The London flat where hard-partying rock icon Mick Jagger caused bedlam has gone on the market for £5.5million.
The Rolling Stones singer, 81, lived with Marianne Faithfull in the luxury apartment in Harley House, Marylebone, during his hedonistic party days in the 1960s.
From 1966 to 1968 the lush 2,495 sq ft four-bedroom pad in the Edwardian mansion was where Jagger and bandmate Keith Richards would indulge in their drug-fuelled binges.
Its location just a stone’s throw from the exclusive Harley Street doctors and Jagger’s GP were behind the iconic rocker’s motivation to rent the apartment.
According to The Times, ‘medical tourism’ was behind Jagger’s decision to move to the area where he would regularly visit the medical centres after thier infamous binges in what he called his ‘hippy lounge’.
Pictures taken at the time show Jagger posing on the rooftop in a brown teddy bear style jacket.
The Stones’ personal photographer Gered Mankowitz documented Jagger’s move from his mews flat near Baker Street into the apartment where he posed outside with his newly-bought Aston Martin DB5.
Mankowitz described the shoot in Square Mile writing: ‘They were both in a certain degree of chaos, one as a result of moving out and the other moving in!
‘It all added atmosphere to the series of shots that we did, and we were perfectly happy to work around movers and decorators with Mick enjoying taking the p**s out of this rather cheesy genre of picture story.’
Jagger first moved into the fifth-floor apartment in Harley House with his then girlfriend Chrissie Shrimpton — the younger sister of celebrated Sixties model Jean Shrimpton.
It was supposed to be their first home as newlyweds, but soon after finding the flat, he informed Chrissie that he no longer wanted to get married, just to live with her there.
At Harley House, she had ample time to reflect on this banishment because Mick’s continual absences with the Stones meant that she spent weeks, even months, there alone.
To begin with, he seemed to find the separations as hard as she did, sending her telegrams and writing her ‘hundreds of letters’ during their tours.
Even from distances of thousands of miles, she says, he was ‘very controlling, very paternalistic, very care-taking’.
‘I used to go to the Scotch of St James Club every night when he was away on tour. He arranged for a car to be sent for me at three in the morning, and then he would ring me as soon as I got in to make sure I was there.’
He was rather closer to home when, as the winter of 1966 approached, he had what began as yet another one-night stand following a Stones concert with Ike and Tina Turner in Bristol.
Among the guests backstage was singer Marianne Faithfull, who had first met him two years previously.
Chrissie began to sense that Mick was becoming increasingly remote and strange in his manner towards her.
Still tortured by thoughts of the wedding and babies that might have been, and guilt-ridden over her estrangement from her father, she felt herself perilously near the state that Mick had had such fun with in the Stones’ song 19th Nervous Breakdown.
On December 15 1966, she and Mick were supposed to be going on holiday, but there was no sign of him, and when she phoned his office she discovered that the flights had been cancelled. Even then, she still had no idea by then that he was seeing Marianne Faithfull.
‘I remember thinking “He doesn’t want me, and I can’t live without him”,’ she told in 2012.
Alone at the Harley House flat with her dog, six cats and three songbirds chirruping in the Victorian cage which Mick had bought for her 21st, Chrissie took an overdose of sleeping pills.
‘It wasn’t just attention-seeking or a cry for help,’ she says. ‘I really wanted to die. I thought my life was over.’
Only after Chrissie was released from the hospital, and recuperating at her parents’ home, did she learn from the newspapers about Mick and Marianne.
And when at last she returned to Harley House to collect her possessions, she found the flat’s front-door lock had been changed and she had to telephone the Stones’ office and make an appointment to be allowed in.
Jagger and Faithfull moved out of Harley House in January 1968 and the apartment has for the last 30 years been owned by a Japanese millionaire.
‘He set up a pharmaceutical company in 1990 and he has just retired this year,’ says Ivan Rose, who is representing the seller.
‘It’s his principal residence, but he’s only here three months of the year. He does an awful lot of travelling, and he’s been to every country in the world. He’s had a house built near Tokyo.’
The apartment is access by a gated private road and has been listed for sale by Beauchamp Estates.