By Philip Norman
Certain cities are for ever twinned with great pop stars, usually as the scenes of their childhoods or their first musical inspiration. One cannot mention Liverpool without picturing The Beatles, or Memphis without lamenting the tragedy of Elvis Presley.
But it’s for somewhat different reasons that the spirit of The Rolling Stones haunts Marrakech. The Stones discovered Morocco in the mid-Sixties, lured by the ‘anything goes’ atmosphere that had fascinated the British since Casablanca lit up our cinema screens during the Second World War.
Keith Richards
Moroccan magic: Marrakech was a playground for the likes of Keith Richards (and girlfriend Anita Pallenberg)
Marrakech became the band’s favourite bolthole from the outrage they had unleashed in Europe with their disgracefully long hair (as it seemed then) and raw, sexy music.
There they could escape their persecutors and fans alike, strutting around in hooded djellabas and Berber jewellery, plundering the souk for carpets and ornaments to fill their mansions, and, above all, gobbling down the drugs that were openly available on every street corner.
It was in Marrakech that The Stones tried in vain to seek refuge during the worst crisis of their career.
In February 1967, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had been arrested for drug possession by police in Britain and were awaiting a trial that would become the most notorious of the decade, and end with both men being jailed.
The trip to Morocco was meant to be a respite before the screaming headlines of the approaching (and, for them, misnamed) ‘summer of love’. Instead, the band’s unstable lead guitarist, Brian Jones, beat up his model girlfriend Anita Pallenberg so savagely that she dumped him for Keith, and the two decamped back to Britain in Keith’s Bentley.
Another band, Crosby, Stills And Nash, would later celebrate the city in a song, Marrakech Express.
But for The Stones at that moment, it looked like an expressway to oblivion. No one foresaw them becoming the most enduring of all rock bands, a national treasure about to celebrate their 50th anniversary – yet still somehow exuding the same whiff of lawlessness in their late 60s as in their early 20s.
Marrakech
All a-swirl: Although firmly on the tourist map, Marrakech has an authentic atmosphere
Despite being The Stones’ biographer, I’d never followed their trail to Marrakech until last autumn, coincidentally just after finishing my new book about Mick Jagger.
Previously, my only taste of Morocco had been in the Seventies on a so-called safari: 18 people, mostly Australians and New Zealanders, crammed into the back of a Ford Transit. It was a gruesome expedition on which our Aussie driver bypassed most places of interest, such as exquisite Fez, in his eagerness to reach the next bar. I suffered food poisoning and a throat infection, both picked up in the Marrakech flophouse where we stayed.
So if this article seems to strike an inappropriately upmarket note, remember that I’ve paid my dues.
My trip was delayed for several months after the Arab Spring spread its heady pro-democracy message along this stretch of North Africa’s coast collectively known as the Maghreb. It brought regime change to Libya, caused major upheavals in Tunisia and Egypt and, for a time, seemed to have lit a fuse in Morocco.
Then the country’s canny young ruler, King Mohammed VI, promised constitutional reforms that seemed to stop the insurgency dead, without bloodshed. Consequently, while Marrakech’s kasbah still has its old alluring whiff of intrigue, its streets are calm and safe.
As with so many other places recently, I wondered why I had stayed away so long. For this is a fascinating country with its mix of Arab and French, seasoned, as in a tagine pot, with the indigenous cultures of Berber and nomadic Tuareg, and the lingering legacy of Spain.
Philip Norman
Unashamed luxury: After roughing it on his first trip to Marrakech, Philip was happy to sample its luxury side
Its three most renowned cities (mixing cultures yet again) are like insalata tricolore: blanca the white, Fez the green and Marrakech the red. Only, it’s more rose than burnt sienna, with a pervasive laid-back quality that seems more European than Arab or African. There’s none of the relentless, exhausting crowd pressure one feels in Delhi or Cairo. Everyone seems to have room to breathe.
Six decades after gaining independence, Marrakech remains pungently French with its pavement cafes, bistros and ubiquitous ‘bonjour’ and ‘pardon’ I asked a young woman why memories of French old colonial rule hadn’t been ritually obliterated, as the young Muammar Gaddafi removed every trace of the Italians from Libya. She replied that French and Moroccan culture were too closely intertwined. Or, as she expressed it: ‘How could we pull the moon and stars down out of the sky?’
It was not only rock stars who fell under the spell of traditional Moroccan art and design. It was also inspirational to the French fashion designer Yves St Laurent, especially the luscious Berber blue.
St Laurent is remembered in a garden originally created by French painter Jacques Majorelle, which the designer and his partner, Pierre Berge, bought as an adjunct to their Marrakech home in 1962.
Here among the giant palms and couture-elegant cacti, and flashes of brilliant blue ceramic, St Laurent’s ashes were scattered after his death in 2008; here he is remembered in a column of Carrera marble as simple and elegant as one of his own mannequins.
Remembering the troubled life of that eternally boyish genius, one feels glad that there was a place where he found some real happiness.
This time around, no seedy flophouse or drunken Aussies and Kiwis for me. I stayed at La Mamounia, Morocco’s most renowned hotel, set in a grove of 400-year-old olive trees just outside Marrakech’s rose- coloured ramparts, with the snow-covered Atlas Mountains shimmering on the horizon.
La Mamounia, Marrakech
Courting popularity: La Mamounia is long established as Marrakech’s finest hotel
Built in 1923, La Mamounia was a celebrity magnet long before the Rolling Stones era. Winston Churchill discovered it after his 1943 Casablanca summit with American President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and returned often to paint.
Charles de Gaulle slept here, too, in a bed specially built to accommodate his 6ft 5in frame. The hotel featured in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1956 thriller The Man Who Knew Too Much (the one where Doris Day sings Que Sera Sera) and its avian population, on eagle-eyed watch for morning breakfast trays, is said to have inspired Hitchcock’s masterpiece The Birds.
Mick Jagger also became a regular in later years, after he had ceased to be rock’s number one bad boy and become the darling of international high society.
La Mamounia reopened recently after a three-year £100 million facelift – something that Jagger and Richards could both use nowadays. The relaunch party was the starriest Marrakech has seen for years, with guests including Robert De Niro and Jennifer Aniston, and a performance by Cirque du Soleil.
The old Art Deco interior that Churchill and de Gaulle knew has been swept away by super-trendy French interior designer Jacques Garcia, who was previously responsible for Paris’s Hotel Costes and the revamped Ronnie Scott’s Club in London.
Garcia’s signature red plush and flickering candles are blended with traditional Moroccan and Andalucian touches using local materials such as unmistakable green tiles from Fez.
The subterranean spa is the most beautiful I’ve ever seen, with its avenues of glowing lanterns and a Berberblue steam room. In common with a tiny constellation of five-star hotels across the world, such as the Leela Palace in New Delhi or Paris’s Mandarin Oriental, the new La Mamounia is faultless.
Simply entering or leaving is an aesthetic experience, as twin sets of coloured glass doors in turn are opened with a perfectly choreographed movement by pairs of white-robed doormen.
From La Mamounia, it’s just a short walk along the rose-coloured avenues to central Marrakech, though be warned: crossing roads is even more hair-raising than in Rome when the Vespas are swarming.
La Mamounia, Marrakech
Back to its best: The hotel reopened two years ago after a considerable refit
Despite the longtime erotic vibration in its name, the kasbah i s merely the city’s old residential area, while the souk is its market. The day I visited the souk, it could almost have been designed by Jacques Garcia, with help from Yves St Laurent, as sunlight streamed through its slatted roof, covering everyone and everything in couture-ish black and gold stripes
