Charlie: Our scene is really the recording scene. Producing and writing and playing - trying to keep ahead of the rest. This is much more exciting than the show-business aspect.

Mick: We're at a funny stage. We are just making records and have time to gather our thoughts. It's impossible to do that when you're dashing around all over the place, worried about getting to gigs and things. I don't really know whether it's a good thing or not. I know I didn't enjoy last year very much. I enjoyed the things I did but I didn't enjoy things so much as a whole.

It's true we didn't sell so many discs in England during 1966 as in the previous year, but neither did the other groups. As far as abroad goes, America is okay and we broke the Italian and German markets in 1966. We haven't quietened down. It's madder now than ever before. We couldn't possibly go on doing ballrooms and cinema appearances all the time. All the groups seem to be cooling off in this respect.

I supposed Jeff was one of my best friends, even though he was in another band. When he left the Yardbirds, my group had already wilted and was just about to fold, so that's when we got together.

Some people thought, Oh, you can't go to bass, it's an inferior instrument if you're a guitarist, but it's the other way around. I'm really glad I had that training on bass, because when I went back to guitar I had whole new viewpoint.

(The Rolling Stones will perform q)uite soon. What I want to do is have a show for young people which is not just pop stars comign on stage singing their latest recordings. I want it to include all kinds of acts- a stage show - except at the end we'll go round on a revolving stage, leaping about fro an hour to make up for the Palladium. Oh, and the ice creams will all have acid in them - that's my brother's idea! I suppose we could take an elephant on stage and break that up!

(I was) immediately aware of the split in the band: Mick and Keith together, and Brian, Bill and Charlie on the other side. I found it frustrating to be with somebody who was able to be that passive. I felt Bill should be more outspoken, not put up with as much as he did, and I told him so. He said he tried but didn't get very far.

There's a big knock at the door. Everybody is just sort of gliding down slowly from the whole day of sort of freaking about. Everyone has managd to find their way back to the house. TV is on with the sound off and the record player is on. Strobe lights are flickering. Marianne Faithfull has just decided that she wanted a bath and has wrapped herself up in a rug and is watching the box. Bang bang bang, this big knock at the door and I go to answer it. Oh look, there's lots of little ladies and gentleman outside. He says, Read this, and I'm going, Wha? wha? All right. We were just gliding off from a 12-hour trip. You know how that freaks people out when they walk in on you. 

The vibes were so funny for them. I told one of the women with them they'd brought to seach the ladies, Would you mind stepping off that Moroccan cushion? Because you're ruining the tapestries. We were playing it like that. They tried to get us to turn the record player off but we said, No. We won't turn it off but we'll turn it down. As they went, as they started going out the door, somebody put on Dylan's Rainy Day Women really loud. Everybody must get stoned. And that was it.

The Stones were good targets. We made good copy. It was the idea of degenerative moral standards. They were looking for scapegoats for some sort of generational lifestyle.

(W)e had just started to turn on to acid. Yeah, we had picked it up in America in ‘66, on that last tour in the summer and we came home and just laid back and started to get it on. We had been working for a long time without stopping, without thinking, for along time. For three years. The bust ended it. We knew it was going to be heavy... 

The English are very strange. They're tolerant up to a point where they're told not to be. You get to a point up there where somebody turns around and swings a little finger. They've had it in their hands so long, the power. They haven't been fucked since Cromwell, man. First they don't like young kids with a lot of money. But as long as you don't bother them, that's cool. But we bothered them. We bothered 'em because of the way we looked, the way we'd act. Because we never showed any reverence for them whatsoever. Whereas the Beatles had. They'd gone along with it so far, with the MBEs and shaking hands. Whenever we were asked about things like that we'd say, Fuck it. Don't want to know about things like that. Bullocks. Don't need it. That riled 'em somewhere... 

After the bust everyone's reaction was to get out of England. Although the bust happened in February we weren't charged then. They just took some substances. We weren't even arrested. For a while it was hoped that the lawyers could get the whole thing dropped. In the meantime everybody thought the best idea was to get the fuck out of England so nothing else could happen. We decided to go to Morocco.

I was thinking about this the other day, and I don't  really think I was suited to heavy drug behavior, to be perfectly honest. But I don't mind talking about it. It's hard to believe that you did so many drugs for so long. That's what I find really hard. And I didn't really consider it. You know, it was eating and drinking and taking drugs and having sex. It was just part of life. It wasn't really anything special. It was just a bit of a bore, really. Everyone took drugs the whole time, and you were out of it the whole time. It wasn't a special event... 

All these drugs had tremendous influence on behavior. I think half of starting to take drugs in that early period was to kind of place yourself outside of normal society.

By then I'd given up on Brian. I was disgusted with the way he treated Anita Pallenberg and the way he behaved. I knew there wasn't any possibility of any long-term friendship lasting between Brian, me and Mick. But then Anita had had enough. Besides we were really into each other... (W)ith Brian being in between Anita and I for 10 days we both realized there was something more to it than just a bit of a laugh on the journey... 

Brian nearly didn't make the (European) tour. We weren't talking again. Having been through that before it was like being back to square one, except that now he resented me bitterly for taking his chick.

Mick: I wanted the kids in Poland to have the chance to listen to us. The kids get their records from western European countries, and they hear us on the radio. I'd love to go to Leningrad too.

Keith: Like in Poland, in Warsaw in ' 67. Nearest thing to that Long Beach riot (1965) I ever saw...  We get there, behind the Iron Curtain, do the whole bit, all very uptight. There's army at the airport. Get to the hotel which is very jail-like. Lots of security people about, a lot like America. And it gets even more like America as it goes along. We're invited by the Minister of Culture, on a cultural visit, and we're playing in the Palace of Culture. We get there to do our gig. We go on. Honksi-de-boyski, boysk. Zee Rolling Stones-ki. And who's got the best seats in the house right down front? The songs and daughters of the hierarchy of the Communist Party. They're sitting there with their diamonds and their pearls... and their fingers in their ears. 

About 3 numbers, and I say, Fuckin' stop playing, Charlie. You fuckin' lot, get out and let those bastards in the back down front. So they went. About 4 rows just walked out. All the mamma and daddy's boys. Outside, they've got water cannons... All the cops had white helmets and the big long batons... There were 2000 kids that couldn't get in because of the sons and daughters. They wouldn't have had a riot there if they'd let the kids in. Only later I found out Poland is one of the most corrupt countries in the world. There can't be many bands that have played behind the Iron Curtain.

We had another madness in Greece in early '67. They put us in the Panathinaikos Football Stadium, with the crowds in seats and 3 rows of police, so they weren't allowed to leave the seats. Of course as soon as we started they all poured onto the pitch, running and tackling the cops and they stopped the show about 3 times. And the police were beating them with batons, really viciously. Tom Keylock was with us because he worked for Keith and we had all these big bunches of flowers we were going to distribute but we couln't get them to the crowd. So Keylock says I'll do it. He took two armfuls and jumped offstage and ran and had a fight with the police; they broke his nose or wrist. 

The rest all left for England, while I stayed for a holiday and got stuck there, because two days later there was the military coup - that's probably why the police were so uptight. And then we didn't tour until Hyde Park and America in 1969.

It started coming down heavy for Brian when he got busted for drugs. After that in the next year Brian was out of it. By then it looked like the police were just out to get Brian.

To our surprise (Brian) brought along a sax. I remember him turning up in this big Afghan coat at Abbey Road and he opened up a sax case and we said, We've got a little track here, and so he played sax on it... (I)t's a funny sax solo - it isn't amazingly well played but it happened to be exactly what we wanted, a ropey sax, kind of shaky. Brian was very good like that.

Not at all... We are not old men. We're not worried about petty morals.

I was deathly scared (during the trial). I was much more frightened than Keith. I broke into tears when they said we had to go to jail. I'm like that...

The Times was thrown through the slot in my cell door, and thudded and hit the concrete floor of my cell and I thought, What the fuck is that? I thought, Well, that’s nice, they’re delivering me The Times. I hadn’t had a lot of experience of being in jail. When I read it I realised why they had in fact delivered it to me. The same day I was out.

I don't know (that we were trying to copy the Beatles). I never listened any more to the Beatles than to anyone else in those days when we were working. It's probably more down to the fact that we were going through the same things. Maybe we were doing it a little bit after them. Anyway, we were following them through so many scenes. We're only just mirrors ourselves of that whole thing. It took us much longer to get a record out for us, our stuff was always coming out later anyway. I moved around a lot. And then Anita and I got together and I lay back for a long time... 

There was a time in '67, when everybody just stopped, everything just stopped dead. Everybody was trying to work it out, what was going to go on. So many weird things happened to so many  weird people at one time. America really turned itself round, the kids.... coming together... The only thing I can say, from the Stones' point of view, is that it was the first album we ever made off the road. Because we stopped touring; we just burned up by 1966. We finished Between The Buttons, you know, Let's Spend the Night Together, and boom, we stopped working for like a year and a half. And in that year and a half, we had to make another album. And that was insane - on acid, busted, right? It was like such a fractured business, a total alien way of working to us at the time. So it kind of reflects.

I went to the studio one night and when I arrived at the studio Glyn (Johns) said, The session's canceled, so I said, Oh, what a drag, 'cause it was quite a drive for me, about a 45 minute drive. And he said, Well... got any songs you want to mess around, try and demo and things? Nicky Hopkins was there on keyboards. I'm not sure whether Charlie was there or not. I can't remember. And I said, Yeah, 'cause I'd been messing with this song. It was a bit... what I thought was kind of spacy, you know... a bit kind of Satanic Majesties-like. And psychedelic in a way. 

And he said, We'll have a go at it and I just used those players and next door, in the other studio, were the Small Faces who were recording. And Steve Marriott came in and Ronnie Lane and they sang with me 'cause I just didn't want to sing. So I used that tremolo effect on the voice 'cause I was really uptight about my singing - which I still am. And we just used effects and we tried all kinds of things and it came out quite nice and I went home sort of reasonably satisfied, with an experiment, if you like. And next day I got to the studio and we were just chatting about what we were going to do tonight and Glyn said, Hey, hang on, he said to Mick and Keith and Brian. He said, Hang on, have a listen to this, and put the tape on, played them a rough mix. They said, That's really good, what is it? He said, Bill. He did it yesterday. And so they all liked it and they thought it fitted in so we put it on the album.

Mick: The trial wore me out. It wore my bank balance out. Cost a fortune. The whole thing is sort of a game between different lawyers. Nothing happened. I mean, they put us through a lot of hassle and took a lot of bread off of us...

Keith: (The trial) kind of said, OK, from now on it's heavy. Up till then (pop music) had been show biz, entertainment, play it how you want to, teenyboppers. At that point you knew they considered you to be outside - the're the ones who put you outside the law. Like Dylan says, To live outside the law, you must be honest. They're the ones that decide who lives outside the law. I mean, YOU don't decide, right? You're just living. I mean your laws don't apply to me, nobody says that, because you can't. But they say it. And then you have to decide what you're going to do from then on.

I was there in a flash. Mick and I really hit it off really well from then... (I)t was the first time I really met Keith... He was at the studio, listening to a freshly laid-down track. I grabbed a drink, took a sip and went over to say hi. I just approached him, I stumbled a little and poured my drink on him. We laughed it off and cracked on. The manner in which our relationship started pre-empted how it would go on. (From Ronnie.)

At some stage (the band) realized that Andrew (Oldham)'s ideas on producing were only ideas he'd got from them in the first place. There must have been some sort of bust-up with Andrew 'cause all of a sudden they really wanted to get rid of him. Before they started Satanic Majesties a lot of time was booked at Olympic. Andrew was supposed to be there as producer. And he was there only in a literal sense. We went in and played a lot of blues just as badly as we could. Andrew just walked out. At the time I didn't understand what was going on. They were probably a bit fed up with Oldham wanting to be the record producer and not really producing.

He's a brilliant guy, actually, Andrew. And if it were not for him, I don't think the Stones would've gotten to where they are now. They WOULD have made it no matter what. I mean, there would have been a group exactly like the Rolling Stones and they would have been as good as the Rolling Stones, whether Brian and I existed on the face of this earth or not. But they would've probably, if not for the careful handling of the group by Andrew, burned themselves out in two or three years by playing too much. Andrew was very careful about the exposure and image of the group. He only slipped up when he tried to be a record producer.

Although I was strongly against drugs for myself, I was put in a vulnerable position by the pushers who were constantly around the band - in the studios, on the tour in dressing-rooms, hotels, planes, cars... I had to keep aware because if the cops did bust us I would have been thrown in jail together with the rest of them, as would Charlie. And who would believe that we weren't involved?... I accepted that if I was in the band, it was something that had to be tolerated. But they wouldn't lift a finger to help me in my family situation... So the "separatism" built up... I hardly socialized with the others for ten years from about 1967.

I was happy (when the album was finished). I breathed a sigh of relief because we had finally finished it. It's just there to take it or leave it... I'm very conscious of the fact that it doesn't reflect (our arrests) in any of the songs. That they aren't all about policemen as they could well have been... 

Mick: Satanic Majesties had interesting things on it, but I don't think any of the songs are very good. It's a bit like Between The Buttons. It's a sound experience, really, rather than a song experience. There's 2 good songs on it: She's A Rainbow, and 2000 Light Years from Home. The rest of them are nonsense... I think we were just taking too much acid. We were just getting carried away, just thinking anything you did was fun and everyone should listen to it. The whole thing we were on acid...

Satanic Majesties was the mood of the time. You can't play or write outside the mood of the times, unless you live on a mountain... In those times it was flowers, beads and stars on your face, that's what it was. In fact, I'm rather fond of that album, and I wouldn't mind doing something like that again... (W)e were just obviously out to lunch. I'm saying this because I just heard it recently and realized how much I liked it. What surprised me was the comedic feeling and all the jokes and things we'd never dream of doing now.

Keith: It's so unbelievable. It was so weird to make an album and not be on the road that it was totally UNLIKE recording. I liked a few songs, like 2000 Light Years, Citadel and She's a Rainbow, but basically I thought the album was a load of crap. That album was made under the pressure of the court cases and the whole scene that was going on in London at that time.