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It’s only LSD but I like it: the play telling the untold story about the Stones drugs bust
Keith Richards and Mick Jagger’s 1967 raid and trial caused a national storm, seeming to pitch old against young, Establishment against counterculture. But was the real story overlooked? We return to the 60s at their most swinging
Everyone with even a passing interest in the Rolling Stones knows the salient details: the grim role of the News of the World in setting up a police raid on Richards’ country pile, Redlands; the entirely apocryphal rumours about Mars Bars and Marianne Faithfull; the band’s brief attempt to escape the press attention by travelling to Morocco, where Richards began a long relationship with guitarist Brian Jones’s then-girlfriend Anita Pallenberg; the unexpected intervention of the Times’ editor William Rees-Mogg, protesting against the severity of the sentencing in an editorial headlined Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel? ; their subsequent release, Mick Jagger’s appearance on a hastily convened edition of the TV show World in Action, debating the whole business with Rees-Mogg, former home secretary Frank Soskice, the Bishop of Woolwich and Fr Thomas Corbishley (“a leading British Jesuit”). The judge managed to turn me into some folk hero overnight – and I’ve been playing up to it ever since Keith Richards We’re talking in a London studio during rehearsals for Redlands, which was commissioned by the Chichester Festival theatre: “a no-brainer” according to director Justin Audibert, given its setting.
Or read this on The Guardian
