Crossfire Hurricane

ANITA PALLENBERG: “For a few years then we were just flying. We had everything – money, power, looks, protection, we had the lot.”

SPANISH TONY: “Anita and I both spoke fluent Italian, and we had always been close friends, though our relationship was that of brother and sister, with never a hint of romance. And so it was to me she often confided. ‘I feel,’ she told me one day, ‘as though I’m rather like the sixth Rolling Stone. Mick and Keith and Brian need me to guide them, to criticize them and to give them ideas.’ ‘Arrogant bitch,’ I thought, but said nothing.”

GARY LACHMAN: “At Robert Fraser’s apartment, the Stones met Kenneth Anger. Immediately fascinated with the androgynous Mick, Anger saw Jagger as Lucifer with Keith as his familiar, Beelzebub. He wanted them both for his still unfinished epic, “Lucifer Rising.” Mick ate up Anger’s ramblings on Crowley’s philosophy, and listened to his tales of magick, but shrewdly kept a discreet distance and remained non-committal… Keith and Anita seemed even more impressed. At one point he had the superstitious Anita wearing garlic to ward off vampires. In an interview with ‘Rolling Stone’ magazine, Richards said that witchcraft, magic and Satanism were something everyone ought to explore, and remarked that he was Kenneth Anger’s ‘right-hand man.’”

ANITA PALLENBERG: “Some people do have the power. If you practice it a lot, you can do it.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “Anita was certainly into black magic. And although I can’t really say whether she was a witch or not, there’s no denying the fact that Anita was sort of a black queen, a dark person, despite her blond looks… It’s very hard to define wickedness, but when Anita looked at you sometimes with that incredible smile on her face, it was a smile that seemed to be a camouflage for some dark secret that she was hoarding… The best way I can describe Anita is that she was like a snake to a bird and that she could transfix you and hold you in place until she wanted to make her move.”

ANITA PALLENBERG: “Oh, Marianne’s probably referring to that spell I put on Brian.  She knew about that. [Recovering at a friend’s house after a violent argument with Brian] I was sitting there, in tears, angry, getting my wounds treated, feeling terrible, and I decided to make a wax figure of Brian and poke him with a needle.  I molded some candle wax into an effigy and said whatever words I said and closed my eyes and jabbed the needle into the wax figure.  It pierced the stomach. [The next morning] he’d been up all night, and was in agony, bottles of Milk of Magnesia and other medications all around him.  It took him a day or so to get over it.  Yes, I did have an interest in witchcraft, Buddhism, in the black magicians that my friend, Kenneth Anger, the filmmaker, introduced me to."

GARY LACHMAN: “Kenneth Anger was close enough to Richards to set up camp for a while at Redlands. But then something happened. Pallenberg mentioned that she wanted to marry Richards, and Anger suggested they have a pagan ceremony. It would take place at dawn on Hampstead Heath – or maybe right there at Redlands. If so, Anger advised that the door to the house would have to be painted gold, using a special paint that contained magical herbs, symbolizing the sun. Anita thought it was a great idea; Richards, chilled from the effects of some magical herbs of his own, was less enthused. He was even less crazy about the idea the next morning. After Anger left for the night, Keith and Anita nodded off. When they awoke they discovered that the massive front door had been painted gold – on the inside. For Pallenberg, this meant that the powers agreed with her ideas about her and Richards getting married. But not Keith. Mostly he was annoyed that the expensive security system he had installed didn’t prevent someone from breaking in and doing the re-decorating. Needless to say, the marriage didn’t take place.”

CHRISTOPHER ANDERSEN: “Once, Anita and Keith had taken a number of Kenneth Anger’s books and talismans and loaded them into their car. When they became involved in an auto accident, they placed a frantic call to Mick. ‘Then we did this ritual fire burning of all Anger’s stuff that was in the car,’ said Pallenberg. ‘But that was just panic, and to be safe.’ Anita used her scarf dipped in a dying man’s blood to cast spells on her enemies and, when she briefly came to believe that Mick might be Satan’s emissary on earth, over Jagger as well.”

MICK JAGGER: “For most people the fantasy is driving around in a big car, having all the chicks you want and being able to pay for it.  It always has been, still is and always will be.  And anyone who says it isn’t is talking bullshit.”

 

A.E. HOTCHNER: “Mick desperately needed to keep Marianne in his life and he brooded about how to do that.  He knew that she yearned for a house in the country, for flowers, shrubs, grass, a running brook, a life away from the enticements and pressures of the rock world, and Mick seriously considered dropping out for a while and joining the nomad life of his friend, Sir Mark Palmer, the young aristocrat who had renounced his upper-class life.  Perhaps that would assuage Marianne’s restlessness.  And his own.  So Mick and Marianne packed a duffle and joined Mark Palmer in the south of England, where he was leading a caravan of horse-drawn wagons across the countryside.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “I would have loved to have set up a home in the country, to have furnished it, and made it something of our own.  Then I could have started to be my own person.  There was a house that I wanted Mick to buy but he wouldn’t because he said it was too far from home.  Of course, it was a long way, near Wales, but I fell in love with it.  It had a trout stream and three mountains in the background.  I would have put in gardens and made it a thing of beauty.  Of course, the house that Mick did buy in Stargroves did give me an opportunity to create a lovely garden, which I made in the shape of the four of diamonds composed of red and white roses.  It was sort of like Alice in Wonderland.”

SIR MARK PALMER: “In reality, Stargroves was a grim place, and Mick really never intended to fix it up proper and move in.  It did have big stables and all that sort of thing, so when winter came and we couldn’t graze the horses any more, we all moved into Stargroves.  We did that for a couple of winters.  Mick and Marianne stayed for a bit but before long they took off.  But they continued to come down for brief visits.  So did Brian Jones.  And Keith and Anita.  But the thing about Marianne, she was into heroin by then, so were Keith and Anita, and Marianne really had to be in London to stay close to her supply.  But the times he was there, Mick really liked the laid-back, communal life of our group at Stargroves.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “It’s a bit like life in the seraglio. Luxury, drugs and a lot of waiting around for the sultan to make an appearance! Anita and I dealt with it very well, under the circumstances. What we had in common was magic and books. But mainly we talked about things that people talk about when they don’t want to talk about what’s really happening. We would take acid and dress up a lot. Anita’s idea of help in those days was to give you drugs. And there’s nothing quite like drugs for making time pass. We did what girls do. Kissed. Took baths together. I was madly in love with Anita. She was so gorgeous. The one time we began to make love we were interrupted in flagrante by Mick and Keith. Anita and I would spend the day reading passages from ‘The White Goddess’ out loud to each other. That’s what we loved to talk about: phases of the moon, alphabet dolmens and mnemonic finger poems. That was our stuff.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “I know it’s been said that there was something between Anita and me but that simply wasn’t true.  I was in awe of Anita because she was very powerful, very beautiful, very clever.  But that’s as far as it went.  There was something compelling about Anita, as if she had some great secret locked up in her.  No matter how I tried to dress, Anita always made me feel dowdy and badly dressed, lacking in style, and lacking in sophistication.  I guess part of my feelings could be traced back to the fact that it was Keith that I really liked and would have liked to have been with, but Anita was the one who got him when she left Brian.  So emotionally that would have some effect on how I felt about her.  There’s no doubt I was jealous of her, primarily because she was easier in her own skin than I was in mine.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “These were the years when all life transpired on the bed. Listening to records, talking on the phone, rolling joints, playing guitars took place on and around the bed. The bed was a sort of charmed island. Acid and hash induced a Lotus-Eaters’ indolence and languidness. You wanted to drape yourself on the bed, lie around on stacks of pillows and vibrate. Scarves over the lamps, tiger balm, worn ballet slippers, picture books of weirdness, incense and tapes all over, albums stacked leaning against the wall. A Gypsy’s life.”

CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD: “Jagger purchased books at John Dunbar's Indica Shop. Among his favorite references were ‘The Secret of the Golden Flower,’ ‘The Golden Bough,’ and ‘Morning of the Magicians’ – each was filled with cryptic allusions – green suns and celestial travelers.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “These were enchanted evenings. Everything unfolded with magical ease. We sifted through the past, selecting exquisite bits and pieces from other eras: furniture, books, ideas, art, other lives. Andee [Cohen] would talk effusively about her past lives. Egypt, Samaria, the court of Louis I, the Tang Dynasty. Mick would play wonderful old blues and Motown, Hank and Audrey Williams duets, Sun Ra and Joe Tex. I’d have all my fairy-tale books spread out on the bed: Edmund Dulac, Arthur Random, Rossetti, Heath Robinson, all those bizarre Victorian illustrators. Faces coming out of trees, talking fish, the King of the Mountains of the Moon and his bewitched court. I could now read our Persian-Kurdish rug in a way I had never been able to before. It was a mythological map of Samarkand with interlacing arabesques of mechanical peacocks, saffron pavilions, orchards and gardens and cypress trees. We lived these lives a thousand years ago as courtesans, as opium-eaters at the court of the Kubla Khan.”

MARSHALL CHESS: “I remember visiting Mick’s house on Cheyne Walk, and he had a long table in the living room.  At the end of it, there was a turntable, with stacks and stacks of records.  He had some Zydeco, blues.  Some deep cool shit on that table.  Not a lot of white people know about Zydeco.  He put on this Clifton Chenier song, ‘Black Snake Blues.’ It was a rare thing.  I never saw a white guy other than maybe a Cajun who would have that side.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “Mick just wasn’t part of what was going on, you see – not part of the sixties.  Really out of step, not part of the scene.  Mick was very frightened of drugs – always was.  And that’s been great, in a way, because he’s kept his health together.  And that’s very important to him.  But he’s always pretended that he’s been into dope like everyone else.  It’s all a sham.”

OSSIE CLARK: “There was a time I saw another side of Mick’s persona, when anger overcame him and he became like a man possessed.  It happened at a party the Stones gave in a place in Maidenhead.  John Lennon was there, and a lot of their other musician friends.  At four o’clock in the morning, the owner said, ‘That’s it, no more drinks.’ Mick was incensed, absolutely furious because the party had thinned and there was a nice lot of his favorite people who were left and Mick wanted to go on partying with them.  But the owner just told Mick to fuck off and left, after padlocking the bar.  Mick went out of control, smashing things all over the room.  Finally he picked up a chair and threw it through the big glass window, spraying glass all over the place.  Then he dashed out and disappeared into the night.  I had gone to the party with him but he left without me, ranting and raving.”

KEITH RICHARDS: “Everybody eventually had their own pet registered junkie. Steve and Penny were a registered junkie couple. Anita and I installed them in the cottage across from Redlands, which was where I was living at the time. And once a week, ‘Steve!’ Into Chichester, pop into Boots for a minute, go back home and then I’d have half his smack. Steve and Penny were a very sweet, shy, unassuming couple. They weren’t some lowlifes. He was very ascetic, with a little beard. He was a philosopher, always reading Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche. Big, tall, thin bloke with ginger hair, mustache and glasses. He looked like a fucking professor, though he didn’t smell like one. It must have gone on for about a year. They were such a sweet and gentle couple. ‘Can we make you a cup of tea?’ Nothing that you think about junkies. It was all very civilized. Sometimes I’d go to the cottage and – because they were mainliners – say, ‘Penny, is Steve still alive?’ ‘I think so, darling. Anyway, have a cup of tea and then we’ll wake him up.’ It was all so genteel. For every stereotypical junkie, I can point to ten others who live perfectly ordered lives, bankers and whatever.”

MARSHA HUNT: “Mick was close to Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg, who lived on the same road.  After one visit to their house, I decided to keep my distance.  I didn’t find their being into hard drugs cute or adventurous.  Mick doted on Keith, and I didn’t voice an opinion but I avoided contact.”

VICTOR BOCKRIS: “At Cheyne Walk, Anita transformed what had been a classic 18th-century wood-paneled salon into a ‘replica of a Moroccan hashish den.’ The house was a hippie’s dream pad. The second-floor front reception room was dedicated to tripping before a fireplace flanked by two giant candlesticks. A glittering mirrored ball hung from the ceiling, reflecting endless shards of light across the walls. Another room contained a shrine to Jimi Hendrix. Keith and Anita slept in the bed on which Mick had fucked her during the filming of ‘Performance.’ A number of people who stayed there claimed the house was haunted.”

OSSIE CLARK: “I visited Keith and Anita in the house in Cheyne Walk.  I remember going there one night, and Anita came up to me with this pin, a golden pin with a skull on the head.  It had an emerald for one eye and a ruby for the other.  She thrust it at me menacingly: ‘Don’t you think it’s beautiful?’ she demanded. ‘I think it’s rather macabre,’ I said. She said, ‘I think it would be nice to stick it in your neck.’ She lunged at me and I had to grab her arm or she would certainly have plunged it into my neck.”

STANLEY BOOTH: "Valentino, a scarred grey tabby cat who once belonged to Brian Jones, yawned and stretched on the terrace. Keith and I were sitting on a Moroccan carpet... the flashing-eyed Anita was still upstairs in the tapestry-bedecked bedroom where she and Keith slept, on the dresser in silver frame was a small photograph of Brian. Inside the lid of the downstairs toilet was a collage of Rolling Stones photographs. These people didn't try to hide things. The first night I spent at Keith's, Anita tossed a blanket beside me on the cushion where I was lying. 'You don't need sheets, do you?' she asked. 'No, I'll be fine,' I said. 'Mick has to have sheets,' she said. 'Put it in your book.'"

DAVID COURTS: “At that time there was a big connection between the art scene and the music scene and I think it had a lot to do with a lot of musicians coming out of art school, and so it was quite easy to jell, and of course the drug connection was big and everybody had the same antiestablishment feeling, that it was them and us. I started making jewelry for Keith through Anita. I made a skull pin, which was this carved skull with a bishop’s miter of white-yellow gold with sapphires, rubies, and diamonds set in it. It was rather unusual and she said, ‘Great, we’ll have it for Keith and engrave on it ‘The Bishop of Rock and Roll.’ So she was right on the ball.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “Keith was gorgeous in those days. When I think how he looked then, how beautiful he was – and pure. Long before I got to know him, I had a huge crush on him. For years. He was the epitome of the tortured Byronic soul.”

SIMON WELLS: “Soon after Keith and Anita’s arrival at Cheyne Walk, Sir Anthony Nutting casually dropped by to check if any of his mail had bypassed the redirection process.  Given entry by the house porter Luigi, Nutting was astounded to witness the startling transformation that Anita had applied to his former home.  Such was the former minister’s shock on viewing the renovation, he was forced to sit down.  If the aroma of the incense and other exotic wafts wasn’t intoxicating enough, the first-floor reception room – a location where many establishment luminaries (including Winston Churchill) had supped and dined – was now draped in black, with giant black candlesticks glowing above the ornate fireplace.  Hieroglyphic art littering the stairwells, on the second floor, an oak-panelled drawing room (a place where government ministers had once debated the Suez Crisis of 1956) was now dominated by a psychedelically painted piano and a large hookah pipe.  Hanging above, a glittering mirror ball shot shreds of light across the room, the effect constructed by Anita to aid tripping.”

SPANISH TONY: “Anita was obsessed with black magic and began to carry a string of garlic with her everywhere – even to bed – to ward off vampires. She also had a strange, mysterious old shaker for holy water which she used for some of her rituals. Her ceremonies became increasingly secret, and she would warn me never to interrupt her when she was working on a spell…. In her bedroom she kept a huge, ornate carved chest, which she guarded so jealously that I assumed it was her drug stash. The house was empty one day, and I decided to take a peep inside. The drawers were filled with scraps of bone, wrinkled skin and fur from strange animals. I slammed the chest shut in disgust and fled from the room.”

R. GARY PATTERSON: “It has been rumored that Anita Pallenberg also placed a curse upon Joe Monk, a former friend of Keith Richards. After a drug bust had occurred in the summer of 1973, Pallenberg had become convinced that Monk had served as an informant for the police. She claimed that she would get her revenge upon the supposed double-crosser by placing a curse upon him.”

SPANISH TONY: “A short while later Joe Monk was driving along a lonely cliff-top road in Majorca when his car crashed and he was killed. Nobody saw it; no other vehicle was involved. The police said it was the strangest accident that they had ever heard of. One can only assume it was a coincidence of course.”

KEITH RICHARDS: “Kenneth Anger told me I was his right-hand man.  It’s just what you feel.  Whether you’ve got that good and evil thing together.  Left-hand path, right-hand path, how far do you want to go down?  Once you start there’s no going back.  Where they lead to is another thing.  It is something everybody ought to explore.  Why do people practice voodoo?  All these things are bunched under the name of superstition and old wives’ tales… before, when we were innocent kids out for a good time, they were saying, ‘They’re evil, they’re evil.’ Oh, I’m evil, really?  So that makes you start thinking about evil.  What is evil?  Half of it, I don’t know how much people think of Mick as the devil or as just a good rock performer or what?  There are black magicians who think we are acting as unknown agents of Lucifer and others who think we are Lucifer.  Everybody’s Lucifer.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “We were sitting on Robert Fraser’s beautiful seventeenth-century four-poster bed. Robert leaned against one post, me against another and Keith and Anita entwined at the other end of the bed. Keith began to play ‘You’ve Got the Silver.’ He sang it in a very drony and nasal twang as if the song were still somewhere deep inside him and only just emerging. We were speechless. It was a love song for Anita, obviously. The depth of his attachment to her was just flowing out of him. Very romantic, very consummate love. Which is why Anita and Mick’s betrayal during ‘Performance’ was so devastating to him.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “At one point Brian began to paint a mural of a graveyard on the wall behind the bed. Just above the pillows was a large headstone. He never got around to writing his name on it, but you knew that the headstone was for him.”

BRIAN JONES: “I got quite a reputation a couple of years ago for being the youngest alcoholic in London.  But now I drink very little.”

RONNI MONEY: “My husband had gotten into drugs with Charlie Parker and his bunch.  So I recognized the same weakness in Brian, knowing how easy it was to be sucked in, if you were the nervous type like Brian, needing to take a drink before he went on or pop a pill.  So I worked on him to not take amphetamines.  I said, ‘You need something to calm you down.’ And I knew that one didn’t get addicted to marijuana because I smoked for a long time myself, and when I wanted to, I stopped just like that.  But if you start to drink, nobody’s got a guarantee you’re not going to become an alcoholic.  And if you pop amphetamines regularly, you’re bound to become an addict.  So I made him smoke.  I said, ‘If you need to take something, take something that isn’t going to take you.’ So I turned him on.  In fact, he told Bob Dylan, when he introduced me, he said, ‘This is the woman who straightened me out.’ But not for long.”

TONY SANCHEZ: “Brian would wake up in the morning, take speed, cocaine, some morphine, a few tabs of acid and end up with, like, a lizard-skin boot on one foot and a pink shoe on the other. Then he’d find he couldn’t stand up.”

IAN STEWART: “It wasn’t so much narcotics as drinking brandy all the time.  He got into this thing that a lot of jazz musicians got into, where they lived on brandy.  Brandy’s a good food substitute, and if you drink a lot of brandy you don’t need to eat.  The result was that he just stank of it.  You couldn’t go near him.  So he was pissed most of the time then, steadily pissed.  And he could never resist acid either, so he didn’t talk a lot of sense, and everything was like dreamy and all that kind of shit.”

TERRY RAWLINGS: “Suki moved in with Brian at Courtfield Road and was horrified at the dilapidated surroundings of the once elegantly adorned flat. Plates of half eaten takeaway meals were stacked precariously on the tables and in the sink. Wardrobe doors were smashed and splintered mirrors gaped open, hanging off their hinges, as clothes, magazines and books lay strewn across the floors. There was a huge Nazi flag draped fully over an armchair while more than a hundred albums lay in a pathetic pile, sleeveless and stacked in a corner.”

SIMON WELLS: “Fearful that someone was attempting to inflict a nervous breakdown on him, Jones called a press conference at Courtfield Road, addressing the media from the balcony of his first floor flat.  Wrapped in a silk kimono and standing perilously close to the flat’s modest parapet, Jones informed curious reporters that a war was being waged against him by anonymous forces.  The voices in his head were amplified by the massive coverage afforded to the Redlands trial.  Visiting his physician, Brian’s condition was deemed so grave that a recuperative stay in a Hampshire clinic was arranged to sort out his numerous traumas.  He checked out after only two days.”

RONNI MONEY: “It got so bad I decided to go right over to Courtfield Road and sort Brian out. You’ve no idea what a mess that place was. Beautiful, yeah, but a tip. His fridge was full of liquid methedrine. There was no food, well nothing you could eat. It was all moldy.”

NICK KENT: “The most poignant image is Alexis Korner’s observation of Brian spending hours crouched excitedly rummaging through wardrobes and trunks full of golden trinkets which he’d try on, finest silks and velvets that he’d stroke, all the sprawling booty of his past peacock finery.”

ALEXIS KORNER: “Brian was already starting to look hideous… Like a debauched version of Louis XIV on acid, gone to seed. It was then that I suddenly realized there could be such a thing as an acid casualty.”

KEITH RICHARDS: “I never saw a guy so much affected by fame. The minute we’d had a couple of successful records, zoom, he was Venus and Jupiter rolled into one. Huge inferiority complex that you hadn’t noticed. The minute the chicks started screaming, he seemed to go through a whole change, just when we didn’t need it, when we needed to keep the whole thing tight and together. I’ve known a few that were really carried away by fame. But I never saw one that changed so dramatically overnight. ‘No, we’re just getting lucky, pal. This is not fame.’ It went to his head, and over the next few years of very difficult road work, in the mid-60’s, we could not count on Brian at all. He was getting really stoned, out of it. Thought he was an intellectual, a mystic philosopher. He was very impressed by other stars, but only because they were stars, not because of what they were good at. And he became a pain in the neck, a kind of rotting attachment.”

OSSIE CLARK: “I think of Brian Jones and I remember being driven in his chauffeured silver Roller to Hammersmith where we park outside a recording studio and smoke dope which makes no effect on his melancholia and megalomania. God knows what cocktail of drugs he’d already consumed just to get out of bed – where he’s been sleeping all day above my workroom in Radnor Walk while the sun shone – now with a three-day beard and dirty blond hair in crumpled clothes, a pin-striped jacket and one of Suki’s satin blouses. He wails, ‘It’s not fair. That’s my band in there recording and I’m being kept out here.’ Poor Brian – neither of us knew it then but he only had a few months to live at that time…”

BILL WYMAN: “There were two Brians… one was introverted, shy, sensitive, deep-thinking… the other was a preening peacock, gregarious, artistic, desperately needing assurance from his peers.  He pushed every friendship to the limit and way beyond.”

CHRIS BARBER: “The press made a meal of it, but you know it’s never right to blame people like Brian one hundred per cent for losing their grip. Because there’s more involved here. You normal punter is frightened to drop acid, but very much encourages their pop star to do it. People like that want to live vicariously through their idol’s life. Their fix is watching the stars do what they haven’t the nerve to dabble with. The stars in turn are expected to live up to that image.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “When the phone rang at four in the morning it was always Brian. A thin, faint voice with labored breathing like a ghost who’d looked up your number in a call box. Someone fading away before your very eyes.”

SPANISH TONY: “Brian was genuinely out of his skull on drugs most of the time, while Mick used only miniscule quantities of dope because he worried that his appearance would be affected. Brian was into orgies, lesbians, and sadomasochism, while Jagger lived his prim, prissy, bourgeois life and worried in case someone spilled coffee on his Persian carpets.”

CHRIS JAGGER: “Mick was able to deal with success – that was the virtue that saved him.  I can’t tell you how many rock people cracked up when they got successful.  Busted or dead.  They didn’t have the confidence to deal with success, not the sudden success of the rock world with all that adulation and enormous money.  They were poor boys, from provincial places, and all of a sudden they’re being asked to make all kinds of decisions and they don’t know what the fuck is going on.  So success overwhelms them.  It’s much harder to deal with success than to deal with failure, because with failure, you keep trying, but success is something else… Success wrecked Andrew Oldham, and it wrecked Brian Jones, and it made a wreck of Keith Richards although somehow he kept staggering to his feet, like a punch-drunk prizefighter who refuses to get knocked out.”

VICTOR BOCKRIS: “Keith often commented that his friends’ approach to drugs had followed in De Quincey’s footsteps.  They saw their bodies as laboratories and were trying to find out if they could improve themselves or understand the world in a more sophisticated way.  At first, they were, he insisted, more intent on experiencing ideas, emotions, and a new physical reality than getting wasted.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “I wanted to leave the sixties in a blaze of glory – under a volcano.  That would be Vesuvio, Spanish Tony’s Million Dollar Bash, almost emblematic of the blithe, hedonistic sixties overweening-ambitions-and-carpe-diem approach to life.  There’s a picture in my mind’s eye of Mick and Keith in front of the Vesuvio with its painting of Mount Vesuvius behind them.  So very camp.  Mount Vesuvius was an apropos image for swinging London.  We were all living underneath a volcano, getting high, getting dressed, getting together, swanning about in clubs with witty names while forces we hadn’t even guessed existed were about to fall down on us.  Scintillating, vibrating creatures in fantastically beautiful clothes from Ossie Clark and the Antique Market, all frolicking beneath a volcano on the verge of erupting.”

SPANISH TONY: “Marianne and Anita both started in much the same way I did. They seemed to enjoy the huge, orgasmic buzz of heroin so much that they started to alternate it with cocaine. They would take coke for a day or two to lift them up higher and higher, then, when they started to become strung-out and jittery, they would snort heroin to bring them back down again. They both felt lonely, rejected by their men. The girl who was supplying Marianne and Anita with their dope showed them how to skin-pop it: how to dilute the miniscule heroin jacks, then put them into a syringe and jab them into their bodies. It seemed a sensible thing to do because they needed only a tenth as much heroin if they skin-popped instead of snorting.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “It’s really very odd, the whole business. Keith and Anita, Mick and I. The magic, the alchemy of the alliances was very powerful and had an impact far beyond our little romances. I don’t, obviously, know why. I’ve always been extremely wary of Kenneth Anger and the Tower and all the dark stuff. But there was definitely something very powerful psychically about my alliance with Mick. And it enhanced us both in a way that, in the end, almost destroyed me.”

JERRY HALL: “Mick had a chest full of love letters from Marianne Faithfull that he let me read. From what he’s said, I think of all the girl friends he’s had he loved her the most, so I felt a bit of jealousy. I couldn’t help it. I never felt jealous of his other girl friends. I’ve met her a few times since then and she’s a great girl. I think he was twenty-one when they got together, and together they so easily climbed the social world. She was this angelic kind of girl. She got Mick into the world of acting. He said she showed him a whole new way of life. Everything he’s told me about her makes me like her a lot. And even some of the bad stories, like about the drugs… I could see how that happened to them. They were so young and the press and the media went crazy on them and they just weren’t strong enough to keep it together.”

CHRISTOPHER GIBBS: “Things were already beginning to go wrong.  Marianne was falling about a bit, taking too much of whatever she was taking.  We went across in a little boat to the Aran Isles.  We climbed about and went to this great fort on top.  We then went to some holy well, and Marianne threw her cigarette into it.  It wasn’t the sort of thing she ever did.  She always had a great sense of place and sanctity, but something was getting to her and she was beginning to get into a muddle.  Obviously the drugs and her relationship with Mick were interdependent, but I think it was the drugs thing more.  The pressures and anxieties of the affair and the availability of dope conspired to pull her down.  She took refuge in drugs, I suppose, because she realized that the relationship wasn’t progressing or fulfilling either of them like she dreamed it might.”