A book publisher says he possesses a memoir penned by Mick Jagger. John Blake calls the 75,000-word draft a “masterpiece” and he believes it may never see the light fo day.
Handed to him by a friend three years ago, Blake describes the book as “an extraordinary insight into one of the three most influential rock stars of all time” and the “rock ’n’ roll equivalent of the Dead Sea Scrolls.”
Blake claims that Jagger was persuaded to write the book in the early eighties and was offered a handsome one million cash advance.
Surprisingly, the publisher rejected the Rolling Stones frontman’s manuscript as it was too “light on sex and drugs.” Blake adds: “In the early 1980s when it was written, shock and awe was a vital part of any successful autobiography.”
Stories recounted in the autobiography include Sir Mick buying a historic mansion called Stargroves while he was out of his head on LSD, nearly losing his life riding an out-of-control stallion and the “tedium of looking at Keith’s scraggy, monkey-like bottom night after night.”
Having obtained the memoir three years ago, Blake says he immediately got in touch with Mick’s manager Joyce Smyth who said that “Mick could not remember any manuscript.”
When Blake pushed recently, he says the “steel gates clanged shut” and “Mick wanted nothing further to do with this project. He never wanted to see it published.”
He ends his Spectator blog writing: “Apologies to the 10million people around the world who would love to read this story. After all, as the philosopher Jagger once said ‘You can’t always get what you want.’”