sonny Rollins played saxophone on Waiting on a Friend. Tattoo You went to number one in America, the last of eight studio albums in a row to do so. The 1981 tour was the biggest of that year, and in 1982 pianist Chuck Leavell joined for the road.[1] [2] [3] [4]

World War Three

In 1982 the Stones signed with CBS Records for a reported fifty million dollars, then the biggest record deal ever. But after Undercover in 1983, Mick also signed a solo deal with CBS and started spending his energy on his own album, She's the Boss. Keith was furious. The trouble went back to the seventies. While Keith was lost to heroin, Mick had run the band's affairs, and once Keith was clean and wanted his say again, Mick did not like sharing control. Keith later called this period World War Three. The 1986 album Dirty Work was recorded in Paris largely around Keith, with Mick often absent, and Mick refused to tour it.[1] [2]

In the middle of it all the band lost its conscience. On the twelfth of December 1985, Ian Stewart went to a London clinic with breathing problems and died of a heart attack in the waiting room. He was forty seven. The Stones played a private tribute show for him at London's 100 Club in February 1986, and added a thirty second clip of Stu playing Key to the Highway to the end of Dirty Work. Mick said Stu was the one person they all wanted to please. Keith wrote later that, to him, the Rolling Stones was still Stu's band.[1] [2]

Charlie Watts had troubles of his own. The steady family man, who never cheated on his wife Shirley and once spent a night at the Playboy Mansion playing in the games room, later said he became totally another person from about 1983 to 1986, drinking heavily and using drugs. He said he nearly lost his wife over it, and called it a midlife crisis. He came out the other side and stayed clean. In those same years he also led a jazz big band, the Charlie Watts Orchestra, playing the music he had loved since he was a boy in Wembley.[1]

In 1986 it also became public that Bill Wyman had begun a relationship with Mandy Smith when she was thirteen years old, and he was in his late forties. Smith has said it became sexual when she was fourteen. The story caused a storm in the British press. Wyman married her in June 1989, when he was fifty two and she was eighteen. They separated within two years. That same year Wyman told the author Bill German that Mick had tried several times to push him out of the band, though German did not publish it at the time because of the tensions in the group.[1] [2]

In early 1989 the Rolling Stones were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by Pete Townshend. Charlie did not go. That same year Mick and Keith patched things up and made Steel Wheels, hailed as a return to form. On one track they recorded in Tangier with the Master Musicians of Jajouka, the Moroccan musicians Brian Jones had once recorded. The Steel Wheels and Urban Jungle tours were their biggest productions yet, with Guns N' Roses among the openers. It was Bill Wyman's last tour. He quietly left, and his departure became official in January 1993, after thirty years in the band.[1] [2] [3]

Stadium giants and elder statesmen

Charlie Watts chose Wyman's replacement, the American bassist Darryl Jones, who had played with Miles Davis and Sting. He was hired as a sideman rather than as a full member, and he has held the job ever since. Voodoo Lounge, produced by Don Was, came out in 1994 and won the Grammy for best rock album. Its tour grossed three hundred and twenty million dollars, then a record. On the eighteenth of November 1994 the Stones also became the first major band to broadcast a concert over the internet, a twenty minute video at a jerky ten frames per second.[1] [2] [3]

In 2003 Mick became Sir Mick, knighted by Prince Charles for services to popular music. He said the honour meant more to his father than to him. Keith was scathing. He called it a paltry honour and said it was ridiculous to take a medal from the establishment that had tried to throw them in jail. Mick answered that it sounded like jealousy. There was worse news the next year. In June 2004 Charlie Watts was diagnosed with throat cancer. He had radiotherapy and recovered, and the band waited until he was ready before making A Bigger Bang, released in 2005.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The Bigger Bang tour broke records everywhere. In February 2006 they played the Super Bowl half time show, and on the eighteenth of February they gave a free concert on Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro to more than a million people. Then, on holiday in Fiji that April, Keith fell off the branch of a dead tree and needed brain surgery in New Zealand. He later joked he left half his brain there. Martin Scorsese filmed their shows at New York's Beacon Theatre for the film Shine a Light, where Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun fell backstage and later died. By its end in 2007 the tour had grossed five hundred and fifty eight million dollars.[1] [2] [3]

In 2010 Keith published his memoir, Life, with some very unkind words about Mick. That same year a reissue of Exile on Main St. went back to number one in Britain, almost thirty eight years after it first got there. Rupert Loewenstein suggested the band wind down and sell up, the band refused, and he left after four decades. In March 2014 Mick's partner of thirteen years, the fashion designer L'Wren Scott, took her own life in New York, and the start of that year's tour was postponed. Mick later set up a scholarship in her name.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The band kept finding new places to play. They performed in Israel for the first time in 2014, and on the twenty fifth of March 2016 they played a free concert in Havana, Cuba, to around half a million people. That December they released Blue and Lonesome, an album of old Chicago blues covers, recorded in just days in London, which went straight to number one in Britain. In March 2019 Mick needed a heart valve replacement and the American tour was postponed. Six weeks later he was back on stage, dancing as usual. Then the pandemic stopped everything in 2020.[1] [2] [3]

After Charlie, still rolling

In April 2020, during lockdown, the Stones released Living in a Ghost Town, a new song that went to number one in Germany. Then in August 2021 came the news fans dreaded. Charlie Watts had had a medical procedure and would miss the rest of the American tour, with his friend Steve Jordan sitting in. On the twenty fourth of August 2021, Charlie died in a London hospital with his family around him. He was eighty. He had played every single Stones concert for fifty eight years, never missing one. For ten days the band's website showed nothing but his photograph.[1] [2] [3]

The band chose to finish the tour, with Steve Jordan on drums and a short film of Charlie opening each show. They also quietly dropped Brown Sugar from the set list, a song whose lyrics about slavery had long drawn criticism. In October 2023 they released Hackney Diamonds, their first album of new songs in eighteen years, produced by Andrew Watt. The title is London slang for the broken glass left after a smash and grab raid. Paul McCartney, Lady Gaga, Elton John and Stevie Wonder all guested. Charlie played on two songs recorded in 2019, and Bill Wyman came back to play bass on one of them. The album won the Grammy for best rock album.[1] [2] [3]

The losses kept coming. Anita Pallenberg had died in 2017. Bobby Keys, the saxophonist on Brown Sugar, died in 2014. And on the thirtieth of January 2025, Marianne Faithfull, Mick's partner in the late sixties, died at seventy eight. She had survived years of heroin addiction and homelessness after they split, and had rebuilt her career with the album Broken English in 1979. Mick, Keith and Ronnie kept working. In April 2026 they slipped out a single called Rough and Twisted in just a thousand vinyl copies under a fake band name, the Cockroaches, a name they had used for secret club gigs in the seventies.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

On the tenth of July 2026 the Stones released Foreign Tongues, again produced by Andrew Watt, with Steve Jordan and Darryl Jones in the band and guests including Paul McCartney, Robert Smith of the Cure and Steve Winwood. It also includes a song recorded with Charlie Watts. Most reviews were warm, although a few critics disliked the glossy production. It went straight to number one in Britain, their fifteenth number one album there, drawing level with the Beatles. The band said there would be no tour in 2026, and as of 2026 reports say at least ten more songs are already written for another album. More than sixty years after Edith Grove, the Stones are still rolling.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

The people around The Rolling Stones

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Childhood neighbours who met again on a train platform in 1961, they became one of the most successful songwriting teams in history, calling themselves the Glimmer Twins as producers. Their bond has swung between brotherhood and open war, most bitterly in the eighties. Keith once called their fights a family squabble, and in 2023 summed up making records as controlled madness, with Mick the controller and Keith the madness.[1] [2]

Brian Jones and Anita Pallenberg. Brian met Anita Pallenberg backstage in 1965 and they became one of the most photographed couples of swinging London. The relationship was stormy, and Brian was violent towards her, once breaking his hand on her face. On a trip to Morocco in 1967 she left him for Keith Richards. It badly damaged Brian's already fragile place in the band.[1] [2]

Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg. Together from 1967, Keith and Anita had three children, Marlon, Dandelion Angela and Tara, who died as a baby in 1976. They shared a long heroin addiction, and Anita was arrested with Keith in Toronto in 1977. They split in 1979 after a young man killed himself at their house, but remained on good terms. Anita died in 2017, aged seventy five.[1] [2]

Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull. Marianne Faithfull was discovered by Andrew Oldham and had her first hit with the Jagger and Richards song As Tears Go By. She and Mick were a couple from 1966 to 1970. She introduced him to the novel The Master and Margarita, which fed into Sympathy for the Devil, and co wrote Sister Morphine. After a miscarriage and a suicide attempt, they split, and she fell into years of addiction before her comeback.[1] [2] [3]

The Rolling Stones and Andrew Loog Oldham. Oldham was only nineteen when he took over as manager and producer in 1963. He invented their bad boy image, forced Mick and Keith to write their own songs, and sidelined Ian Stewart. But when the 1967 drug busts hit he fled to America, and the band drifted from him during the Satanic Majesties sessions. He later sold his rights in their music to Allen Klein.[1] [2]

The Rolling Stones and Allen Klein. Klein, a New York accountant, renegotiated the Stones' Decca deal in 1965 and won them more money than the Beatles were getting. But the band later accused him of holding back royalties and taking their publishing. His company ABKCO kept the rights to their sixties songs, and years of lawsuits followed. He went on to manage the Beatles as well, and died in 2009.[1]

Ian Stewart and The Rolling Stones. Stu answered Brian Jones' advert first and ran the band's bookings from his office desk at ICI. Removed from the line-up for his looks in 1963, he stayed as road manager and pianist until his death in 1985. He disliked minor chords, avoided the drugs and booked hotels near golf courses. Keith said the Rolling Stones was Stu's band.[1]

Charlie Watts and Shirley Watts. Charlie married Shirley Ann Shepherd in October 1964, and they stayed together for fifty seven years, until his death. In a band famous for excess, he was known for refusing groupies, and he left the road after every tour to go home to her and their horse farm in Devon. Shirley died in December 2022, the year after Charlie.[1]

Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall. Mick met the Texan model Jerry Hall in 1977 as his marriage to Bianca was ending. They had four children and held an informal wedding in Bali in 1990. It ended after Hall learned he had fathered a child with the Brazilian model Luciana Gimenez, and in 1999 a London court declared the Bali marriage invalid.[1]

Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood. Ronnie and Keith were friends before Ronnie joined, and Keith played on Ronnie's first solo album. When Ronnie arrived in 1975, their loose, interlocking style brought back what Keith calls the ancient art of weaving, two guitars trading parts. Keith was sceptical at first about Ronnie's many attempts to stop drinking, but Ronnie has now been sober for well over a decade.[1] [2]

Mick Taylor and The Rolling Stones. Mick Taylor joined at twenty and played on the band's great run from Let It Bleed to It's Only Rock 'n Roll. He felt he deserved songwriting credit on songs like Moonlight Mile and Sway, and quit suddenly in 1974. Keith sent him a warm telegram, which reportedly made him cry. He rejoined them on stage for the fiftieth anniversary shows in 2012 and 2013.[1]

Rare facts about The Rolling Stones

• As a boy soprano, Keith Richards sang at Westminster Abbey for Queen Elizabeth the Second. Keith was recruited into his school choir at Dartford Tech and sang in a trio of boy sopranos, including a performance for the Queen at Westminster Abbey. His breaking voice eventually forced him out of the choir.[1]
• The Stones' first number one on their own terms, Satisfaction, was released only because the band outvoted Mick and Keith. Mick and Keith did not think Satisfaction was commercial enough. Brian Jones, Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts, Andrew Oldham and the engineer outvoted them, and it became their first American number one.[1] [2]
• In 1963 the Stones secretly recorded a Rice Krispies jingle for Kellogg's. The thirty second advert was credited to Brian Jones, which annoyed the rest of the band. It meant that when Microsoft paid a reported three million dollars to use Start Me Up for Windows 95, it was not actually their first advert.[1] [2]
• Ian Stewart ran the early Stones from his desk at the chemical company ICI. None of the others had a telephone, so Stu's work number was printed in Jazz News and he handled the bookings at his office. He also bought the van that carried them to gigs.[1]
• Stu refused to play minor chords on stage. Ian Stewart loved boogie woogie and old rhythm and blues. He said that when a minor chord came along on stage with the Stones, he lifted his hands in protest and stopped playing.[1]
• The Stones were the very first band to play on Top of the Pops. On the first of January 1964 they opened the BBC's new chart show with I Wanna Be Your Man, a song the Beatles had given them.[1]
• Keith Richards was nearly killed by an electric shock on stage in 1965. In Sacramento, his guitar touched an ungrounded microphone and he was knocked unconscious. Doctors thought the rubber soles of his shoes saved his life, and he played again the following night.[1] [2]
• The comma in Paint It, Black was a mistake by Decca. The single first came out as Paint It, Black. The stray comma, added by the record company, stirred up arguments over how the title should be read.[1]
• Deep Purple's Smoke on the Water name checks the Rolling Stones' mobile studio. The Stones built a recording studio into a van in 1968 at Ian Stewart's suggestion. Led Zeppelin used it for albums three and four, and Deep Purple sang about the Rolling truck Stones thing in Smoke on the Water.[1] [2]
• The guitar Keith used on Gimme Shelter fell apart on the very last note. Keith played an Australian made Maton hollow body. He said the whole neck fell off on the last note of the take, and that you can hear it on the original recording.[1]
• The cowbell that opens Honky Tonk Women was played by producer Jimmy Miller. Miller, who produced five albums for the band, also played drums on You Can't Always Get What You Want, Tumbling Dice and Happy.[1]
• Keith Richards often plays a guitar with only five strings. His favourite open G tuning comes from banjo tuning, and he removes the lowest string because he says it gets in the way. You can hear it on Honky Tonk Women, Brown Sugar and Start Me Up.[1] [2]
• The designer of the tongue logo was paid just fifty pounds for it in 1970. John Pasche got another two hundred pounds in 1972 and sold his copyright to the band in 1984. In 2008 the Victoria and Albert Museum bought his original artwork for fifty one thousand pounds.[1]
• The Flying Burrito Brothers released Wild Horses a year before the Stones did. Gram Parsons heard a demo and asked to cover it. The Stones agreed on condition it was not a single, and the Burritos' version appeared in 1970, while the Stones' own was held up by legal fights with Allen Klein.[1]
• Keith Richards and saxophonist Bobby Keys were born on the same day. Both were born on the eighteenth of December 1943. Keys played the famous saxophone solo on Brown Sugar, and was best man at Mick Jagger's wedding to Bianca in 1971.[1]
• Truman Capote toured with the Stones in 1972 and was cruel about Mick Taylor. Capote was writing a Rolling Stone article that he never finished. On The Tonight Show he described Taylor as pretty but dumb and totally uninteresting.[1]
• Some Girls was reissued with a cover reading pardon our appearance, cover under reconstruction. Celebrities including Lucille Ball, Farrah Fawcett and Raquel Welch objected to their faces on the original sleeve. The band replaced them with garish blank spaces and that apologetic slogan.[1]
• Start Me Up began as a reggae song called Never Stop in 1975. The band cut dozens of takes during the Black and Blue sessions, tried again in 1978, then shelved it. It was rescued from the vaults for Tattoo You in 1981.[1]
• At the 1976 Knebworth festival, the Stones finished their set at seven in the morning. They played to around two hundred thousand people, their biggest crowd up to that point.[1]
• Ronnie Wood was on a salary for about fifteen years after joining. Unlike the others, Ronnie was a paid employee from 1975. He only became a full partner in the band's business in the early nineties.[1] [2]
• Charlie Watts sketched every hotel bed he slept in on tour from 1967 onward. He told Rolling Stone in 1996 about the habit, and by 2001 he had filled a dozen or more diaries. He also never had a driving licence, although he collected beautiful cars.[1]
• Charlie Watts made his first drum out of a banjo. As a boy he bought a banjo, disliked the dots on its neck, took the neck off and used the skin as a snare drum. He got a real drum kit for Christmas in 1955.[1]
• Bill Wyman faked a toothache in 1990 to leave a Stones tour and watch a football final. A lifelong Crystal Palace fan, he said he needed a London dentist. He actually went to Wembley to see Palace in the FA Cup final.[1]
• Bill Wyman's old bass sold for a record three hundred and eighty thousand dollars. His 1969 Fender Mustang bass went for that sum at auction in 2020, then the highest price ever paid for a bass guitar.[1]
• Keith Richards received a pardon from the governor of Arkansas in 2006. Governor Mike Huckabee pardoned him for a reckless driving citation from 1975.[1]
• Keith owns roughly three thousand guitars. Despite the huge collection, he once joked that whatever model he plays, give him five minutes and he will make them all sound the same.[1]
• In the sixties the Stones' contracts banned them from playing segregated venues. A clause said they would not perform to segregated audiences, with a heavy fine for the promoter and the right for the band to walk away.[1]
• Scientists named a family of fossil insects after the band, calling them Rolling Stoneflies. On Mick's seventy fifth birthday in 2018, seven fossil stonefly species were named after band members. NASA later named a rock on Mars moved by its InSight lander Rolling Stones Rock.[1] [2]
• The Stones pioneered webcasting with a concert stream in 1994. On the eighteenth of November 1994 they broadcast twenty minutes of a show over the internet, at ten frames per second, one of the first demonstrations of streaming video.[1]
• The Stones gave back the royalties to Bitter Sweet Symphony in 2019. The Verve's hit used a sample from an orchestral version of The Last Time, and Allen Klein's company took the songwriting credit. In 2019 the band and Klein's son returned it to Richard Ashcroft.[1] [2]
• Chuck Leavell, the Stones' keyboard player since 1982, is also an award winning tree farmer. He runs a large tree farm in Georgia with his wife, and they were named America's outstanding tree farmers of the year in 1999.[1]
• At Live Aid in 1985, Ronnie Wood played air guitar so Bob Dylan could keep going. When one of Dylan's strings broke during Blowin' in the Wind, Ronnie handed over his own guitar and mimed until a stagehand brought a replacement.[1]
• Andrew Loog Oldham never met his father, an American airman killed in 1943. His father, a US Army Air Force lieutenant from New Orleans, died when his B17 bomber was shot down over the English Channel months before Andrew was born.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.