Michael Joseph, a room full of animals and the photographs behind Beggars Banquet
Imagine trying to photograph The Rolling Stones.
Now add a goat.
A sheep.
A cat.
Three dogs.
A suckling pig.
Stuffed animals.
Several bottles of claret.
And give yourself two hours.
That was more or less the situation photographer Michael Joseph found himself in on June 7, 1968, when The Rolling Stones arrived at Sarum Chase in Hampstead for what would become one of the most extraordinary photographic sessions of their career.
The photographs were intended for their new album.
Beggars Banquet.
Welcome to the banquet
Sarum Chase was no ordinary house.
The vast neo-Tudor mansion in Hampstead had once belonged to painter Frank O. Salisbury, and its dramatic interiors already felt more like a film set than a London home.
Stylist Jackie Crier transformed the space further.
When Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman arrived, they found an elaborate banquet waiting for them.
The band were dressed in a mixture of ragged historical costumes, somewhere between Dickens, Commedia dell’Arte and late-1960s London.
Around the table were food, wine, stuffed animals and a small collection of very much alive animals.
Michael Joseph was waiting with a large-format Sinar camera.
And a megaphone.
How do you direct The Rolling Stones and six animals?
Joseph had only around two hours for the first day's shoot.
Working with a large-format camera meant that this was not a case of firing hundreds of frames and hoping something worked.
Each photograph required preparation.
And then there were the animals.
Fortunately, Michael had recently photographed a group of dogs for an advertising campaign and had discovered a useful technique.
Noise.
He began making strange sounds through a megaphone to get the animals to look in the right direction.
It worked.
According to Michael:
“Luckily the Stones also behaved likewise!”
The result is visible in the photographs.
The band do not look stiff or overly directed. They are eating, drinking, laughing, playing with the animals and generally behaving as if someone really had invited The Rolling Stones to the world's strangest dinner party.
Mick and the chicken
Some of the best photographs from the day happened away from the formal group arrangement.
Mick Jagger holds a chicken.
Keith Richards sits with a pug.
The band crowd towards Michael's camera.
Animals wander through the frame.
The whole session feels beautifully uncontrolled.
But behind that apparent chaos was a photographer who knew exactly what he was doing.
Joseph was using a large-format camera, elaborate lighting and carefully constructed compositions. He simply allowed enough disorder into the scene for the pictures to feel alive.
The result is very different from a conventional band portrait.
It is theatrical.
Funny.
Slightly decadent.
And unmistakably The Rolling Stones.
Then Mick Jagger got involved
The following day, the group travelled to Swarkestone Hall Pavilion in Derbyshire for the second part of the shoot.
Afterwards, Michael showed Mick Jagger a high-contrast black-and-white print he had made overnight from the banquet scene.
Jagger loved the image.
But there was a problem.
He thought black and white was boring.
So he took the photograph away.
What happened next horrified the photographer.
Mick Jagger hand-coloured it.
Brightly.
Very brightly.
Michael later recalled his reaction to seeing what Mick had done to his carefully made photograph.
But Jagger's version survived.
And it was the hand-coloured photograph that eventually appeared inside the album's gatefold.
Sometimes the client really does get the final word.
The cover that wasn't
The original idea had been for Michael Joseph’s photographs to play a central role in the album artwork.
But Beggars Banquet developed another problem.
The Rolling Stones wanted the front cover to show a graffiti-covered toilet wall.
Their record company refused.
The disagreement delayed the artwork and neither the toilet photograph nor Joseph’s banquet image became the original front cover.
When the album was finally released in December 1968, the cover was almost absurdly plain.
White.
Typography.
Designed like a formal invitation:
Rolling Stones Beggars Banquet. RSVP.
Inside, however, was Michael Joseph’s wonderfully chaotic banquet.
Complete with Mick Jagger's hand-colouring.
The rejected toilet cover would eventually appear on later reissues.
A band on the edge of change
There is another reason the photographs feel important today.
They were made during a pivotal moment for The Rolling Stones.
Only three days before the first shoot, the band had begun recording Sympathy for the Devil at Olympic Sound Studios.
Beggars Banquet would mark a new period in their music and include songs such as Street Fighting Man and Sympathy for the Devil.
And the photographs also capture the original five-man line-up close to its end.
Less than a year later, Brian Jones would leave the band.
He died in July 1969.
Seen now, the photographs have a strange mixture of celebration and hindsight.
Everyone is young.
The wine is flowing.
The animals are misbehaving.
The Stones look as if the party might continue forever.
But it wouldn't.
Photographs that escaped the album
For many years, most people only knew a small part of Michael Joseph’s Beggars Banquet shoot.
The wider series reveals much more.
The contact sheets and surviving photographs show a band relaxed enough to play with the absurdity of the situation. They also show how much work went into creating images that appear almost accidental.
Today, photographs such as The Banquet, Mick & Chick, Stones Into Camera and other images from the sessions have become limited-edition fine art works in their own right.
They no longer need the album.
They have their own story.
Dinner is served
Perhaps that is what makes the session so memorable.
The Rolling Stones were already famous.
Michael Joseph could easily have made a cool, serious photograph of a dangerous rock band.
Instead, he gave them costumes, wine, a banquet table, a goat and a megaphone.
And somehow it worked.
More than fifty years later, the photographs still feel unruly, theatrical and completely alive.
Exactly as a Rolling Stones photograph probably should.
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