His first public appearance with the band was the Stones’ huge free concert in Hyde Park, which became an impromptu memorial for the band’s founder and original guitarist Brian Jones, who had been found dead two days earlier. He was five years younger than his bandmates and a far more gifted instrumentalist, having toured for three years with the influential John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers.įurthermore, as a fitter’s son from Hatfield, Hertfordshire, he was genuinely working class, while the Stones were middle-class boys pretending to be rough.įrom January 1971, he also had a daughter, Chloe, to support from a short-lived marriage to his first wife, Rosie. Taylor was always set apart from the rest of the band, who had already been together for seven years by the time he joined. ‘Part of the charm of the Rolling Stones, as far as I could see, was that they were not technically very good but were very raw and had great ideas.’ I wasn’t impressed by all that and I think they kind of liked that attitude.
‘The next day, Mick called and asked if I wanted to join. I’ve got things to do.” I told them to give me a call if they wanted me to do anything else.
‘After doing guitar parts on three songs, I said to Mick and Keith, “If you guys are just going to sit and mess around, I’m going home.
‘At the first session, I overdubbed the guitar on Honky Tonk Women, but I thought they were all a little bit vain and full of themselves. ‘I sort of liked them, but was never passionate about the Stones. ‘When they asked me to come to the studio in 1969, I thought they just wanted me to play a session,’ he recalled. Mick Taylor's old car decays in the overgrown garden ‘I make no bones about it – had I remained with the band, I would probably be dead. ‘People are always asking me whether I regret leaving the Rolling Stones,’ he said. He is jowly and far heavier than in his prime – the legacy, he admits, of years of drug abuse. His once-golden mane of hair is streaked with grey. The thick-set Taylor has none of the dandyish elegance of Jagger or the outlaw chic of Keith Richards. The uncut grass, empty cans in the kitchen sink and the ancient car parked in the driveway with weeds growing through its wheels also tell a tale. ‘I just don’t feel up for it right now.’Įven less edifying is the unopened stack of bills and threats to cut off the water, electricity and gas. ‘Yeah, I know it needs doing,’ he said dismissively.
The tiny house in a Suffolk country lane is in serious need of repair and redecoration. It is clear that the scruffy, two-bedroom semi where he has lived for the past 20 years hardly fits the image of a former Rolling Stone. Now, 61-year-old Taylor has broken his silence in an extraordinary interview with The Mail on Sunday. Rolling in it: Mick Jagger and Mick Taylor together on stage in 1972įor years, he has refused to discuss his time as a Stone and has brushed off the two questions that have dogged him ever since: why did he leave, and does he regret it? Yet Taylor walked away from the band at the height of its musical powers.Īnd while Jagger, Keith Richards, Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts have become fabulously wealthy on the back of music he helped make, Taylor scrapes a hand-to-mouth existence by playing pub gigs and hasn’t seen a penny in royalties from the Rolling Stones since 1982. He was present at the height of the band’s decadent excess at Nellcote in the South of France in the summer of 1971 and on the legendary tours of America in 19-73. Taylor, who replaced the erratic Brian Jones, played guitar on Honky Tonk Women, Wild Horses, Angie, It’s Only Rock And Roll and a host of other classic tracks. When the band announced six weeks ago that it was switching record labels from EMI to Universal, much was made of the continuing selling power of classic albums such as Exile On Main Street, Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers – all made in an astonishingly productive five-year period between 19, when Taylor was the Stones’ lead guitarist. Mick Taylor is Ronnie Wood’s direct predecessor and the musical virtuoso behind the Rolling Stones’ golden age. Unpaid bills:Mick Taylor believes he could be owed millions of pounds in royaltiesĮven guitarist Ronnie Wood, a relative newcomer who was only made a full member of the band in 1990, was estimated to be worth £70million during his recent divorce.Īll of which is a source of bitter amusement to the shambling figure in a dark grey duffel coat, stopping to light his umpteenth cigarette of the day as he walks from his ramshackle cottage in rural Suffolk to the village shop.