The hidden tapes of Anita Pallenberg: Fear, self-loathing and an affair with Mick Jagger

Marlon Richards doesn’t mince words. When the son of Keith Richards has, on occasion, gone on YouTube and seen nasty comments about his mother, Anita Pallenberg, on Rolling Stones-related clips, he has answered them in no uncertain terms. “I say, ‘This is me and you have no idea what you’re talking about,’” he tells me via Zoom from his home in West Sussex. “To comment on someone’s personal life with all that judgement is hurtful to everyone they know. I would really like them to see that Anita wasn’t who they assumed she was.”

Now, he finally has the chance to make that case via a new documentary titled Catching Fire. At nearly two hours, the film offers a far fuller and more nuanced picture of Keith Richards’s most famous, glamorous and notorious girlfriend of the Sixties and Seventies than has been presented by any previous depiction. At the same time, the film includes scenes that might only reinforce the judgements some have of her. As Pallenberg herself wrote a few years before her death in 2017, at the age of 75, “I’ve been called a witch, a slut and a murderer. I’ve been hounded by the police and slandered in the press. But I don’t need to settle scores. I’m reclaiming my soul.”

Those defiant lines appear in a loosely constructed and never-published memoir that lends the documentary its focus and gives it a scoop. Richards discovered the manuscript in Pallenberg’s London apartment after she died. “I had no idea she’d been writing this,” he says. “She was very much like that – quite devious.”