How love and taxes made Mick Jagger rock's biggest Francophile

Telegraph

5 days ago

All the usual suspects were present at Tuesday night's state banquet in Windsor Castle's St George's Hall in honour of French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte. The King and Queen and the Prince and Princess of Wales rubbed shoulders with diplomats and dignitaries as they tucked into a Raymond Blanc-designed menu and sipped a special gin and pastis cocktail called L'entente.
But one of the more unexpected faces among the 160 guests was that of Sir Mick Jagger, the Rolling Stones frontman, who was seated just five places to the right of Macron. White of tie and flanked by royalty, the rocker who once released an album called Beggars Banquet found himself dining in altogether more salubrious circumstances.
It's not the first time Jagger has been part of a high-end Anglo-French nosh-up. In 2023 he was among the celebrities who joined the King and Macron at a state dinner at the Palace of Versailles.
The truth is that Dartford-born Jagger is a huge Francophile. Despite symbolising a sort of louche and moneyed Britishness, and in spite of an accent that has steadfastly stuck to its Thames Estuary origins, the 81-year-old's love affair with France stretches back decades. Jagger is fluent in French, as he demonstrated in an impressive 10-minute 2023 TV interview conducted in the language, an exchange in which he talked lucidly about the Beatles-Stones rivalry and extolled the virtues of London rapper Dave.
He also owns a French château (obviously), having paid £2.2 million for a 16th-century castle, La Fourchette, on the banks of the Loire in 1982. Jagger quarantined there during the pandemic, and he's often seen shopping in the local shops, or riding a mountain bike through the country lanes.
During last summer's Olympics in Paris, Jagger's was a face that regularly popped up on telly. He even attended a reception at the British Ambassador's residence to welcome Team GB as the games started, posing for selfies with the athletes.
'I spoke French from when I was a child, from when I was 11, in school and then I used to travel to France – my parents would take me,' Jagger explained in 2023. The terroir seemed to seep into his early life and career, even if subconsciously. Jagger attended the London School of Economics, modelled on L'École Libre des Sciences Politiques in Paris.
And rather than embracing the 1960s clichés of Swinging London, the Stones worked with avant-garde Parisian director Jean-Luc Godard on their experimental 1968 film Sympathy for the Devil, Godard's first English-language film.
But the singer's connections with France were really made for a brace of reasons two years later: love and tax.
At the end of September 1970 Jagger met 25-year-old Nicaraguan Blanca Pérez-Mora Macías (later Bianca Jagger) at a Stones aftershow party on the executive floor of Paris's Hotel George V. Jagger had recently split up with Marianne Faithfull and it wasn't long before he and Macías, who'd moved to Paris in 1961, were an item. This was confirmed in the eyes of the world's media when the pair enjoyed a fortnight's holiday in Nassau that November.
The second reason was more prosaic. Taxes for the rich in Britain were sky-high in 1971 so the Stones, and many other high-earning musicians, left the country. 'The tax rate in the early 1970s on the highest earners was 83 per cent,' Stones guitarist Keith Richards wrote in his autobiography Life, 'And that went up to 98 per cent for investments and so-called unearned income. So that's the same as being told to leave the country.'
The band toyed with moving to the Channel Islands (too dreary) but settled on France. With families in tow, they scattered themselves around the south of France in April 1971, just days before the new tax year started. Drummer Charlie Watts went to Vaucluse, guitarist Mick Taylor to St Tropez, Jagger to a château once owned by Pablo Picasso near Biot, bassist Bill Wyman to Grasse and Richards to the sprawling – and soon to be infamous – Villa Nellcôte in Villefranche-sur-Mer.
As Jagger's unauthorised biographer Alan Clayson put it: 'The reason for relocating to the Côte D'Azur wasn't the sunshine but because, despite the huge takings for the 1969 North American [tour], the Stones' revenue for the fiscal year had been overestimated. Expenditure exceeded income at a rate that couldn't cover [the tax bill].'
With matters of the heart and the wallet drawing him to France, Jagger's residency there coalesced around two key events in the summer of 1971. It was in Richards's rented Villa Nellcôte – all tall ceilings, statues and period furniture – that the band recorded what is widely held up as their finest album, the raggedy Exile on Main St.
The band never intended to use the house as a recording studio: they'd looked for facilities in Nice or Cannes to no avail. So a warren of tiny rooms in the mansion's basement became their makeshift studio (the place was a former Gestapo HQ), with leads and cables trailing out of the windows to the band's mobile recording studio parked outside, itself illegally jacked up to the French railway system's electricity supply.
Although technically the home of Richards, his partner Anita Pallenberg and their young son Marlon, the villa attracted all manner of guests, including country music star Gram Parsons. It became the smartest sleazy guest house in Europe. A local boy known as Fat Jack was employed as the chef, while Richards kept a 20-foot mahogany Riva motorboat on a jetty at the bottom of some cliffside stairs, enabling the band to nip out to lunch down the riviera.
Photos from that summer of Jagger and Richards taken by photographer Dominique Tarlé, who was invited to Nellcôte for a day but stayed for six months, ooze a rakish grandiosity that remains unsurpassed in rock 'n' roll photography. 'Incredible alchemy,' was how Tarlé described what he found there. One week, Jagger and Stones saxophonist Bobby Keys roamed the French coast on Honda 350 motorbikes, having been unable to locate Harley-Davidsons. A helmet-less Jagger is pictured tearing down the bucolic roads in a baseball shirt, local heads turning at the rock star in their midst.
The second key event of that summer was Jagger's marriage to Macías. It took place on May 12 in St Tropez with ceremonies in both the local council office and the Roman Catholic church. It was a star-studded event with the likes of Eric Clapton, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and Stephen Stills flying in specifically, most with their partners and kids with them. Pictures, again by Tarlé, show the biggest tower of profiteroles you've ever seen. As Richards noted, somewhat witheringly: 'Mick arranged what he saw as a quiet wedding, for which he chose St Tropez at the height of the season. No journalist stayed at home.'
While these two events marked Jagger's highest-profile French escapades, his love affair with the country was far from over. In October 1971, his and Bianca's daughter Jade was born in Paris's Belvedere Nursing Home. The Stones frontman is often seen at Paris Fashion Week (as, these days, are his offspring). And, this being Jagger, matters of the heart are often linked to the City of Light.
In the 1990s, he reportedly had an affair with model Carla Bruni, who would go on – years later – to become the first lady of France through her marriage to Nicolas Sarkozy. 'I thought I'd never get over it,' Bruni is quoted as saying in Christopher Andersen's 2012 biography, The Wild Life and Mad Genius of Jagger. Jagger's son with long-term partner Melanie Hamrick is called Deveraux, a common French surname.
Yet rather than have Sympathy for the Deveraux, we should embrace Jagger's clear Francophilia. Britain's relations with France have often been strained, as Macron himself has suggested on this visit. So with all his French ties, it's no wonder that Jagger is a willing vessel of soft power to smooth cross-channel bonds. He should keep sipping at the L'entente. Satisfaction guaranteed.