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.”

 

Mick Jagger Year by Year

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