Under Their Thumb

This unassuming but highly readable memoir portrays the Rolling Stones over a period which has never much appealed to rock’s literati. When Bill German began producing his fan’s newsletter, Beggars Banquet, in 1978 while he was still at high school in Brooklyn, the Stones’ death-and-glory years were over. The big career-defining moments - Brian Jones’s drowning, Altamont, the Exile On Main Street album and the orgiastic American tour which followed it – had all happened and been written up.

This unassuming but highly readable memoir portrays the Rolling Stones over a period which has never much appealed to rock’s literati. When Bill German began producing his fan’s newsletter, Beggars Banquet, in 1978 while he was still at high school in Brooklyn, the Stones’ death-and-glory years were over. The big career-defining moments - Brian Jones’s drowning, Altamont, the Exile On Main Street album and the orgiastic American tour which followed it – had all happened and been written up.