Jade Jagger: Wonder woman

Sunday August 23 2009
Independent.IE

Jade Jagger's home in Ibiza is on the north of the island where, circa 550BC, the Carthaginians chilled out. The daughter of Mick and Bianca lived there full time for more than 12 years, on a 17th-century organic farm, surrounded by sea and nature, "behind old stone walls, a thicket of fig trees, cacti and masses of flowers buzzing with bees," rhapsodised W magazine in 2004.

This is Jade's own private paradise.

"It has," Jade tells me, "rubber floors."

What colour?

"Pink, of course."

How very Marquis de Sade. Are the rubber floors to make it easier for you to wipe after all-night drug orgies?

Those notorious Jagger lips -- inherited from her dad -- quiver with laughter at the ridiculousness of the question. "Not quite." She giggles for at least 10 minutes. "It's for the dogs to shit on the floor. I have one three-legged dog and three Italian greyhounds. They shit everywhere. They are very demanding."

And are you?

"Yeah!" Jade -- who is in Dublin to launch Smirnoff Mule -- laughs. Her long-term boyfriend, Dan Williams, is currently in another room in Ely Place, DJing. To wind her up, I wonder aloud how she would react if he came in now and suddenly announced that he was leaving her. "We'd get it back on, I'm sure," she smiles.

And if you didn't?

"I'd move on," Jade giggles, adding that she, her kids and Dan have recently moved back to London, though "we will always keep Ibiza as a summer base". Hanging out tonight in this spare-but-hip room in Dublin 2, Jade is queen of all she surveys. Tanned and long of leg, she is laid back, friendly and extremely inquisitive. Please note: nouveau riche-kid trustafarians are never overly interested in anyone -- or anything -- other than themselves. "Do you do yoga? What's your star sign?" she asks breezily. "You met my mother?"

It helps that I had lunch with her old dear, Bianca Perez Morena de Macias, in the early Nineties in Dublin, for the Sunday Independent. This gives me carte blanche to ask her cheeky questions. Jade even laughs when I ask her if she has ever done cocaine off Naomi Campbell's bottom. "Naomi's quite a lot of fun," Jade says, roaring with laughter, not answering the question. She possibly doesn't need to. "I haven't really hung out with her that much."

Jade finds it hilarious that some people think that tonight she is here to spin some tunes on the decks at the Smirnoff hooley. "There appears to be a misunderstanding. I am not here to DJ. I am here to hang out with my man," she laughs. "I am a terrible DJ. At home I play Bob Dylan and reggae."

Got any Spandau Ballet?

"Maybe!" she chortles through those Daz-white teeth of hers.

When you meet Jade Jagger, you realise that she's scarcely anything like the stuff you've read about her in the tabloids. Through her lifestyle -- a utopian farm in Spain; now a home in London -- she has challenged the stereotype of a bone-idle daughter of an unimaginably wealthy oul' fella.

A piece she wrote last year in Harpers Bazaar, 'How to throw a party' perhaps didn't help destroy the misconception of her as a high-octane party princess: "The best parties have always been at my house in Ibiza. They start with a bit of music and a barbecue by the pool," she wrote. "Whenever I lay on a party, I try to recreate a house party, where there is less inhibition and no time boundaries. People and drinks make for a good party, but if you want a wild one, it has to go on until after 2am. All the craziness -- that always happens after hours."

She's been pictured with the likes of Kate Moss at various decadent parties, but the real Jade is more of an earth mother than a party girl. Jade says that people want to imagine that she's wild because they want to feel that there's somebody out there doing something while they're going to bed at 10pm. They don't want to think that she was probably at home putting her kids to bed, and moaning that they've left their room in a mess.

She talks about the prejudices she encountered at school -- I hasten to add, she is not saying this in even a remotely poor-me manner. "People make assumptions," she says. "They guess you must be a party girl, and that I have had a lot of money because of my dad, and that is not his style. They think that you do nothing. I have been getting up early and looking after kids for most of my adult life," she says.

"I think people perceive me completely differently than how I perceive myself. I see myself as a sweet, cosy, motherly type. We all want people to be more glamorous and daring and adventurous than they actually are. People project. I think people [think] that you're rich and dumb when you can be poor and clever."

Rich and clever Jade Jezebel Jagger was born on October 21, 1971, in Paris. Her mother was carrying her in her belly when she married the lead singer of the Rolling Stones at the Saint Tropez town hall on May 12, 1971 in front of the world's media. The chic, slimming, white Yves Saint Laurent pantsuit Bianca wore gave no indication of her baby bump.

Andy Warhol used to babysit Jade in New York; it was that kind of charged, bohemian life. "OK, it's displacing for a child that your mother or father comes home before or after Studio 54," Jade once said. Her parents divorced in 1979, when Jade was seven.

Warhol's magazine, Interview, once wrote that Jade's adolescence was spent "in the wilds of the Upper East Side, attending Spence School and hanging out in Central Park. She was living a real-life version of Larry Clarke's Kids and having lots of fun, until her strict English father shipped her to a boarding school in Wiltshire." She was expelled from that school, aged 15.

"I grew up," she says, "in New York, London and on tour." Quite a menage a trio, I think you'll agree.

Did that make it difficult for you to settle anywhere?

"I think so. But only a little bit. I had the same house in Ibiza for the past 12 to 13 years," she says.

Reasonably balanced, now, despite the famous rock 'n' roll heritage, Jade thinks "both my parents gave me a lot of freedom to believe that I can do what I want in life".

A good mother, Jade has raised two daughters by a previous boyfriend, Piers Jackson. Assisi and Amba are now in their teens; Dan's son, Ty, is now also part of the brood. Jade is often photographed around London and Ibiza, happily hanging out with her kids. As a child, Jade loved, she says, Wonder Woman -- "I wanted to be her" -- and the Bionic Woman. "I loved all the sounds that she made when she was deflecting bullets and running at 100mph," she enthuses. She is a bit of a bionic wonder-woman herself. She designs jewellery and has her own clothing range, Jezebel, as well as being a mother to three. "All mothers juggle a lot of things," she adds.

She can remember going to Mustique when she was five; it was more of a Robinson Crusoe island then than it is today, she says. There was just one telephone line, and one generator for the whole island. "If I ever write a book, I am going to call it 'From Margate to Mustique'," she laughs.

She says she is used, by now, to being asked, "'How does it feel to have a famous dad?' and all that kind of crap. 'What was it like growing up in the Seventies with a Rolling Stone as a father?'" She finds it far more interesting to be asked about what qualities her parents instilled in their daughter for her to lead her life in the way she has. She talks about inheriting her outspokenness from her father. "I am not frightened of speaking my mind. I don't have fear in that regard," Jade says.

She has never seen Stella Street -- the BBC's comedy sitcom about a fictional corner shop where Michael Caine and Jack Nicholson go to buy groceries from the shopkeepers, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. "I've seen the puppets on Spitting Image," Jade says. "But not Stella Street."

She has, however, seen the famous footage of her dad, then a young man, being interviewed by the editor of the Times, William Rees-Mogg, and a panel of establishment figures for World in Action in 1967.

The programme came about after the British establishment's heavy-handed reaction to the arrest of Mick and Keith for drug possession at Richards's Sussex manor house -- an episode that led the Times in an editorial to ask, in Alexander Pope's words: "Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?"

"Of course, I have seen it," Jade says.

Her father, just like Bob Dylan or Jack Nicholson, was portrayed as the outspoken prophet for his generation in the Sixties. The Rolling Stone evidently passed on the opinionated gene to his daughter. "I say what comes into my head without fear," she says.

Say something without fear, Jade.

"I won't!" she hisses, hilariously. "This is not pay-per-view Jade."

She tells the London PR, who is in the room as a kind of chaperone when we talk, that she can "go out and hang with the boys now". The PR appears to be in a bit of a huff when she leaves, which Jade finds funny.

What pisses you off about people?

"People sucking up. I don't like people doing things that they know will make them unhappy. They do things for their parents or for money and they don't follow their hearts."

"My mother gave me a lot of stoicism," she says of Bianca, who is an internationally respected human-rights activist, and also chair of the Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation. "My mother had opinions on the world and on politics. She was, and is, a strong woman," Jade says. "She wanted to break down boundaries -- she came from a country where women were thought of as having to stay at home. My mother stood up for what she believed." Jade believes that she got her "show-off side" from her father.

You can say that again. Jade is something of the high priestess of the plunging neckline and the exploding decolletage. Hers is a boho style for utopian babes of exquisite English and Nicaraguan ancestry. Tonight, in Dublin, she is wearing a flowing, slinky, sexy, show-off dress that just about covers her chest. It is her signature look.

That said, Jade possesses quite the aura of haute hippy chick. She is happy to be called that, too. As Celia Walden in the Daily Telegraph recently wrote of Jade's look and inner self: "Throughout the interview Jagger frequently refers to herself smilingly as 'a hippy', which is not, it quickly transpires, the affectation it might be if professed by, say, Sienna Miller. Something about Jade's physique, languid demeanour and unwillingness to be cornered -- by a journalist or rules -- exudes overtones of endless summer." Dublin tonight exudes overtones of endless winter, of course.

I ask her a few hippy-dippy questions. Do you think the recession might give people an opportunity to finally grasp that life is about humans, and not money?

"I think it was good to make people see money isn't everything. I think it was good for the world to see what is important. It was bringing it back to what is really important. It was good to stop too much excess and to stop people being wasteful," she says, adding that she "talks in riddles".

What message would you like to give to the world, to Ireland?

She looks at me blankly.

I suggest stealing Pope John Paul II's spirited bons mots of 1979: "Young people of Ireland, I love you."

"I'll copy the Pope then," Jade smiles. "I want people to be true to themselves and believe in themselves. I want people to stop looking to celebrity idols and look to themselves instead, because we need real people to inspire us."

This is no idle, hippy babble either. She describes the birth of one of her kids, at her home in Spain, as "a happy home-birth".

"It was in a bed. I delivered my own baby, like in Africa. I have that tough nature, which comes from my mother, because of her earthy background." This all seems light years away from the British tabloid caricature of Jade as a spoiled, jet-setting bon vivant.

Jagger talks about empowering herself by living. This is -- upon examination -- not some new-age, hippy mush. She has the facts to back it up. Jade has empowered herself, she says, by "by living up a mountain with two kids for quite a long time. I always had a call to nature. I always wanted to have kids young. I was 20 when I was had my first child," she says of Assisi Lola Jackson.

The noise that her boyfriend Dan is making at the Smirnoff Mule party outside the door is quite a racket. MIA, and what used to be called acid house is pumping on his stereo. Jade fiddles with her gold necklace. It is one of her own creations: gold skulls on a chain. "They are actual skulls, shrunken," she laughs. "You'll be wearing it next. This is inspired by a lot of tribal things. I use a lot of symbols like wings and people can attach whatever meaning they want. You know, like angels or whatever. I put all sorts of symbols, thoughts and iconography into my jewellery and little things that can mean different things to different people. I know everything is superfluous. I am under no illusions about that."

I ask her what wearing Jade Jagger jewellery says about the wearer. "It says you are a punchy, outspoken person with a lot of character -- a powerful person inside."

Is that what you are?

"Oh, I think so," Ms Jagger laughs, as I get a mental picture of four canines happily shitting everywhere in Ibiza, while their mistress does her best to wipe the dog poo off the hot-pink rubber floors before Grandad arrives and slips on the floor and sprains his ankle.

Limping Jack Flash.