The French authorities viewed the arrival of the Rolling Stones in 1971 as one might the invasion of the Vandals and the Goths. Towns started shoring up their defences. An early attempt to settle the band in a villa in the picturesque village of Mougins, near Cannes, was met with panic. The mayor, Georges Pellegrin, announced, “We definitely don’t want them here. We have many important people living here” — including Pablo Picasso — “and we don’t want long-haired singers.”
Jo Bergman, the Stones’ personal assistant, was given the task of finding houses for each of the band members and their families as they settled into a new life as tax exiles. Mick Jagger and his girlfriend, Bianca Pérez-Mora de Macías, hopscotched between hotels in Paris and St Tropez until they could move into an estate near Antibes, owned by Prince Rainier of Monaco’s uncle. Charlie Watts settled his family in a farmhouse near Aix-en-Provence (which would leave him with a monstrous commute of “a six-and-a-half or seven-hour drive along these little roads”).
Bill Wyman, his girlfriend, Astrid Lundstrom, and her sister, Ulla, moved into La Bastide Saint-Antoine in Grasse, practically next door to the artist Marc Chagall. Mick Taylor and his partner, Rose Millar, along with their baby daughter, Chloë, rented a house near Bill, owned by a Russian who called herself Madame Tolstoy. But it was Keith Richards who wound up with the grand prize.
Glorious house, terrible studio
Villa Nellcôte, in the sleepy seaside village of Villefranche-sur-Mer, was a magnificent, 16-room neoclassical mansion with vast grounds, lush gardens and a tennis court, on a headland above the Mediterranean. The back porch looked out over palms and olive trees and sloped down to a jetty, where a speedboat waited on the water.
Keith moved in on April 3 with his one-year-old son, Marlon, and his labrador. From then on Villa Nellcôte functioned as ground zero for the Rolling Stones in France — and for the album that would become Exile on Main St.
Richards, Anita Pallenberg, their son, Marlon, and his labrador outside Villa NellcôteGetty images
The hangers-on began circling immediately: girls and drug dealers by the gates, hippies sunbathing nude on the adjacent beach. Stash de Rola, a Prussian aristocrat, moved in. “The whole atmosphere was suffused in a kind of French debauchery,” said Robin Millar, the 19-year-old brother of Mick Taylor’s girlfriend and another frequent guest.
Exactly where to record was unclear. Other bands might have used the ground floor banqueting room with its grand acoustics. Not the Stones. The living quarters were sacrosanct. The dining room was for eating; bedrooms were for shagging. “We ended up in Keith’s basement,” Mick recalled, “and the basement was crummy in every possible way.”
Bobby Keys, the saxophonist, described it as “a catacombs” but it was more like a dungeon made up of cubicles so small that no two instrumentalists could be in the same room at the same time; often there wasn’t even enough space for their equipment. It was dark and damp. Electrical wires snaked from room to room, crackling and sparking in the ancient sockets. If the electricity failed, which it often did, candles were lit. The acoustics were horrendous. Until their mobile recording unit arrived, it was impossible to get serious work done.
Vintage champagne and pink heroin
On April 14 Anita Pallenberg, Keith’s girlfriend, steamrolled into Nellcôte, fresh from rehab and claiming she was “clean” but with an entourage that included her drug dealer, Tony Sanchez. She took over the villa’s round-the-clock management. Aside from Mick, she was the only person able to converse in French with the household staff, over whom she presided like a drill sergeant. The villa came with a French chef, Gérard Mosiniak. Anita buttonholed Mosiniak and overhauled the downstairs kitchen. Meals were to be available any time of the day and would now function as feasts.
“There were massive amounts of meat, birds, sweetmeats, huge salads and cheeses. Plus top-quality alcohol, vintage bottles of champagne, great marijuana and cocaine. So nothing was normal and everything was surreal,” Robin recalled. “All of Keith’s friends from all over the world descended on this place as if it were a holiday camp,” Mick Taylor said. “We would sit down to dinner in the evening, all around this wooden table, and there would sometimes be 45 people there.”
Richards entertains diners including the singer Gram Parsons, fourth left in a dark shirt, and Pallenberg, right, on the terraceDominique Tarlé
It wasn’t long before Jean de Breteuil, a self-styled “dealer to the stars” arrived. He had reportedly sold the fatal dose of heroin to Janis Joplin in 1970. Afterwards he fled to Paris and then on to Villa Nellcôte with a house gift of pure pink Thai heroin that gave him an all-access pass.
Soon, cocaine and heroin were as plentiful as food at Villa Nellcôte. Anyone who wanted got a regular taste. Keith evolved into a full-time junkie.
Jagger’s shotgun wedding
The first rehearsal, on May 5, was a loose review of recent material. Halfway through it, Mick let slip that on May 12 he and Bianca were marrying in St Tropez. The news was a bombshell, especially for Keith. Mick hadn’t taken him into his confidence — Keith had a contempt for the tradition, viewing marriage as a bourgeois affair. Neither did Mick tell him that Bianca was four months pregnant.
Everything about the wedding was last minute. The guest list was assembled on 48 hours’ notice, a who’s who of rock’n’roll nobility booked onto a chartered jet from Gatwick airport. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr and their wives were on board (seated at opposite ends of the cabin as McCartney was suing his Beatles bandmates), as were Eric Clapton, members of the Small Faces, including the future Stone Ronnie Wood, Pete Townshend and Keith Moon from the Who, Peter Frampton, Stephen Stills, the film director Roger Vadim, the photographer Patrick Lichfield, the designer Ossie Clark and Mick’s parents — 75 passengers in all. The music producer Jimmy Miller, who marvelled at the amount of pot and cocaine circulating on the flight, quipped, “I don’t think this plane needs any fuel to fly.”
Paul and Linda McCartney and their children, Mary, left, and Heather, at Gatwick airport en route to Mick and Bianca Jagger’s weddingGetty images
Three other guests arrived in a gypsy-style caravan stolen from the singer Donovan. Tommy Weber, the estranged husband of one of Anita’s friends from rehab, travelled overland with his two sons — Jake, eight, and Charlie, seven — and a wedding gift of cocaine. “We got the drugs in Holland, two or three kilos of coke, from my father’s partner in crime, a Romanian gypsy named Taffy,” Jake Weber recalled. “Dad duct-taped the drugs to me and Charlie, a pack on our back, a pack on our chests. He did a test run with us to see if we could handle it before arriving in Nice. And believe me, we were terrified.”
Pallenberg, Richards and Marlon, left, with the drug mules Jake and Charlie Weber at the ceremonyGetty images
St Tropez was overrun with stargazers, tabloid press and paparazzi. A civil ceremony at the town hall was followed by a Catholic service at Chapelle Sainte-Anne. The bride and groom arrived at the church angry and frazzled. They were greeted by the two Weber children, the drug mules, who were pressed into service as pageboys. Keith, dressed in a green military jacket, no shirt and black tights, served as best man. None of the other Rolling Stones were invited, nor had the British guests from the charter flight shown up on time. It was only afterwards, at the reception, that Charlie, Bill and Mick Taylor and their families were admitted to the festivities along with 200 others, including Brigitte Bardot.
Mick and Bianca tie the knot at Chapelle Sainte-Anne on May 12, 1971. Guests included the royal photographer Patrick Lichfield, third right in a light blazer Getty images
The party raged until the morning, fuelled by champagne, cocaine and performances by the famous guests. Mick largely ignored Bianca, who decamped to her hotel room early on. He sang lead on a number of R&B staples, finally stealing away slightly before 5am. The next day Mick and Bianca boarded a yacht for a ten-day honeymoon to Corsica and Sardinia. Any new music would be put off for at least two weeks.
Les cowboys
With Mick away, Keith and Anita threw what became an around-the-clock house party. “We all lived like a family at Nellcôte,” Mick Taylor recalled. “A dysfunctional family. Keith was in charge and pulled the strings.”
Anyone deemed fascinating or useful was welcome to come and stay. John Lennon and Yoko Ono turned up, as did any number of court jesters, lost souls and criminals.
Keith was out of control. He and Anita zipped around the coastline in his Jaguar E-type, or they’d fire up the Mandrax 2, his speedboat, and hightail it Antibes, Juan-les-Pins, Menton or Cap Ferrat — or run down to Italy for breakfast. “Wild days,” Anita called them.
Before long they got wilder. During an argument in Beaulieu harbour, Keith pulled an enormous hunting knife on the harbourmaster, then threatened him with his son’s toy pistol, not anticipating that the harbourmaster had a real one.
Another time, Keith and the dealer Tony Sanchez got into a fight in a shack at the harbour. “There was some kind of conflict,” remembered Jake Weber, who was in Keith’s car. “This guy came out, staggering, all f***ed up with blood pouring from his eye socket. Keith had hit him with his skull ring. And Keith had a gun, a .38. So we had to speed back to the house and get rid of the guns and drugs before the police showed up.”
Keith was eventually charged but somehow, after an apology, a few autographed Rolling Stones albums and, he was sure, money spent, he was off the hook.
Drugs were taking over. Nellcôte’s chef quit. He was replaced by his young steward, John-Jacques Busato. “Fat Jacques”, as he was known, had a talent for drug trafficking. According to Keith, he was “the Marseille connection” who brought them pure heroin from the port. He also came with a posse — three Corsicans who dressed in tacky western garb and were promptly dubbed les cowboys by the Nellcôte occupants.
They were disagreeable characters, just this side of violent. Keith considered them useful, so he put them on the payroll, gave them menial jobs as assistant gardeners and cooks and a place to live inside the gates.
“It started to get really scary,” Anita admitted. “All these hoods from Marseille — these guys were dealing from our house.”
They were also making themselves at home. “The cowboys would be scoffing food and drinking Dom Pérignon,” Robin Millar recalled. Personal items began disappearing from the house and they began gouging Keith on the price of drugs.
Recording begins (finally)
It was almost an act of mercy when Mick returned from his honeymoon. Music took precedence again.
On June 7, the “mighty mobile” recording unit arrived, but the schedule was laughable. “I woke in the afternoon, had breakfast at 7pm and we started recording at nine,” the producer Jimmy Miller recalled. “Lunch was 10.30pm, then we kept going until five in the morning. Then we’d play poker and go to bed around noon.”
During the day the basement rooms were sweltering. Bobby, the saxophonist, recalled that “it was hotter than hell in there. We were wearing bathing suits, shorts and flip-flops and drinking lots of whisky and beer”. Guitars were impossible to keep tuned.
Richards, Jagger and, lying down, the producer Jimmy Miller, in the basementDominique Tarlé
Keith Richards, far left, and Jimmy Miller take it easy while Jim Price, left, and Bobby Keys record horn partsDominique Tarlé
Despite all the hurly-burly and the madness, as Keith noted, “songs started coming out”. By the end of June there were 20 or more songs in some stage of development.
But it was a grind getting them to the finish line. Arrangements would go around in circles. “It was a nightmare,” Bill said. “Instead of working on a song for two hours, you worked on it for two f***ing weeks.” “Drugs were f***ing things up,” said Marshall Chess, the Stones’ record-label manager.
Mick Taylor, only 22, started to dabble with heroin. “He was an innocent when he arrived in France,” said June Shelley, who was the Stones’ PA in France. “But he and Rose worshipped Keith and Anita to a scary degree and were led down the wrong path.”
No one spread as much malevolence as Jean de Breteuil, who’d spent the summer housesitting Keith’s Chelsea flat. Marianne Faithfull had lived there with him for a few months, long enough for him to turn her into a self-described “hopeless junkie”. He did the same to the actress Talitha Getty, who eventually died of an overdose. In Paris with Marianne one weekend, he provided the fatal dose of heroin to Jim Morrison.
Another visitor caught in heroin’s grip turned up at Nellcôte in late July. The singer Gram Parsons was one of Keith’s dearest friends but no one was prepared for the shape he was in. He could barely play the guitar and was “totally zonked out of his head”, according to Jo Bergman, the band’s assistant.
‘Mick and Keith were really bitchy’
Mick and Bianca took off for Ireland to visit the Guinness family. When they returned, Bianca left for Switzerland, where she’d decided to have her baby, then moved to Paris to have the baby there instead. Her husband helped to settle her in both locales. Mick’s absences, effectively stalling the sessions, infuriated Keith, fracturing their special bond. Keith also accused Mick of treating Gram with outright hostility. “I’ve no doubt in retrospect,” he concluded, “that Mick was jealous of me having other male friends.”
Jagger in his Morgan Plus 8 roadster in St Tropez Getty images
Some of that may have been valid. But if Mick was rude to Gram it had much to do with his concern for Keith’s welfare. “Mick was very worried about Keith,” Bill recalled. Mick’s tie to Keith wasn’t simply a musical partnership. They were like brothers, with all the complications that come with such an attachment. The love was there but it was unspoken.
Keith also took pleasure in pissing Mick off. There were days when Mick showed up to write songs and Keith would make himself scarce. “Mick would be on his own in the basement,” Anita said, “and Keith refused to go down there.”
Tension began to permeate the sessions. Mick Taylor took abuse from Keith for playing too loud or getting too creative. “He was treated like a salaried employee by Mick and Keith, who were really bitchy to him,” Marshall Chess recalled. It became a burden. “Some days,” Anita said, “he was too scared to go down to the basement.” The pressure to make headway on the album was relentless. Some housekeeping was required.
Down to business
Gram Parsons had outlived his welcome, often passing out at meals mid-sentence or collapsing in a hallway. Anita pressed Keith to do something about it and they put Gram on the next plane to London. Gram was so hurt that he attempted to overdose before he left.
Tommy Weber and his boys were also on the check-out list. Tommy, whom Keith adored, had pushed his luck too far. “My dad had always fancied Anita,” Jake Weber says, “and they’d been having sex.” After an argument with Keith about it, Anita, Tommy, Marlon Richards and Tommy’s two boys absconded to a place Tommy had rented in the hills. “Nothing was ever going to come of Anita and my dad,” Jake Weber says. “After a couple days Anita got sick of him and demanded he take her back to Nellcôte. That’s when we knew it was time to leave.” Stash de Rola and Tony Sanchez were also given the boot. Les cowboys were allowed to stay.
By August 26 the occupants of Nellcôte were pared back to a skeleton staff. With the minions gone, the Rolling Stones buckled down to business.
Plans were drawn up to tour Japan and America in support of the new album, provisionally entitled Tropical Disease. They agreed to try to finish the recording by the end of October.
Anita was pregnant again, however, and highly emotional. The second week in September she summoned June, the PA, with an urgent request. “You have to help me,” Anita said. “I can’t have this baby. I need an abortion.”
There were rumours that Anita feared the baby was Mick’s, which might be apparent when it was born. “Keith heard the rumours as well and things got chilly, chillier, between them,” Marshall Chess said. France was a predominantly Catholic country. Anita needed to go somewhere abortion was legal.
“Keith wants the baby,” Anita told June. “I can’t do it. Can you arrange for me to get a plane to Switzerland?”
But June didn’t work for Anita. When she went to the band’s French accountant to obtain money for the plane ticket he insisted that Keith sign off first. Keith “was furious”, Anita recalled. “ ‘Buy her a ticket anywhere she wants,’ he told me. ‘Just don’t buy her a round trip.’ ” June purchased the plane ticket four different times. “Each time there was another excuse why Anita didn’t make the flight. It became clear to me that she decided to have the baby.”
Then on September 21 burglars looted Nellcôte. Keith and Anita spent the afternoon locked in their bedroom, watching TV. Even Inspector Clouseau could have solved the crime. Everyone knew it was an inside job — les cowboys were the obvious suspects. They had the run of the place, they were thugs and word had it that Keith and Bobby Keys owed them money.
‘We were in some bad trouble’
In the aftermath, the villa underwent a complete lockdown. Visitors were no longer welcome. Locks were changed. “The massive gates were closed,” Anita said, “and big lights [shone] onto the street. We went to maximum security.”
Meanwhile Mick had arrived in Paris, where Bianca had given birth to a 6lb baby girl, Jade Sheena Jezebel Jagger. Brimming with pride, the tax exile father stole into England to introduce his parents to their new granddaughter.
Basic tracks for the new album were nearly complete by early October, but they were mainly raw, bare-bones recordings. Many lacked lyrics. Most of the band were soon on their way to Los Angeles to finish the work there, in studios better equipped to punch in overdubs, layer on the vocals and supply studio musicians.
Richards and Jagger jam amid speaker boxes inside the villaDominique Tarlé
Keith was eager to do his part, but he and Anita were detained in Villefranche. The police had opened an investigation. Informants had supplied information about les cowboys and their sources, as well as the trafficking outside the villa’s gates. A wealth of evidence allegedly linked the Stones and their associates to the movement of drugs in the region and the French state intended to bring charges against everyone associated with Villa Nellcôte. Keith was facing possible lengthy jail time.
“We were in some bad trouble,” Keith admitted. God knows how many go- betweens had their hands in the operation — les cowboys, Fat Jacques, Tommy Weber, Tony Sanchez, any number of intermediaries from Corsica and Marseille, retainers, villains and drifters. They would have plenty to say.
Then Rupert Loewenstein, a merchant banker who had masterminded the band’s tax exile in the first place, rode to the rescue. He had French friends in high places: a team of lawyers, cabinet advisers to the prime minister and mayor of Antibes, prefects for the Alpes-Maritimes, any bigwig he could get his hands on. They could not expunge the charges, but they did secure Keith from custody, enabling him to leave France.
Almost as soon as he and Anita were out of the country, police raided Nellcôte. They hit the jackpot. The place was awash with heroin, cocaine and other substances, leading to new charges of drug possession and trafficking. A warrant was issued for Keith’s and Anita’s arrest. By that time, however, the couple was out of harm’s reach, in Los Angeles. The Rolling Stones, half a world away, were putting the finishing touches on an album they were now calling Exile on Main St.
© Bob Spitz 2026. Extracted from The Rolling Stones (Penguin Michael Joseph £30), published on May 28. To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Special discount for Times+ members