Mick Jagger speaks with a plummy voice behind closed doors, a former staffer claims.
Sally Arnold, who was nanny to the Rolling Stones frontman’s daughter Jade, now 51, says he changes to his more familiar rock’n’roll accent in public.
In her new memoir Rock N Roll Nanny, she says: “Strangely, Mick spoke the Queen’s English in private and with only a couple of people around, but the minute there were more or he was on the phone, he’d switch to the sort of Mockney accent we know today.”
One example of his switch was when he phoned one of Sally’s former employers for a reference before hiring her.
She says: “She was so surprised because he spoke to her in a rather uncouth way, and she wondered, ‘How can Sally work for somebody who speaks like that?’”
Sally tells of life with Mick and then-wife Bianca, saying: “My impression at the time was how normal Mick and Bianca seemed.
“He was very attentive, pouring tea, carrying and fetching things for her.”
Sally became tour manager for the Stones, and later Mike Oldfield and Peter Gabriel.
Mick’s accent came under the spotlight in Philip Norman’s 2012 biography.
It told how the star’s first serious girlfriend Chrissie Shrimpton assumed Mick’s Mockney accent came from his upbringing in Dartford, Kent — until she met his parents, and found they both spoke with Received Pronunciation.
- Rock N Roll Nanny by Sally Arnold is out now.
