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The night half a century ago that Mick Jagger took one in the eye (Read 603 times)
Edith Grove
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The night half a century ago that Mick Jagger took one in the eye
Oct 6th, 2015 at 5:10am
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The night half a century ago that Mick Jagger took one in the eye



IT was the very beginning of the Rolling Stones age, 50 tears ago on Thursday, and for all sorts of reasons Ian Wright has never forgotten it. It made quite an impression on Mick Jagger, too.

It was also the night that Jagger and Keith Richard really did see the writing on the wall, and that at 2am the Stones were thrown onto the North Yorkshire streets.

Quite a story, this one, and the man who indelibly recalls it is Ian Wright, long in Las Vegas but then a 19-year-old trainee photographer on The Northern Echo in Darlington.

The Stones were playing the ABC in Stockton, Teesside’s terrible Teds much in evidence amid the hysterical teenage girls who packed the High Street theatre.

One of Ian’s photographs appears to show a Teddy boy holding a knife. Others had filed the edges of penny coins to use as missiles – and it was a coin which struck Jagger on stage, just millimetres from his right eye.

The lead singer jumped around, pulled out a pristine handkerchief, stemmed the blood flow, aborted the set but returned for the second half. Ian raced back to Darlington with his pictures and the story. Legendary Echo editor Harold Evans – known to young Wrighty as Buddy Holly, but never to his face – liked the sound of it, even helped develop the film, decreed that it should make the front page alongside the story of Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith’s doomed Downing Street talks in a bid to prevent UDI.

“Blood from a stone,” read the editor’s caption. In all his career, says Ian, no one’s ever written a better headline to one of his images than that.

HE’D eventually been joined at the ABC by Philip Norman, a young Northern Despatch journalist who would go on to write four biographies of the Stones and another of Jagger but who in the autumn of 1965 had come on the bus, tried to pay at the door and broke down in tears (says Ian) when told the show was long since sold out.

The Echo had sent Luke Casey, to become a BBC household name. Though he’d secured an interview with Jagger and Richard – both of whom supposed security staff “sadistic” – his report concentrated on the screaming, seemingly out of control teenagers.


“With apologies to the Duke of Wellington,” wrote Casey, “I don’t know if they frightened the Stones but, by God, they frightened me.”


They frightened Ian Wright, too, sitting with his Nikon in the orchestra stalls, seeking something for the next day’s paper. Minutes before the coin struck Jagger, a stiletto-heeled shoe had crashed off a footlight and into Charlie Watts’s drum kit. Someone else threw a six-inch spanner. “I could feel the pent-up aggression,” he recalls.

Even before Jagger’s four stitches from St John Ambulance, Luke Casey had had mixed feelings about the group, too. “Nice boys. Little bit on the ugly side. Nothing serious.”

IAN WRIGHT and the Rolling Stones were almost old friends, having met 18 months earlier at the Alcove Club in Middlesbrough. Gerry and the Pacemakers and the Hollies were also on the bill, the cover charge 2/6d.

For the Stones it was a first gig outside London, the youngsters flattered that Ian, younger yet, should ask them for a photograph.

Earlier that day he’d been at nearby Acklam Park, covering Yorkshire’s match against the touring West Indian cricket team – played on a bitterly cold day and against the inescapable backdrop of the Teesside pong, against which Harold Evans also successfully campaigned.

Jagger, ever the cricket lover, was much taken by that, too. It was the beginning of a long friendship. “I had no doubt from the moment we first met that he could be a success at anything he wanted to be,” says Ian.

After delivering his Stockton pictures to the excited editor, Ian had developed some spare prints, waited until the first edition steamed hot from the press about 11.30pm, grabbed a few copies and headed down the A1 to the Scotch Corner Hotel, where the Stones were staying.

He arrived before them, joined in the foyer by a doctor, by long serving hotel manager Tom Jones and by rather a lot of sandwiches and lager. It was the papers that they most appreciated. “Mick said his eye was all right, but throbbing like hell,” Ian recalls. “He was rather impressed with the papers.”

Upstairs in their twin room, Jagger and Richard received a message from the Beatles – who were in the Bahamas – and returned the call. Jagger wrote the number on the wall, an action witnessed by the room service porter who informed the manager.

Though old rubber lips insisted that it was only in pencil and could easily be erased, Tom Jones ordered that they report to reception, pay up and get out.

They made their way to Richmond, found a bed and breakfast – “the proprietors couldn’t have been more welcoming” says Ian – and next morning rang their new friend from a café at Leeming Bar.

The picture he took of Mick Jagger, 20 minutes before the missile incident, now hangs in the Stone’s home. It’s in the National Portrait Gallery, too.

OCTOBER 8, 1965? Ian Smith was warned “in the most solemn terms” of the consequences of UDI, US president Lyndon Johnson had his gall bladder removed, the North East Civic Trust was formed and government minister Richard Crossman opened Baldersdale Reservoir in Teesdale, later holding a press conference at the Scotch Corner Hotel (from which he managed not to be thrown out.)
      
A Leyburn butcher was fined £5 for selling mouldy pies, My Fair Lady was on stage at the Theatre Royal in Newcastle, the Vicar of Cockerton was appealing for homes for his two curates – “not near the church, we don’t want it to be a holy corner” – Sunderland FC were (then as now) bottom of the league and a young Northern Despatch reporter – yet greener, more gauche and more gullible than Philip Norman – was marking his 19th birthday.

Another rolls round on Thursday. It’s to be hoped that the stone gathers no moss.


Slideshow here: http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/features/13805893.The_night_half_a_century_ago_...
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“What rap did that was impressive was to show there are so many tone-deaf people out there,” he says. “All they need is a drum beat and somebody yelling over it and they’re happy. There’s an enormous market for people who can’t tell one note from another.” - Keef
 
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