"It's quite a long story because it ended up with a movie but it started off as a tour idea." "And I think..." "Ronnie Lane and I used to hang out in our neighborhood in Richmond in the west of London, and there's a studio here called Olympic in Barnes." "One day we got to talking, Mick, Ronnie and I, at Olympic." "Ronnie and I had done some backing vocals for a demo for the Stones, and we started to talk about..." "I had these visions of Rock And Roll going on and being almost like some great installation sculpture." "Ronnie had this vision of Rock And Roll being something that traveled around in tents and wagons." "And Mick was into the idea of perpetual touring." "The triangle was gonna be The Who, the Stones and The Faces." "Rod Stewart never got in the loop." "He may have been unkeen on the idea." "But it was to create a circus that could travel all around America." "Mick got Chip Monck " "M-O-N-C-K, I think it was spelt, who was a theater designer and lighting designer, he designed one of the first big stages for the Stones - to do a draft proposal for the acquisition of a Barnum and Bailey circus tent," "trucks, and railway rolling stock." "And we planned to do this big tour." "We had a meeting in LA, me and Mick had a meeting with Chip, and it got really exciting and obviously we were gonna film it." "And what actually caused it to collapse was the fact that the railway track then in America was only used for goods and commercial, it wasn't passengers anymore." "The track was so slow, the trains could only travel, in some places for up to 200 or 300 miles, at a maximum of four to six miles an hour." "So it would've been very tedious to sit on the train, whether or not it had a cinema, an operating theater, a school and a recording studio, all of which were in Chip's grand vision." "It would've made the most fantastic movie." "Anyway, it was dumped, and Mick went on to drive forward this idea of doing a film which was kind of just about the idea, just the idea of turning..." "So some of what you see in the Rock And Roll Circus TV show has a real Ronnie Lane feel about it, and what Ronnie Lane went on to do with his band Slim Chance which was to take out a circus tent on the road," "was a realization of some of those ideas." "A Quick One was not my first attempt at a song cycle but it was the first one that really worked." "I'd done a bunch." "I'd worked with this guy Speedy Keen who went on to become famous for writing... the epic song Something In The Air, which I produced." "It was Kit Lambert my manager's birthday and we did this spoof, like a Verdi spoof, Italian opera, called Gratis Amatis" " Free Love." "Played it to Kit and he loved it as a joke." "But afterwards he said, "This is very interesting." ""I know it's a parody and it's silly" ""but it's also very interesting." ""Have you thought about doing something like this?"" "He said, "We need to knock something up" ""to put on The Who's album, a ten-minute short."" "So I knocked up A Quick One." "I did it as a series of very short little..." "almost phrases." "I suppose it's really a story about child abuse." "A young girl carried... put in the safety..." "What do you call it?" "The care of an engine driver, or guard, on a train." "I was talking to my mum, I'd sent my son to Cornwall on the train, she said, "You can't send a young boy..."" "I said, "He's 14, he's with a friend." "Anyway, you used to do it to me."" "I suddenly realized I used to do these train journeys from London to Westgate where my grandmother lived in the care of the guard." "So I think that was inspired by that, this feeling of unease at being in the care of a guy in a railway carriage for two or three hours as it was then." "But then the feeling of betrayal, forgiveness, and then in some way at the end, the beginning of a sense of an emergent spiritual journey which I suppose I was just about on the cusp of." "Around the time, maybe six months after this was finished," "I discovered through my friend Mike Mclnnerney, who was the artist who did the Tommy album cover, the teachings of Indian mystic Meher Baba," "I've been following him since then, and then Tommy came out." "So it came from really wanting to fill up a hole on a record and all those other things." "This is just pre-Tommy, isn't it?" "We were probably a bit frightened, career-wise." "We were fairly green round the gills still." "We hadn't really..." "We were great live but I think this was probably shortly after we'd been to Australia." "So the piece that we played, the mini-opera, had become almost a model," "I started to get this sense of the shape of it being a model for something that might work on stage for The Who with this thing I was working on called Tommy." "The thing at the end, "You are forgiven, you are forgiven,"" "building in intensity, which I took over, when we played this in Australia, I'd become a bit of a star, because that was the bit that I did." "We were being berated so much in the press in Australia at the time, 1968, that me singing, "You are forgiven,"" "was almost like I was forgiving the Australians for treating us so badly." "I remember it pretty well, it was a really exciting day." "I love Michael Lindsay-Hogg who directed it," "I've always loved him, he's always been such a great supporter of my work." "He also made what I think was the first definitive pop video for The Who called Happy Jack, which had a story, and possibly one of the first of its type." "The way that Mick had put the band together..." "Sorry, put the guests together." "It wasn't just about music that he liked, it was about people that he wanted to spend the day with to some extent." "So I felt flattered that we were invited." "Taj Mahal, Mick and I were both huge fans of." "We'd just discovered his music around that time." "So I was glad he was on." "I actually love the bit where..." "People don't like it cos they don't understand Yoko but I love the bit where they're doing the..." "I can't remember what the band was called, the band with Lennon and Eric and Yoko, and she starts to wail." "It's just..." "There's a kind of an irony in it, there really is an irony in it." "What do we have today?" "We don't have Yoko but we have The Darkness." "It's roughly the same thing really except that Yoko has a brain and The Darkness have spandex trousers and an incredibly arch and astute sense of show-business marketing." "I had a chat with her that day," "I remember talking to her because she'd been involved with Gustav Metzger." "She'd created, around the year before, something called the Symposium for Destruction in Art" "with Gustav Metzger and a couple of other people I can't remember." "She was very important in that area for me, this is my post-art-school stuff." "Hearing her wailing away," "I thought, Eric Clapton and John Lennon together, and she's wailing, it was just..." "It's great in a way." "Only she could get away with it." "Marianne was great too." "I think Marianne was great because we hadn't realized what teeth this girl had." "We just thought..." "We'd done some shows with her as a pop star and sat backstage taking the piss, really, cos she was beautiful and gorgeous but taking the piss because she seemed to be a blonde airhead." "Suddenly there she was, Mick Jagger's girlfriend, and I think we all suddenly realized then that she had teeth and presence and power." "When she sat in the middle of the floor to do her song, I turned to Keith and went, "Fucking hell, look at that."" "She was just so transcendentally beautiful." "And self-possessed." "And was very sweet to me all day, so it was probably good that my girlfriend wasn't there." "If you watch this today you definitely get a sense that something strange is going on for the Stones." "Mick has just come out of doing his role in Performance." "He had the stigma of the dyed black hair but you could see that he'd been through something quite strange but also empowering." "I think probably what you can also see is that Mick had the ability to tap some kind of power..." "It's four o'clock in the morning, he's spent the whole day trying to rebuild Brian, who was crying," "Keith was yellow from the various substances that he was on," "I mean bright fucking yellow, and when he wasn't yellow, he was green." "It's four o'clock in the morning, they've spent the whole day trying to do all these things, it must've been exhausting." "I was completely shattered." "We'd just done our little set sometime during the day." "When you see the film, you see that Mick engages the camera and stays on it with absolute concentration." "It was about two solid hours of shooting and he never let up." "So there was this strange element from him that he'd been empowered in some way." "He was always a very charismatic performer but had been given some new gift from outside." "It's almost like he was a different guy." "Brian's sitting by the stage with tears in his eyes." "Keith is pretending it isn't happening." "But Keith's got a heart, he knew what was happening." "I think we all knew that this was Brian's last performance." "We didn't know he would die shortly afterwards but we knew that this was the end of him and the Stones." "But time has definitely..." "You can now see that The Who was just about adrenaline and... that's it." "With the Stones we're seeing them in an incredibly interesting moment in their career." "I love the performance." "I like it in retrospect and I loved it at the time." "I really enjoyed it." "You can see me in the audience having a whale of a time." "Partly because I was drunk, partly cos I was sitting right behind Marianne Faithfull" "and partly because I was, still am, such a fan." "It was so great to be there." "I stayed to the very last minute." "I also felt that we had to stay." "What I said earlier about this idea, the Circus being something that we shared, it was the realization of something that I'd thought a lot about." "Yeah, I was having a good time." "I loved it, I loved the whole day, I just wanted to stay." "And I suppose..." "I don't know what I was drinking." "I remember there being a shortage of booze." "It was four o'clock in the morning, we couldn't go out to the off license, and there wasn't a bar." "A lot of the drunkenness could be playacting." "When the film didn't come out, I remember thinking, "Wow." ""They control their own career."" "I was quite impressed because it must have cost a lot of money." "But I was impressed by the fact that they had the right and the ability to do that." "I don't know that I felt that that was something that we had at the time." "It was something that we became used to, subsequently." "My strongest memories of the whole thing is definitely Mick's performance, singing, definitely that." "He reminds me of a Picasso." "I know that might seem an incredible, pretentious extrapolation but I say that because he's artistically capable of incredible concentration." "But also, as a businessman and an organizer and a rallier of people around him and a supporter of people around him and a user of people around him, he's both ruthless" "and responsible." "And incredibly hardworking." "On that day, you saw him... he must have been on his last pennyworth of energy." "Watch him." "Singing that song at the very end, he is still totally, completely, 100% on the ball." "Looking at the camera, at you and I on the other side of that camera 30 years on." "That's..." "That's a measure of..." "I was gonna say that's a measure of a great artist." "There are some people that have difficulty... dealing with the use of the word art or artistry or artist in the context of rock music." "Fuck 'em." "Just fuck 'em, fuck 'em, fuck 'em, fuck 'em to death and hell and beyond." "That day was an absolute testament to the fact that from the chaos, the drugs, the absurdity, the flippancy, the pretentiousness, the irony, the artistic extravagances of all the people involved... the vanity, the vacuity," "the shallowness, the emptiness, the addictive petulance, all of this stuff... the self-obsession..." "What actually came out of it is that... one person in the middle of it, who was the driving focus of it, was able to look into a camera and talk to you and I directly." "What you see with The Who is you see The Who doing their little set piece." "We're not doing it for you, we're doing it for us and our fans." "When you watch The Who, it's almost like watching them sideways, they're going from there to there." "When you watch Mick, it's coming right at you." "A lot of my respect for Mick was crystallized around that time." "I ceased to be a fan and a fancier, if you like, of what Mick represented," "and much more of somebody that thought, "Fuck, this is pretty big."" "That was the moment for me, anyway, watching him and thinking..." "I remember I was sailing a little bit myself." "I kept thinking, "How's he still doing this?" ""And why is it so important to him?"" "Then you see the movie and it's not about it being important, it's just this is what he does." "It's like somebody saying, "Picasso used to get up at six, paint till 12," ""then have lunch and fuck a girl." ""Then he would paint till six, go to bed..."" "and did it every day, that's the reason why there's so much Picasso all over the place." "He was incredibly prolific." "The Stones are incredibly prolific, both as recording artists and performers." "They're very, very driven by Mick in this respect and you see a sign of it there." "When you watch it now, it's a documentary, it's a comment on the time." "I hope it stimulates people to do more." "Cos this stuff's always gonna be good to look at 30 years on."