In the spring of 1971, the Rolling Stones did something that rock bands rarely do: they fled their country for tax reasons and accidentally made the greatest album of their career. The British government was threatening high earners with a 93% tax rate, and the Stones' accountants delivered a simple message: Leave England. Within weeks, the band had scattered across the South of France, and one of rock and roll's most legendary chapters had begun.
 |
| ©Dominique Tarlé |
Keith Richards found the villa. Set on a promontory above the bay of Villefranche-sur-Mer, Villa Nellcôte was a Belle Époque mansion of 16 rooms, marble Ionic columns, and gardens dense enough to guarantee privacy. Richards rented it for around $2,500 a month. He described the upstairs as being like Versailles. The basement, where the music would actually get made, was something else entirely. "Down there," he said, "it was Dante's Inferno."
The villa had a dark history. During the Nazi occupation of France, it had served as the local Gestapo headquarters, and the heating vents were still decorated with gold swastikas when the Stones moved in. This detail alone gives some sense of the surreal quality of the whole enterprise.
The other band members dispersed across the region. Charlie Watts settled his family in Arles. Bill Wyman took a house in Vence, near Nice. Mick Taylor was in Grasse, just inland from Cannes. Mick Jagger shuttled between Paris and hotels along the coast before eventually renting a place in Biot, an ancient walled town overlooking the Mediterranean. They were not so much a band as a diaspora, converging on Nellcôte when the music demanded it. The recording of what became ‘Exile on Main St.’ was less a studio process than a prolonged house party that occasionally produced music.
The Stones' mobile recording unit was driven down from England and parked outside, running cables through the windows into the basement. The lights cut out regularly. The equipment malfunctioned. There were, according to various accounts, regular small fires.
Guests arrived and never quite left. John Lennon is said to have been among them. French photographer Dominique Tarlé moved in for the duration and documented the whole spectacle with extraordinary intimacy, his photographs capturing a world of children running through grand rooms, musicians half-asleep over their instruments, and the particular quality of Mediterranean light falling through shuttered windows onto chaos. Richards' drug supply was maintained through connections with the Corsican underworld based in Marseille. The French police had the villa under surveillance for most of the summer. After the Stones departed for Jamaica to continue recording, a warrant was issued for their arrest on drug charges. All the other band members testified it was Keith's house and none of the charges stuck, though the episode ensured that France was not a country any of them were keen to return to professionally.
Out of all this came a double album of raw, deeply American music: blues, gospel, soul, and rock mixed with a looseness that felt like the opposite of the controlled studio work the band had been doing. *Tumbling Dice*, *Rocks Off*, *Happy*, *Sweet Virginia*: songs that sounded like they had been excavated rather than composed, dragged out of the humidity and the chaos of those basement sessions. The South of France, paradoxically, does not much feature in the music itself. *Exile* is an album obsessed with America, with the Delta blues and the honky-tonks riffs that Keith Richards had been consuming since adolescence. The Riviera backdrop seems to have worked as a kind of pressure cooker, disconnecting the band from their English identity and their American touring machine, leaving them with nothing but each other and the music they had grown up with.
Villa Nellcôte was sold in 2006 to a Russian buyer for a reported $128 million. The new owners declined to allow the 2010 documentary *Stones in Exile* to film there. It sits behind its gates on the Avenue Louise Bordes, inaccessible to the pilgrims who still make their way to Villefranche. The address is known. The rest is behind closed doors.
The summer of 1971 on the Côte d'Azur remains one of those episodes in rock history that has grown into myth precisely because it was so unlikely. A band of tax exiles, scattered across Provence and the Riviera, finding their way each day to a crumbling mansion above a perfect bay, and making, in the most improbable circumstances, something that has lasted.