Mick Jagger said he abandoned writing a memoir in the ‘80s because he found the process “dull and upsetting.” The book was the subject of a bidding war, with a large advance payment made to the Rolling Stones singer, before he decided not to continue with it.
“I was offered a lot of money, and the money was the seductive part of it,” Jagger admitted in a recent interview with the BBC. “When I actually started to get into it, I really didn’t enjoy it. And what I didn’t enjoy was reliving my life to the detriment of living in the now.”
He noted that “if you want to write an autobiography, this is not a process you can do in a week, you know? It takes a lot of you – it takes a lot out of you reliving emotions, reliving friendships, reliving ups and downs and all this. And I must say, it wasn’t the most enjoyable experience. I found it ultimately dull and upsetting … there wasn’t that many highs out of it. So I just said, ‘I can’t be bothered with this,’ and I just gave the money back to the publishers, [saying] ‘I’ll do it another day.’ And that was the end of it.”
Jagger also admitted he made up a flimsy excuse at the time. “I think I said something stupid like I couldn’t remember anything,” he said. “It wasn’t that – I just didn’t enjoy the process.” Asked if he’d even return to the book, he replied: “Not any moment soon.”
In 2017, publisher John Blake revealed that he was given the 75,000-word manuscript that was Jagger’s work in progress. Describing it as a “little masterpiece,” he said he came close to reaching an agreement to release it with a foreword by the singer, emphasizing that it was an unfinished work from three decades earlier. “I kept gently pushing, but when eventually I tried to force a decision, the steel gates clanged shut,” Blake wrote in The Spectator. “Mick wanted nothing further to do with this project. He never wanted to see it published.”
