July 31st, 1967: The manic day Mick Jagger was released from prison in the morning, interviewed by a Jesuit Priest in the evening
Squinting into the sunlight pouring through the barred window of his concrete cell, his trademark lips cracked from dehydration and an inevitable comedown, Mick Jagger had certainly had better mornings than July 31st, 1967, when he awoke to the cold embrace of Brixton prison, having found himself on the receiving end of some considerable grief after the home of his esteemed guitarist, Keith Richards, had become the site of a drugs raid.
By that point in time, The Rolling Stones had largely gotten used to being the poster boys for rock and roll rebellion, but they weren’t quite at the stage of being used to the constant hounding of the British establishment, eager to quash what they viewed as a dangerous new age of drug-fueled counterculture. Following a police raid on Keith Richards’ Sussex home, the band’s pouting frontman had been hit with a three-month sentence on amphetamine possession charges.
Richards himself had been banged up too, on account of the small quantity of drugs found during the raid, even if they weren’t in his direct possession, being on his property. “There’s a knock on the door, I look out the window, and there’s this whole lot of dwarves outside,” the guitarist recalled in his memoir. “I’d never been busted before, and I’m still on acid.” From that quote, you can probably put together a picture of just how chaotic the Redlands raid was.
If The Rolling Stones were any kind of normal rock band, it would be down to their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, to sort those legal difficulties out, hiring a crack team of lawyers and doing everything in his power to free his band. In reality, though, the similarly Young and similarly drug-addled Oldham fled the country to avoid attracting any charges himself. Bizarrely, then, it was the upper class that came to The Stones’ rescue, specifically William Rees-Mogg.
At that time, Lord Rees-Mogg was the editor of The Times, and he penned an op-ed criticising the police raid and suggesting that Richards and Jagger were locked up on trumped-up charges resulting only from their fame and public influence. “Mr Jagger’s is about as mild a drug case as can ever have been brought before the courts,” he wrote. Seemingly, Rees-Mogg’s defence was enough to change the situation entirely, and Jagger was released from prison within a few hours of the paper being published.
There, upon his release, began an even more unexpected series of events for the – probably still quite hungover – rock star, who was ushered into a helicopter, to be transported to a secret location in Essex for a highly-publicised television interview on ITV’s World In Action.
From being stuck in a cold cell in Brixton earlier that morning, Mick Jagger suddenly found himself in the leafy green surroundings of a stately home, talking to Rees-Mogg along with leading Jesuit Priest Father Thomas Corbishley, former Attorney General Lord Frank Soskice, and Bishop of Woolwich, John Robinson. “It was quite mad,” the frontman later said of the experience.
“Impossible to satirise. Why was I doing that? It was the day I got out of prison. I was absolutely hopeless on that programme.”
Despite his bedraggled appearance immediately setting him apart from the strange cross-section of the British establishment presented before him, Jagger spoke at length about the widening generation gap, drug use, and all the press paranoia surrounding the band – the latter, incidentally, only continued to intensify in the wake of the Redlands raid, eventually spurring the band on to escape to Morocco.
All in all, that particular instalment of World In Action did little to set the country to rights when it came to this bold, new, drug-taking generation, but it did at least lay bare the cultural disparities between the generation that had lived through wartime and those born in its wake.
Being a Rolling Stone, bizarre and era-defining situations are something of an occupational hazard, but the 24-hour period which saw Mick Jagger go from imprisonment to polite conversation with a bishop remains one of the strangest that the frontman had ever experienced – or, at least, the strangest that he was conscious enough to remember.
