3 CHEYNE WALK (aka. River House), SW10

Rolling Stone Keith Richards bought this Victorian town house from former Conservative minister Anthony Nutting for a reported £55,000 in May 1968. Fellow Stone Mick Jagger bought a house 100 yards away at 48 Cheyne Walk the same month.

     Guitarist Eric Clapton was a regular visitor here. Clapton was apparently very much in awe of Richards and Mick Jagger, both of whom were at that time scheming to oust Brian Jones from the Stones. The two courted Clapton – then on the verge of leaving Cream - as a possible replacement for Jones, but nothing came of it.

     Also in residence at 3 Cheyne Walk was Richards’ girlfriend Anita Pallenberg. A devotee of the occult and filmmaker cum black magician Kenneth Anger, Pallenberg draped garlands of garlic around the house to ward off vampires. She also kept a locked case full of human hair, bone and animal parts in her room for use in spells and incantations. Anger, meanwhile, had become infatuated with Mick Jagger’s girlfriend, Marianne Faithful. Faithful was less impressed with the would-be satanist’s skills, however, which she dismissed as “hocus pocus”. She nevertheless agreed to appear in Anger’s movie Lucifer Rising and travelled to Cairo for location shooting, but only because “by then I was a hopeless junkie.”

     In June 1973, the house was raided by drug squad officers who discovered illegal firearms and a small quantity of drugs. Along with Richards and Pallenberg, also present during the raid was their friend (quel surprise!) Prince Stanislaus Kosloswki de Rola, aka. Stash - who seems to have made a career out of being present at celebrity busts (see 101 Cromwell Road, 1 Courtfield Road and Redlands). Richards was later fined £200.

By then, Richards was only at the house occasionally, having left the UK along with his fellow Stones in March 1971 to live as a tax exile in France. According to Stones biographer Philip Norman, on the morning of the departure “a task force descended on 3 Cheyne Walk, picked up everything around Keith – furniture, bottles, half-full ashtrays, clothes, scarves – packed them all into cartons, transported them across the Channel and rearranged it in the same pattern around Keith as he subsided into his new home in St Jean Cap Ferrat.”

Richards sold 3 Cheyne Walk in 1978 - the same year that Jagger sold no. 48 (note: Jagger biographer Christopher Andersen disagrees with this date). The house, part of a larger Victorian terrace, appears considerably larger than no.48 – at least from the outside - and is marred by crass faux brickwork at the front.

 

48 CHEYNE WALK, SW10 

Mick Jagger bought this fashionable Queen Anne town house in May 1968 for £50,000 and hired designer Christopher Gibbs (see 98 Cheyne Walk) to redecorate the place.

     Since visiting Morocco in 1958, Gibbs had been an enthusiast for all things Moroccan; arguably, it was Gibbs more than anyone who initiated the late-Sixties hippie craze for Morrocan art and culture (not least, hash). It was this same style that Gibbs introduced to Jagger’s new house, turning it into a “Moroccan bazaar” of drapes, pillows, ornate, painted furniture, brass lamps and fixtures. During the course of his work, Gibbs also came up with the title for the Stones' next album, Beggars Banquet. There was nothing beggarly about Gibbs’ redecoration, however, which cost Jagger a small fortune. In September 1968, interior designer David Milnaric added finishing touches, including a genuine Regency bed and Louis XV bath.

     Not there to admire the decor, on 22 May 1968, half a dozen police officers led by Detective Sergeant Robin Constable (sic) arrived with a warrant to search the premises. Substances were duly seized. The following morning Jagger and girlfriend Marianne Faithful appeared at Marlborough Street Magistrates Court charged with possessing cannabis. They were released on £50 bail each. When the case came to court on 19 December 1968, Mick was fined £200 with £52 costs. Faithful was acquitted.

     Reportedly, for all its quaint, cottage-like charm from the outside, once through the front door of the house, the ambience changed dramatically. The Gibbs-designed decor evoked the lush decadence of a Turkish harem or opium den (very similar, apparently, to the interior of the Jagger character’s house in the film Performance: see Lowndes Square). The blinds were kept closed, even during the day, the vast living room with its immense, Citizen Kane-style fireplace would usually be lit by just a single table lamp. Jagger liked to pad about the place in women’s slippers, wearing heavy Arabian kohl eye make-up and – when the mood took him - one of Faithful’s frocks.

     Jagger had a studio constructed at the end of the garden, and it was here that long jam sessions with Keith Richards produced many of the songs for Let It Bleed, including Honky Tonk Women, Gimme Shelter and Midnight Rambler.

     In their early years at Cheyne Walk, Jagger and Faithful’s life here was idyllic. However, by 1969, as Faithful plunged into heroin addiction and Jagger into his work – and (allegedly) other women’s beds - the relationship became nightmarish. According to Jagger biographer Christopher Andersen, Faithful’s addiction “had taken a horrifying toll. She was unkempt, there were great circles under her bloodshot eyes ... She fell down in the streets (and) passed out in restaurants and chic dinner parties. Once, Jagger returned ... to find her sprawled on the bathroom floor, unconcious.” But “like having a butterfly or an insect on a pin” (as Faithful herself described it) Jagger refused to break with her. The following year, “with Nicolas (her son) under one arm and a Persian rug under the other,” Faithful finally left Cheyne Walk for good.

     A few years later, in May 1972, the hallway of number 48 witnessed another stressful exit. According to the Jaggers’ nanny Janie Villiers (quoted in Christopher Andersen’s Jagger Unauthorised), prior to leaving for a US tour on which his new wife Bianca was not invited the singer was waiting for a limo to take him to the airport when his wife began screaming at him. Incensed at being left behind, she demanded he go through his (twenty) suitcases and retrieve a silk scarf which he was planning to wear onstage. Jagger reportedlly “burst into tears” and went through each suitcase until he finally found the scarf.

     By March 1978, things were irrevocably askew in the Jagger marriage and Bianca sued for divorce, naming Jagger’s new flame Jerry Hall as co-respondent. Jagger responded swiftly, moving all the furniture out of Cheyne Walk and (ulp!) cancelling Bianca’s charge accounts.

     According to Andersen, the empty Cheyne Walk mansion was still owned by Jagger in March 1980 (research note: when was it sold?).

     In May 1991 (research note: another source states 1979), Jagger bought another London property, Downe House, a Georgian mansion on Richmond Hill. (See Downe House, Lowndes Square)

 

100 CHEYNE WALK, SW10

Location of designer Christopher Gibbs’ sprawling, wood-panelled apartment – located just a few doors down from Mick Jagger’s. . (NB. Another account gives Gibbs’ address as 96.)

     Originally part of Lindsay House, built in 1645, Gibbs’ apartment was the epicentre of London’s bohemian Chelsea set during the 1960s. Lindsay House itself originally comprised nos 95-101 Cheyne Walk (impressionist painter James Whistler lived briefly at 101), but was split up into apartments in 1775.       Situated on the first floor, and boasting a splendid view of a lavish back garden and ancient mulberry tree (reputedly, England’s oldest), chez Gibbs was done out like a scene from the Arabian Nights, and wild all-night drug parties were frequent. “At every turn there were Moorish lanterns, leather camel saddles and jewel-like Persian carpets – all viewed through an acrid haze of burning incense,” wrote Christopher Andersen in Jagger Unauthorized. “Guests draped in caftans or Victorian lace luxuriated on huge embroidered cushions strewn about the floor.” Jagger, the Stones and Paul McCartney were regular visitors here, along with “the select pipe-dreamers of Sixties Chelsea: poets and mystics, artists and musicians, courtesans, hustlers and hangers-on.”

Cult director Michaelangelo Antonioni used Gibbs’ house as the setting for the famous party scene in his enigmatic Sixties thriller, Blow-Up.