Folky blues (no punk) with gastropub veteran

CHRIS Jagger has turned his hand to acting, songwriting and fashion throughout his career but he will be focusing on the music when he comes to the Crooked Billet next month.

As the younger brother of Rolling Stones frontman, Mick Jagger, he also experienced the height of the Swinging Sixties, deferring his drama course at Manchester University.

“I’m still on my gap year,” says Chris, who lives in Somerset with his wife, Kari-Ann Muller, with whom he has five sons,
14 grandchildren “and a few extras” and one great grandchild.

“The Sixties were quite interesting because there was a lot of crossover with music, art, design, fashion, the whole thing.

“You didn’t have to be professionally trained, you just had to try and work out your ideas and put them into action.

“Having done A levels, the thought of suddenly going to university and reading more Shakespeare didn’t somehow appeal to me for some reason.

“The funny thing was that I did actually come back to the theatre in the late Seventies, which was during the punk period, which was a really bad time to be a musician if you weren’t a punk. I was already
26 and way too old to be a punk.

“At that point the punks were quite fascist, they trashed everybody who wasn’t a punk so if you were playing jazz or folk or rock ’n’ roll or blues, you were trashed, you were just seen as totally irrelevant. They were quite nasty about it, you couldn’t get arrested playing that music.

“So I did some plays up and down the country, up to the Glasgow Citizens and Nottingham Playhouse and some other places and a bit of telly and all that sort of rubbish. But it’s very hard to make a decent living out of acting unless you’re one of the 0.001 per cent who become successful, so that kind of petered out.

“I remember Equity minimum when I was at the Glasgow Citizens was £40 a week and a train ticket to Glasgow was £16. That was nearly half of your wages to go on the train, so you had to be prepared to starve.

“The first play I ever did was a Noël Coward play that had never been produced and the first line I ever gave in what they called ‘legitimate theatre, darling’ in those days was to the equally unknown actor called Pierce Brosnan. The other friend I had that did quite well is Ciarán Hinds. I was in a few plays with Ciarán. That theatre was a good training ground.

“I came back to playing music after the punk thing subsided. I’m still, for my sins, playing a bit of music here and there even though I’m getting very old.

“The one reason is, you don’t need any proper qualifications, because I don’t really have any proper qualifications still.”

Chris released his memoirs, Talking to Myself, four years ago, alongside his album Mixing Up the Medicine, with the single Anyone Seen My Heart? which featured older brother Mick.

When he comes to the Crooked Billet, he will be accompanied by Elliet Mackrell, Dave Hatfield and Charlie Hart.

“I’ve got Dave on double bass, Elliet on the fiddle and we’ve got Charlie joining us, who I’ve known since I was 19 or something. Charlie plays accordion, piano and he even plays fiddle as well.

“So it’s going to be acoustic, we’ll be making the usual musical mayhem at the Billet.

“I haven’t been there for ages. We always used to play in the tiny restaurant and then after we played — and it could be the middle of winter or something — everyone cleared out. It is idiosyncratic to say the least. I’ve been playing there for must be 20 years or more off and on.”

He used to visit former Beatle George Harrison at Friar Park in “Henley-on-Toast, as George used to call it.

“I once visited him there with Eric Idle, it was quite hilarious. A funny coincidence was that in the Seventies, the band that I had then, we toured America and did some other gigs, the drummer was a guy called John Halsey, who played Ringo in the Rutles with Neil Innes and all that lot. He used to play with Viv Stanshall and I think ‘Legs’ Larry Smith used to live in George’s house at the gate or something.

“I did know George a little bit, the last time I saw George was at Dave Gilmour’s 50th birthday party at Fulham town hall.

“They brought on a tribute band, the Bootleg Beatles and I stood next to George and I thought, what the hell’s he going to make of this?

“He didn’t really pass any comment much, but then he said, ‘He’s playing the wrong chord there’, which was typical George. It must have been a bit weird for him watching it.

“He was the Beatle I got on best with because I’ve been to India and I studied some Indian music so we had that in common. I met all the Beatles one way or another.

“I once saw the Beatles playing live, but I can’t say that I heard them. I must have been about 16 or 17 or something.

“What’s quite good about folk music and rock ’n’ roll is, you just have a go and it’s your enthusiasm and your interest that comes across.”

l Chris Jagger and friends play the Crooked Billet in Newlands Lane, Stoke Row, on Tuesday, November 25. Tickets cost £33 as a music cover charge. For more information, call (01491) 681048 or visit thecrookedbillet.co.uk