A Prince Among Stones (28 page)

I made sure the Stones had good and experienced lawyers advising them on most aspects of the business alongside their own personal advisers. I told them that, if and when (at the time I feared it was more if than when, but hoped I was wrong) they came to put another tour together, they could find an additional team on an
ad hoc
basis to work with the lawyers.

The day I retired from working formally for the Rolling Stones, 31 March 2008, was marked by a luncheon they gave for me at Home House in Portman Square. Christopher Gibbs, who had first made the introduction to Mick back in 1968, and therefore had set the voyage underway, could not be there, but sent a message from Africa to say that he was ‘sad not to be part of the beano to celebrate one of the most successful and glorious culture clashes of our times'.

Mick picked up on that notion of culture clash, remembering that in 1968 ‘we came from slightly different backgrounds. At the beginning of our relationship the great problem we had was “we got no money”. And like the old saw that there is nothing as inevitable as death and taxes, Rupert did not promise that death would be avoided but taxes should certainly be legally minimised . . .'

Alan Dunn, one of the most loyal of the Stones' long-serving entourage, who had been in charge of logistics and the tour office, recalled that in the early days he had asked me what the future held, as what lay ahead was uncharted territory. I had replied with the words of Winston Churchill: ‘I have nothing to offer you, Alan, but blood, toil, sweat and tears.' For his speech at the leaving lunch Alan had picked a quote to offer back to me, the opening lines of John Dryden's ‘Happy the Man': ‘Happy the man, and happy he alone, He, who can call today his own: He who, secure within, can say, Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.'

Although my day-to-day involvement with the Stones had come to an end, I remained concerned about how the four of them would move ahead. Without me, or somebody like me, working closely with them all and on behalf of them all, but not tied to any one individual, I thought it would be very difficult for them to act coherently, especially since Mick had always liked to manage himself, which was one of the things that brought Keith against him. If I was leaving the ship I wanted it to sail on. Despite the fact it would be heading into undoubtedly choppier and shallower waters, I had no wish to see it founder.

I left my office in King Street in St James's, where I had been happily installed for over twenty years, a location I much enjoyed since I was next door to Christie's and within easy walking distance of my clubs and the restaurants which had been my regular places for lunch. I decided to give myself a year's trial to see whether I could land any investment management business sufficient to cover the overheads. If not, Josephine would have to put up with the fact that, whereas in the past we had been married for good times and bad, but not for lunch, in the future lunch might have to be included.

At the time, I wrote, ‘I shall no longer be looking after the investment management of the Holy Rollers which has been fun and rewarding and indeed very successful for nearly forty years . . . I am still not at all sure as to whether I would get bored if I didn't have some remunerative work, since it has been so much a part of my life for so long, but on the other hand the irritation and anxiety that I increasingly experience might diminish if I tried to get used to leisure. Was this not how Aristotle defined leisure: “the energetic pursuit of happiness”?'

Shortly after stepping back from the Stones, my term as President of the British Association of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta also came to an end on St John's Day, 24 June 2008 (having been elected exactly six years earlier), and with it the rather onerous workload that I had been undertaking for the Order, because not only had the role of president taken up a lot of my time, since the buck stopped with me, but I was involved with the powers that be in Rome.

Each November I would preside over an Order of Malta dinner with around 200 guests. In 2002 attending that dinner had meant me missing, to my chagrin, the Rolling Stones playing at a businessman's sixtieth birthday event: altogether, including his charitable donation, he spent more than $10 million on the evening. An amusing record, I imagined, although the great feasts and festivals of earlier days were comparatively more lavish and expensive.

The spectacular collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 underlined the fact that this was a period of great change and turmoil. In the old days stupidity and greed on a large scale, or, indeed, true economic disasters, were geographically limited, and the international ones usually arose in those countries that were affected by war. But now the banks were going bust by lending money to people who could not pay it back.

I remembered a time when I went over to Basle to pay a call on the Bank for International Settlements, whose manager was an old-fashioned, one-armed Englishman who had been seconded by the Bank of England to manage it. During our chat we talked about gold and I probably, being young and brash, commented adversely on it for the usual reasons that it was a mineral whose quantity depended on mining so consequently one did not know its ‘real' value, and in addition it paid no income. He looked at me pityingly and said, ‘Young man, gold has provided a key symbol as the repository of wealth for hundreds if not thousands of years and it is likely to maintain this for many hundreds of years after both you and I have been and gone.'

My aunt Helga, then in her late eighties, had rung me after the collapse of Baring's in 1995, at 7.30 in the morning, saying two things: ‘Firstly now, no English merchant bank, if Baring's go bust, is creditworthy? Correct! Secondly, I hear the Rolling Stones will be playing in Köln next week. Since they have made money for the family I feel that I should hear them before I die.' I got her the tickets and after the concert she was interviewed on German TV and asked whether they had been too loud for her, to which she answered, ‘No, I am deaf.' Then she was asked what she thought of them and she said, ‘Psychologically most interesting.'

I concurred, then as now, with her assessment, and applauded her attitude. I enjoyed around four decades of interest, not only psychological, thanks to the Rolling Stones. Although I had firmly resisted changing my own habits to those of the rock'n'roll business – music industry executives were constantly surprised that I could neither drive nor type and that I had never been to the Hard Rock Café. Well, there you are! Our father's house has many mansions – my life had certainly been enriched.

Epilogue

‘Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume, labuntur anni’ (Alas, the fleeting years glide by, Postumus, Postumus)

Horace

During the long, highly entertaining, often amusing but odd marriage between the Rolling Stones and me, I have often reflected generally on why I do not and did not like their music. To many outsiders it must seem extraordinary that I was never a fan of the Stones’ music, or indeed of rock’n’roll in general.

Yet I feel that precisely because I was not a fan, desperate to hang out in the studio and share in the secret alchemy of their creative processes (something I never did since I couldn’t take the noise levels), I was able to view the band and what they produced calmly, dispassionately, maybe even clinically – though never without an affinity and affection for them as people. When it comes to matters of business, I have always found that calm dispassion is essential.

What puzzled me was what I thought about the Stones as musicians. They were certainly always very hard working with their musical instruments. There is no doubt that Keith in particular was obsessed over which guitar he was using, and the actual sound that he was producing. So, in so far as one is concerned with the way sounds which mean something are written, it must be called music.

When Mick was with friends of mine and brought out his guitar to play it, all the young people sat around absolutely loving it, while to me it was not a patch on a French guitarist I had heard playing at a nightclub and who had moved me far more than Mick did singing in a room. What was it that I found so different? Why was I out of step with popular, or populist, opinion?

Many friends were proud and happy recipients of gratis CDs; I never played a Stones track by choice. Josephine enjoyed their music more than I did, because of her dancing career, but, again, would never put on a Rolling Stones album. I have sat backstage through countless shows on tour, sometimes even out in the audience. Depending on who was with me I would stay longer if they were friends of mine who I knew were enjoying themselves. Despite that constant exposure I was never a convert. My personal tastes did not waver.

At one stage I even thought it was not music, but a pointless arrangement of sound with which I could not be bothered, but I came to realise that this could not be true, because the Stones’ music has a great effect – greater than I ever thought – on the audiences. There is something in their use of sound that impresses people and that they like. People whose judgement in most matters I respected and trusted – Ahmet Ertegun and Earl McGrath, for example – also loved rock’n’roll. I would discuss this with them, asking them what it was that they found so moving in it.

I remember arguing about this once with the tour promoter Michael Cohl and Joe Rascoff, the tour accountant. They were saying, ‘There is no such thing as generically good music or generically bad music.’ I said, ‘That’s because in music you don’t believe in right and wrong . . . and better and worse. But you do in other areas. You are very keen on good restaurants and you hate bad restaurants. Now all those restaurants are still producing and cooking basic ingredients which are served and then eaten. In some restaurants, you’ll say, “This is absolutely wonderful”, in others that you can’t even eat it.’

I continued, ‘And sometimes you don’t mind going to a very expensive restaurant with bad food because the ambience and the waiters and the service are all very good, and maybe you can order some very good wine to go with the meal. In many ways it is an interesting method of calculation.’

So what do I mean by good music and bad music? Am I able to define it? Otherwise it is like saying, ‘I don’t like beetroot’. The Rolling Stones to me are like sausages and mash. Comfort food. In medieval times it was the pipe and drum, apparently dull as ditchwater. There is a note from one of my tour journals from 1990: ‘Dora tells me that the agonising thumping music with the non-stop talking is a form of music called “Rap”. Tense music in a synthesised squawk accompanied by odd shrieks and psychedelic effects. Half an hour of torment . . .’

One of my doctors, a very clever man, told me that there has been a study on music and depression, which concluded that there is a part of the brain which makes people who listen to Gregorian music happy and helps their depression lift; the same effect happens listening to Buddhist chanting. This part of the brain is affected by different sounds in different orders. The doctor went on to say that at the congress in Kyoto where he had learnt this, there was a performance by Kodo drummers who played for an hour. He said it had an extraordinary effect on everybody: a sort of euphoria.

Research in the field of neuroscience, notably by Professor Antonio Damasio, of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, continues to explore the link between the brain, music and emotion. There is a paradox in the fact that incredibly complex music written by composers and performed by the most technically gifted of musicians can not only be enjoyed by people who have absolutely no knowledge of music, but produces strong emotions in them, across many different cultures.

It seems that music enters the body in a rather primitive way, through the bones of the ear and the membrane of the tympanum (a drum, of course), and then arrives in the brain at the level where emotions and feelings are processed. Perhaps this explains some of the emotional impact of rock’n’roll, dominated by the rhythm of the drums and the physical impact of the bass pumped through ever more powerful sound systems.

Some Rolling Stones songs I did find moving. I enjoyed ‘Paint It Black’, for example. But by and large it was rather like the circus. When one stops being a child the circus becomes a bit of a bore and it requires a Cirque du Soleil to shake up the whole concept of a circus to make it once again a fascinating and intriguing entertainment for adults.

So when the Stones came on the stage, what did interest me was the performance, the backdrops and videos, everything that Mick was very good at doing and which created part of the magic of the show, and something which Keith was not at all interested in. He could never understand why so much money was spent on the production. His view was, ‘We play better in a nightclub and the music has more meaning.’

The element of the performance, I felt, was essential. The charisma that could control a crowd was a powerful force. I once noticed that when Mick was not concentrating and going through his movements on stage he included what looked like some of the Royal Canadian Air Force gymnastic exercises which his trainer had probably introduced him to. People were cheering him doing that. I thought it unbelievable that doing some bending and moving your arms up and down impressed people. Clearly, from his dancing and the gestures, a huge amount of obsessional gratification was brought into being.

At one stadium in Munich I headed up to the very highest tiers and found a couple perched there before the show was due to start. I asked them why they were there. ‘To see the Stones.’ ‘But you can’t hear them and you can’t see them from here.’ To which they replied, ‘It’s still wonderful.’ They were moved by the event, even though they could not say exactly what it was that moved them.