Heightened Moments and the Rolling Stones
This isn’t really a Wooden Boat Story. The best connection I can make is to imagine Mick and Keith looking out on the Classic Yacht fleet below in the Harbour of Villefranch, from their balcony at the Villa Nellcote.
Mick Jagger & Keith Richards, Villa Nellcote, Villefranche sur Mer, 1971 (©DOMINIQUE TARLÉ/ LA GALERIE DE L'INSTANT
Most of us will remember a time in our lives when our senses were heightened, the light seemed clearer, the smells more intense and the music was filled with personal meaning. These moments are rare and special, perhaps addictively so.
Some seek out moments like these with the aid of alcohol or drugs, or by venturing beyond daily comforts into dangerous situations. Perhaps this is what mountaineers hope to find at the summit. And perhaps falling in love is just a variation on this need.
In the small and tidy seaside town of Le Lavandou, on the south coast of France, finding intense clarity of emotion, seemed unlikely, as the middle-class retirees play pétanque in the shell grit strip outside the waterfront cafes, their magnetised strings dangling from a pocket, saving knees from pressure and tight hamstrings from exhaustion, ready to pick up a boule to save a back from too much bending. Rock and Roll music is not on their minds.
But if you venture a few hundred meters inland to an understated civic building you will find a small exhibition of documentary photographs that tell a story of a different time on this storied coast.
Fifty five years ago the biggest rock band in the world, the Rolling Stones, had a tax problem. Their solution was to flee to the South of France. Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman and Mick Taylor were joined by a young photographer Dominique Tarlé who had known the band for a few years in London. He was invited to photograph for a day, and ended up staying for six months. (there’s a useful piece of advice in that story for any budding photographer…Don’t be annoying!)
Tarlé’s record of that summer exemplifies what great documentary photograph can achieve. The photographs on display at Le Lavendou are steeped in emotion and sensuality, inviting the viewer to be part of this apocryphal era, showing not telling, and they oozing authenticity, something so rare in today’s world of AI generation and image manipulation.
Keith Richards & Mick Jagger, Villa Nellcote, Villefranche-sur-Mer, 1971 (©DOMINIQUE TARLÉ/ LA GALERIE DE L'INSTANT)
Standing in front of the large images I can smell the sweat and cigarette smoke, hear the amplifier’s feedback and raucous chords and feel an atmosphere charged with sexual tension.
Dominique Tarlé became the only photographer ever to live with this legendary band, at the height of their career, during the creation of the legendary album Exile on Main Street. He recorded the mundane and the sublime in the Villa Nellcote, rented by Keith Richards, overlooking Villefranche-sur-mer. It must have been an unforgettable summer, leaving its mark on the photographer’s life and the history of rock’n’roll.
Mick Jagger & Keith Richards, Villa Nellcote, Villefranche sur Mer, 1971 (©DOMINIQUE TARLÉ/ LA GALERIE DE L'INSTANT)
Songs from Exile on Main St have reverberated through the last five decades. Listening to the music today, having witnessed the large, mostly black and white prints reminds me how rare the extreme creative talent, which gave birth to these songs, must be.
Dominique Tarle: Rolling Stones, Croque Monsieur
But it also made me think that those of us with even a modicum of creativity need to occasionally get out of our own way. We need to allow ourselves to disengage from the mores of acceptable behaviour in order to explore what it is, we might be able to achieve.
I’m not suggesting we should all quit our jobs and go and do drugs in the South of France, but one thing I did learn from this beautiful exhibition is that conformity is the enemy of creativity.
Keith Richards, Villa Nellcote, Villefranche-sur-Mer, 1971 (©DOMINIQUE TARLÉ/ LA GALERIE DE L'INSTANT)