nbc_medium | Rolling Stones’ long party: Documentary film tells of children

Few albums are as soaked in the mythology of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll as Exile on Main St by the Rolling Stones. Although its woozy, raw sound has seen it hailed as one of the greatest records ever made, the music itself has tended to be overshadowed by the lurid tales of Bacchanalian excess that accompanied its creation.

Now a new film that screened at the Cannes Film Festival yesterday has returned a surprising additional element to the story: children. Stones in Exile, which is also showing on BBC One on Sunday night, concentrates on the band’s epic six-month residence at Villa Nellcote, in Villefranche-sur-Mer on the Cote D'Azur in 1971.

Sixties optimism had foundered with the killing of one of their fans at a concert in California and the band was regrouping after leaving England and its 93 per cent top tax rate. As Sir Mick Jagger explained at the premiere, they had no idea if their popularity at home would ever recover. “When you leave for tax reasons it’s really not very cool.” Nellcote, a half-hour’s drive up the coast from Cannes, was the rented residence of Keith Richards, Anita Pallenberg and their one-year-old son, Marlon.

The band installed their new mobile recording studio in the sweaty, labyrinthine basement and opened up the rooms above ground to a rolling party for a shifting cast of hangers-on, drug dealers, record company executives, backing musicians, groupies, artists and journalists. Their children were nearly always welcome. The theme that recurs constantly throughout the film, however, is that the atmosphere was significantly shaped by them, an idea that “casts a different light on everything”, Stephen Kijak, the director, said yesterday.

“I think that’s the one perspective of this whole thing that no one has ever explored. I don’t mean to be painting a rosier picture of it all than it probably was but that is the one angle that isn’t part of the mythology. [The children] weren’t being protected from stuff, but they weren’t being exploited; they were just being raised by a pack of hippie rock’n’rollers, not to be members of polite society.”

One of the adult guests at the house was Dominique Tarlé, a young French photographer who turned up to shoot some pictures one afternoon and stayed for six months. Mr Tarle believes that the children helped to temper a lifestyle that “would probably have destroyed lesser mortals”, according to Mr Kajik.

“What no one talks about is that nearly all of these people had kids and they were all there with them,” Mr Kajik said. “In every shot there are kids everywhere. He says that the kids ran the show; they were the boss. “No matter how big a rock star you are, when you have got seven-year-olds jumping up and down on the bed in the morning, demanding ice cream, everything stops. In the film Mr Tarle paints a very domestic portrait of life at the villa.

“It was a normal way of life. Every morning Keith would be up at 8 or 8.30. We would go to the zoo or we would go to the beach. Richards bought a speedboat and amused himself and the children by pretending to be a pirate, boarding other boats moored in the bay in front of the villa.”

One of the children at Nellcote that summer was Jake Weber, whose mother had recently killed herself and whose father, Tommy, an occasional race car driver, adventurer and smuggler, used him as an eight-year-old drug mule to bring cocaine out for Mick and Bianca Jagger’s wedding in St Tropez. Jagger identified him as a key interview for the documentary, telling Mr Kijak that “we need the eight-year-old perspective”.

Mr Weber, now a successful television actor with a settled family life of his own, explained that rolling joints for adult rock stars “was pretty much my function at that point” but added that he had wonderful memories of his summer stay there.

“It was a really happy time for him,” Mr Kijak said. “Jake says he still puts the album on constantly and it just brings back this glow.” Jagger played with Mr Weber the most but, contrary to her debauched rock chick reputation, Mr Weber remembers Pallenberg with particular fondness.

“Everyone wants to paint a picture of her as some kind of black magic sorceress but she was the den mother, she was really kind and really giving, the default mum to him and his brother,” Mr Kijak said. The hour-long film includes contributions from all five members of the band at the time (Jagger, Richards, Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman and Mick Taylor), as well as interviews with Martin Scorsese, Jack White of the White Stripes and Will.i.am from The Black Eyed Peas among others.

Stylishly put together so that new footage blends into the vintage film reel, Stones in Exile has created huge interest in Cannes. Journalists started queuing two hours before the screening to be sure of a seat. Mr Kijak, whose previous film was the acclaimed Scott Walker: 30 Century Man, is now fending off a fresh offer for a music documentary “every three or four hours”, including one about a-Ha. What he really wants to do though is move into fiction, with plans for a “rock’n’roll desert noir feature inspired by Cassavetes’s Gloria”.

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