In April, Mick Jagger said that despite being locked down for the past year, he had no desire to revisit his autobiography, which he abandoned in 1983. Here is Mick on writing it:
“When I started to actually get into it I really didn’t enjoy it. And what I didn’t enjoy was reliving my life, you know, to the detriment of living in the now. This is not a process you can just do in a week, you know. It takes a lot of you. A lot out of you. It takes a lot of reliving emotions, reliving, you know, friendships, reliving ups and downs and all this. And, I must say, it wasn’t the most enjoyable experience. So I just said, ‘Oh, I can’t bother with this’ and I just gave the money back to the publisher. I’ll do it another day and that was the end of it.”
Jagger’s ghostwriter, Barry Coleman, has broken his silence about working with the singer, telling The Guardian it was an “awful experience.”
He says there was another writer who failed to finish the book, and he was given two weeks to complete it.
“Two chapters were more or less presentable. The rest was a pile of interview transcripts, and nothing related to recent years. Stitching everything together was an awful experience…
“All the big stuff was in there, there just wasn’t anything interesting said about it,” says Coleman of the material. “There was always this sense in the transcripts that Mick was holding back, or trying not to hurt anybody’s feelings.”
In the end, Coleman says Jagger just didn’t want to do it.
“I think he respected his audience by not giving them something ordinary about an extraordinary life. I’ve lived with this story for 38 years with a certain frustration, but in a way it tells you more about Mick than anything that could have come out in a mediocre book.
“It needed Mick to be able to talk to someone like he might a therapist, approach his life from a tangent. Instead we ended up with something that was too pedestrian for Mick Jagger.”
Though there have been reports that there is a 75,000-word manuscript locked away somewhere, the only members of The Rolling Stones who’ve published their autobiographies are Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood and former bassist Bill Wyman.
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