Exile (le livre) citations

Extracts From Exile's Ninety Thousand

It wasn't like we were a young married couple on our honeymoon.

We were two guys working. We certainly weren't a bunch of hippies like everyone says. We didn't have time to be hippies. There was too much to do.
Anita Pallenberg

Suddenly there we all were, living in the South of France. And contrary to what the newspapers thought, which is that we were all joined at the hip and were this big group that lived together, we had never socialised that much. But here, we were suddenly all thrown together in a foreign country, having to see more of each other.
Astrid Lundström (épouse de Bill)

John Lennon came once, but just for one afternoon. As soon as he came, he went off to Keith's bedroom for about three quarters of an hour. Then he came downstairs to say "goodbye", vomited on the carpet and left.
Dominique Tarlé

I noticed one day that the vents in the floors were decorated with swastikas. When I asked Keith about it, he said, "Oh, it was the Gestapo headquarters during the war. But it's all right - we're in here now."
Andy Johns

It was all very primitive, and if we were in the middle of a take at two o'clock in the morning and there was a thunderstorm and lots of lightning, we'd have power failure sometimes. We'd sit around in that dingy basement, talking by candlelight until the power came back again. The whole idea of doing an album like that these days would be laughable.
Mick Taylor

Once we finished a session and then, on the Saturday night, we got a message that some kids had come in and stolen all the guitars and other things. Thirteen or seventeen guitars and a bass. They came and asked, "Where is Keith?" "Oh, he is in the other room, watching telly." So they came in and nicked everything. They were so free and easy there.
Bill Wyman

The cop said, "I have time to spend, here are the five depositions, I'll leave you to read them. Smoke a cigarette or drink a cup of coffee and I'll come back in ten minutes. Tell me what you have to say." One deposition I might argue about, even two or three, but five I couldn't deny. So I went to jail for six months and waited for my trial to come up.
Rene d'Amico

Judges and lawyers came by and remonstrated, "Madame!" But Bianca is like a tiger, she turned on them and said, "C'est mon mari," in other words, "Just try and stop me, my husband's in there!" Everybody backed off.
June Shelley

I went down to Nellcôte with rough mixes of all the material I'd found and remember them listening to them and saying, "God, that's pretty good, what is all this?" One of the tracks that I specifically remember was "Shake Your Hips" which definitely came out of that bunch of tapes. Another one was "Stop Breaking Down", and all the ones with Stu on the piano. There was also a version of the Jimi Hendrix song "Red House".
Trevor Churchill

Mick and I... He found out that I could play a little and he could sing a bit. "I dig to sing," he said, and he also knew Dick Taylor from another school they'd gone to and the thing tied up so we'd try and do something. We'd all go to Dick Taylor's house, in his back room, some other cats would come along and play, and we'd try to play some of this Little Walter and Chuck Berry stuff. No drummer or anything. Just two guitars and a little amplifier. Usual backroom stuff. It fell into place very quickly.
Keith Richards from his 1971 Nellcôte Interview (RS)