STEPHEN DAVIS: “Overlooking the deep harbor of Villefranche, near Cape Ferrat on the Riviera, the Villa Nellcote had wide balconies, hanging gardens and endless blue vistas of the Mediterranean. Nellcote had a suitably shady past. The nineteenth-century British admiral who built it had later thrown himself off the roof. Germans had occupied it during World War II and the vaulted cellar was supposedly the scene of Gestapo interrogations.”
STEPHEN DAVIS: “Nellcote was in a park planted with palm and cypress trees brought from around the world by its nautical builder. A long flight of steps led to a private beach. There was a water bed on the balcony, a bright parrot in a cage in the front garden, a rabbit hutch in the back. Keith’s dogs had the run of the place. In the rooms downstairs, the ceilings were thirty feet high and the mistral howled down the chimneys. A giant ‘Sticky Fingers’ promo poster of Mick was propped on the mantel of the main fireplace. Country music – Merle Haggard, George Jones – blared from the record player, alternating with Chuck Berry albums. Hired chefs fed large stoned groups of musicians and friends at long tables at odd hours. At the height of the sessions, Keith was spending $1,000 a week on food, rent, and dope.”
ANITA PALLENBERG: “Villa Nellcote was a fantastic place, very decadent. In the Second World War it used to be a Nazi headquarters – there were swastikas engraved in the heating system – and it was set up for loads of people moving around in it. Upstairs was a hall of bedrooms, and downstairs there was this whole mirror-play were you could put the doors – which were all mirrored – at an angle and see everything in the house. There was a terrace and an incredible garden – an English admiral owned it originally and brought in all these unbelievable exotic trees. We were out on a point that made an L-shape into the harbor, and over the bay was Villefranche, the village, which used to be a little pirate’s cove.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “When I first saw Nellcote, I thought that I could probably handle a spell of exile. The proportions were superb. If you felt a little ragged in the morning, you could walk through this glittering chateau and feel restored. I’d wake up thinking, this is my house?”
ROBERT GREENFIELD: “Anita is our Lady of the Lake, the enchantress who imprisoned the wizard Merlin in either a cave, a tree, a tomb, or the Glass Tower so she could keep him for herself or watch him slowly die, depending on which version of the legend you choose to believe. At the rock’n’roll round table occupied by the Rolling Stones, Anita is the key. Whoever possesses her has the power.”
INTERVIEW MAGAZINE: “Who manages Keith Richards? Probably Anita Pallenberg.”
VICTOR BOCKRIS: “The most interesting thing Keith Richards ever said to me was: ‘Anita is the Rolling Stones, man.’”
ROBERT GREENFIELD: “Here at Nellcote, Keith intends to live as he does everywhere else. In time, he will transform this house into something that resembles a cross between a backstage dressing room and a half-ruined hotel room on the road. Because Keith is a true blue rock’n’roller, he knows no other way to live. Now that he is here, everything in and around Villa Nellcote is about to get just as funky as funky can be.”
ANITA PALLENBERG: "The whole house was majestic, very big and decaying. There was no furniture. I remember bringing home some rugs and in all the photographs you see them. We lived in that rock'n'roll hippie style, on the floor basically."
GEORGIA BERGMAN: “Keith and Anita could manage to create total disintegration in 72 hours. It’s a phenomenal ability. It goes from being cozy to being lived-in to certain stages of rot.”
ROBERT GREENFIELD: “All day long and well into the night, great music blares from Keith’s stereo, everything from rough Jamaican reggae to classic old soul, blues, and rock’n’roll. Marlon and Jake and Charlie are always underfoot, and the living room usually looks like a bomb hit it. With nothing to do but have fun, every day is a brand new adventure.”
ANITA PALLENBERG: "The doors at Nellcote were open day and night. Mainly because we did not have the keys. We searched for them. We never found them."
ROBERT GREENFIELD: “Le Mistral, the hot desert wind that blows from the northwest across the French Riviera in violent bursts, carrying with it grit and sand and dust. When Anita arrives at Nellcote, she can hear Le Mistral ‘howling through the chimneys and there was just me and Keith setting up camp there… I felt spooked out. I was very, very spooked out. Like a premonition of what was to come, a feeling, a foretaste of coming disaster.’”
STASH KLOSSOWSKI: “Mick and Bianca had a villa some distance off. Charlie was far away. Nellcote became headquarters. Keith would emerge late morning, early afternoon, and go waterskiing. At night everyone would come to play. I remember Keith playing ‘Rip This Joint’ standing in the middle of the Nellcote living room and blazing around at the guitar. It was the best version of that song that I had ever heard. I’ve never forgotten it.”
TOM WAITS: “Everybody loves music. What you really want is for music to love you. And that’s the way I saw it was with Keith. It takes a certain amount of respect for the process. You’re not writing it, it’s writing you. You’re its flute or its trumpet; you’re its strings. That’s real obvious around Keith. He’s like a frying pan made from one piece of metal. He can heat it up really high and it won’t crack, it just changes color… You know, in the old days they said that the sound of the guitar could cure gout and epilepsy, sciatica and migraines. I think that nowadays there seems to be a deficit of wonder. And Keith seems to still wonder about this stuff. He will stop and hold his guitar up and just stare at it for a while. Just be rather mystified by it. Like all the great things in the world, women and religion and the sky… you wonder about it, and you don’t stop wondering about it.”
ANITA PALLENBERG: “Keith is a Sagittarius. He’s like an arrow that goes straight to its target without deviating from its flight path.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “It’s strange, given my vocation, that I have had dogs since 1964. There was Syphilis, a big wolfhound I had before Marlon was born. And Ratbag, the dog I smuggled in from America. He was in my pocket. He kept his trap shut. I gave him to Mum, and he lived with her for many, many years. I’m away for months, yet the time you spend with pups binds you forever. In rough times I know I can count on canines. When the dogs and I are alone, I talk endlessly. They’re great listeners. I would probably die for one.”
ELIZABETH WINDER: “It wasn’t as if they were trashing the place; this was simply the way Keith and Anita lived everywhere, as offhand hippie regality, making themselves at home. Gold ormolu writing desks next to Marlon’s wheeled feeding chair. Cigarette packets scattered on eighteenth-century marble. Chipped Limoges dishes stacked high with sugar cubs, sea anemones strewn on old silver platters, along with stale baguettes, beer cans, sheet music, and baby bottles. Old farmhouse talbes set with crystal coke cruets, one of Keith’s switchblades, and a half-empty bottle of ouzo.”
ANITA PALLENBERG: "Everyone was shocked to see how such a beautiful place could have these toys on the floor and the best places were for the guitars. All the nice couches had the guitars on them! You always had to sit somewhere else. Keith does that. He's always got the guitar in the best place with the best seat!"
KEITH RICHARDS: “Once we got down there, after a couple of weeks when we’d settled in a bit, songs started coming out. You’d be surprised if Mick and I didn’t say, ‘I’ve got a couple of new ones today.’ I don’t write them, I wait for them to come to me. I think they all floated through the air, and if you were alert enough or around at the right time of day, if you’d sit down with an instrument you could pick one or two up. I’d sit at the piano or pick up a guitar, and I might want to play an Otis Redding or Buddy Holly song or a bit of Bach, and after about 10 minutes: ‘Incoming!’ As long as the antenna’s up, they can transmit.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “A song should come from the heart. I never had to think about it. I’d just pick up the guitar or go to the piano and let the stuff come to me. Something would arrive. Incoming. And if it didn’t, I’d play somebody else’s songs. And I’ve never really had to get to the point of saying, ‘I’m now going to write a song.’ I’ve never ever done that. When I first knew I could do it, I wondered if I could do another one. Then I found they were rolling off my fingers like pearls. I never had any difficulty in writing songs. It was a sheer pleasure. And a wonderful gift that I didn’t know I had. It amazes me.”
MICK TAYLOR: “Complete pandemonium. All of Keith’s friends from all over the world descended on this place as if it were a holiday camp… All these guests would be lounging around on the private beach in the sun and we’d disappear into the basement to try and do some work. The days just ran into days and we didn’t get any sleep. I remember staggering out of the basement at six in the morning and the sunlight hitting my eyes and driving home.”
TOMMY WEBER: “Nellcote that summer was a shell out of which all sorts of amazing, amazing behavior happened. People became themselves. You couldn’t lie there. The vibes were just too strong. You’d be found out in a second.”
MICK TAYLOR: “It was very difficult for Keith and Anita. They wanted to do it that way, but they never had a moment to themselves. There was no privacy, they were always on show. One weekend they called me up and asked if they could come and stay at my place because they needed a break from all the people at theirs. They just left the partying going on and went into the bedroom. They stayed the entire weekend – not to have sex but to sleep, they were so exhausted.”
ELIZABETH WINDER: “Keith began his French summer clean, at
least his version of it, which still allowed for cocaine, Dom Perignon, and
copious amounts of Tommy’s tequila.
Anita’s slide back into heroin distressed him, as he saw her diving
headfirst into addiction. Talking to her
had always been a labyrinthine experience, but now her riddles went from
sphinxlike to psychotic, chanting a single phrase on repeat until the words had
zero meaning. Conversations sounded
increasingly like demented nursery rhymes.
Keith worried about her immediate safety. Most alarming was her candle obsession, which
she arranged round her bed like a funeral mass.
Twice her bedding caught fire and encircled her in flames while she
dozed in a boozy slumber of pills.”
ANDY JOHNS: "I don't think Anita was very happy. I know I wouldn't have been with the same people showing up every day for six months."
ROSE TAYLOR: “Anita would go on at me and tell me all the intrigues. She sounded completely batty to me but she would weave a spell with it all, you know. She would be telling me what Keith was doing with Stash and what this person was doing and they would find girls all around the house and I would think she was off her rocker.”
ROBERT GREENFIELD: “You were very well aware that this
person’s sensibility was from another planet…
But she was Anita and she was in the moment and she was going to make it
an Anita moment – that was her power.”
OSSIE CLARK: “I once spent three weeks with them in the South of France. Keith had rented a house that had been built by an English admiral who eventually threw himself into the sea off the window ledge. The house still contained strong vibes from that. But on top of that ghostliness was the Satanic thing that was going on. I spent most of the time smoking opium with Anita, who was definitely the high priestess in control of the black magic that was pervasive. She had pushed Keith far into it, and I shied away from him. Her bible was ‘The Master and Margarita,’ which deals with Satanic fantasy. In the late night, while they smoked dope, she’d read frightening passages to Keith and Mick, and when she really got herself worked into it, she did have the aspect of a witch, and they were right into it with her. It scared the hell out of me.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “This house, this Bedouin encampment, contained anywhere from twenty to thirty people at a time, which never bothered me, because I have the gift of not being bothered or because I was focusing, with assistance, on music. It did bother Anita. It drove her up the wall. She was one of the few people who spoke French, and German to the Austrian housekeeper. So she became the bouncer, getting rid of people sleeping under beds and overstaying their welcome. There were tensions, no doubt, and paranoia – I have heard her accounts of her nightmare spell as doorkeeper – and there were of course a lot of drugs. There were many people to feed, and one day some holy men in orange robes came to visit and sat at the table with us and within two seconds, diving for the food, they’d cleaned us out, eaten everything. In terms of staff relations, Anita was reduced to going into the kitchen and making throat-cutting gestures; she felt very threatened by the cowboys who surrounded us.”
TOMMY WEBER: “The guy is a real gent. His idea of behaving well is what we would call forgiveness. It’s absolutely amazing the understanding that he carries about in his whole demeanor. Really, popes should be like that. The one thing Keith cannot stand is bullshitters who hurt others. If you’re real, you can make mistakes with him and be forgiven. I should know. But if he thinks you’re going to hurt someone, he’ll pull his gun on you.”
STASH KLOSSOWSKI: “A lot of people came from England or America. They had taken cabs and now they were stuck. You could barely walk anywhere from Nellcote. With the constant playbacks and recordings, people couldn’t sleep well. At first it sounds exciting, but the music’s going on all night long, and if you’re not participating or actually playing, with the constant drugs it could be iffy.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “Well, when the Rolling Stones are in the South of France of course there’s plenty of people willing to pop by. Friends from London would come and bring us gifts from home – smuggling food into the country. ‘Took enormous trouble to get you a dozen bangers!’ You’ve got to have your HP and your malt vinegar. The ones you hear about are Bianca, Ahmet Ertegun, Robert Fraser, the jetsetters. But there were loads of other interesting low-lives.”
ANDY JOHNS: "Charlie Watts' room looked like a very expensive hooker's room. It had some sort of pink motif and a very large bed. I remember bonking some bird in there one night and getting discovered."
ANDY JOHNS: “The house was incredible. They had these huge front windows with a great view. And they had this amazing fucking cook. I’d go over there a lot cause the food was so incredible. There would be a table with everything on it that looked like a work of art. And Keith would come in and ask for fried eggs or a hamburger. After two months of that the cook finally split.”
BOBBY KEYES: “One cook blew up the kitchen. His name was Fat Jack. The studio being in the basement, we suddenly heard this BOOM, and the room filled with smoke. A fat French cook just standing there amid the smoke.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “Fat Jacques was our cook, who now doubled as the heroin dealer. He was the Marseilles connection. He had a bunch of sidekicks, this team of cowboys who we decided were safer on the payroll that off it, who were good at running ‘errands.’ Jacques emerged because I said, ‘Who knows how to get some shit around here?’ He was young, he was fat and he was sweaty, and one day he went to Marseilles on the train and he brought back this lovely little bag of white powder and this huge supply, almost the size of a cement bag, or lactose, which was the cut. And he explained to me in his bad English and my even worse French – he had to write it down – mix ninety-seven percent lactose with three percent heroin. This heroin was pure. Normally when you bought it it was premixed. But this stuff you had to mix very precisely. Even at these proportions, it was incredibly powerful. And so I’d be in the bathroom with these scales, going ninety-seven to three; I was scrupulous in my weighing out. You had to be careful; the old lady was taking it and a couple of other people. Ninety-six to four and you could croak on it. One hit of it pure and boom. Good-bye.”
PHILIP NORMAN: “The hangers on who naturally congeal around every rock star swarmed over the Channel and the Atlantic and into Villa Nellcote. As Anita would later recall, seldom a day passed when fewer than 30 sat down to cordon bleu lunches and dinners amid the debris of guitars, amps, half-empty Southern Comfort bottles, overflowing ashtrays and children’s toys… Visitors ranged from John Lennon, to Stanislaus Klossoski de Rola, a Swiss princeling and son of the painter Balthus, to Spanish Tony Sanchez, Richards’ favorite drug pusher, to a young falconer who turned up with a young baby eagle in his pocket.”
ANITA PALLENBERG: “I remember one time this tribe of Buddhist monks came – from Indonesia, I think, to put some particular kind of drumming on one of the tracks – stayed for days and days… and they’d be really quiet and genteel – very calm atmosphere about them. I remember them particularly sitting at the dining able, neatly arranged in their long, flowing orange and yellow robes, very reposed, collected except that whenever any food was put on the table they became like animals. I mean, anything, everything that was put out on that table they’d literally ravage, demolish… whatever – however much you’d put out would just disappear in what seemed like just a few minutes.”
ROBERT GREENFIELD: “Everyone has nothing but time on their hands. Which is why they all show up for the long and leisurely lunch served on the back patio where people often sit for hours as countless bottles of ice cold blanc de blanc and fuming hash joints make the rounds.”
MARSHALL CHESS: "I remember vividly late afternoons, early evenings, the one meal of the day. We'd all sit at this long, long table, we would all smoke joints and hash in between courses, a big bowl being passed around. It was a whole new la dolce vita, Fellini-esque kind of lifestyle."
ANITA PALLENBERG: "The main happenings were always around the dinner table or around the lunch table, which we'd always pull out at around four o'clock in the afternoon. And dinners were always longer than lunches. And that's Keith and I having a good time and me standing by my man, so to speak. The whole idea of doing a record in a house was outrageous, really. I'd never do anything like that ever, ever, ever again."
COURTNEY LOVE: “Watch the Jean-Luc Godard film ‘Sympathy For The Devil’ and look how Keith and Mick keep checking in with Anita, she’s as much a part of that record as Jimmy Miller or Bill Wyman. By the time the Stones went into tax exile, Mick had tried to replace Marianne with Bianca. But Anita, she’s holding it all together. For that moment, she is the Stones.”
DOMINIQUE TARLE: "John Lennon came once, but just for one afternoon. He was in the South of France to visit an art exhibition in Nice with Yoko. As soon as he came, he went off to Keith's bedroom for about three quarters of an hour. Then he came down the stairs to say 'goodbye,' vomited on the carpet and left."
KEITH RICHARDS: “John always partied too much with me. I would always have to end up wiping him off and sending him back home. A great bloke, but for some reason he always felt he had to party harder than me. Which is a very difficult thing to do, especially in those days. I wouldn’t try, darlin’. But John did. And he threw up.”
NICK KENT: “One thing about Keith during his junkie years – he was a remarkably non-judgmental host. Vomit on his premises and he wouldn’t throw you out. He was definitely a live-and-let-live kind of guy in that respect. Instead he would offer me more drugs, or ‘the real breakfast of champions’ as he called them. He would lay out a six-inch line of heroin and cocaine mixed together, snort it, lay out another and hand me a rolled-up pound note with a conspiratorial nudge. It would still be 7 a.m. and a bit early in the day for me but, when in Rome…”
ANITA PALLENBERG: “I’d have my freakouts, too, you know – usually when I’d be halfway down the stairs, coming down in the morning to be greeted by this sea of twenty, thirty people, most of whom I didn’t know, filling up our living room. I remember I’d scream at whoever it was – ‘Get out! Out!’ – tossed anyone who wasn’t part of the record out. And meanwhile Keith was coming up with all these fantastic songs for that record, which I think was really brilliant – pulling together all of those bits he’d put aside over the years – putting it together with all of this new inspiration.”
JAKE WEBER: "If you're living a decadent life, then there's darkness there. This was decadent, but at that point, this was the moment of grace, this was before the darkness, this was, if anything, the sunrise before the sunset."
