Why Stones’ ‘Angie’ Was Rumored to Be About Jagger-Bowie Tryst

The Rolling Stones had no scarcity of illicit affairs on the peak of their stardom, so it is no shock that rumors swirled for years in regards to the topic of their chart-topping ballad “Angie.”

Yet the Goats Head Soup lead single prompted much more salacious hypothesis than the remaining due to the events presumably concerned: David Bowie and his spouse Angie, who claimed to have walked in on the Thin White Duke in mattress with Mick Jagger.

Angie Bowie (nee Barnett), who was married to the “Ziggy Stardust” singer from 1970-80, stoked rumors of a Jagger-Bowie tryst when she appeared on The Joan Rivers Show in 1990 and stated she walked in on the 2 rockers bare in mattress. She reiterated this account in her 1993 memoir Backstage Passes, writing, “I felt absolutely dead certain that they’d been screwing. It was so obvious, in fact, that I had never even considered the possibility that they hadn’t been screwing.”

Fans speculated that Jagger wrote “Angie” to appease Bowie’s spouse after she caught the aftermath of their romp within the hay. But Jagger refuted her story: “People began to say that song was written about David Bowie’s wife, but the truth is that Keith wrote the title. He said, ‘Angie,’ and I think it was to do with his daughter. She’s called Angela. And then I just wrote the rest of it.”

Furthermore, it appears unlikely that Angie, who had an open relationship with Bowie and admitted she solely “got married so that I could work [to get a permit],” would have been so horrified by this dalliance that Jagger would have felt the necessity to write a tune for her. She questioned in her ebook why Jagger’s probably fluid sexuality “should have been news to anyone who’d paid any attention to the Stones’ affairs,” and she or he famous that her ex-husband “made a virtual religion of slipping the lance of love into almost everyone around him.”

Watch the Rolling Stones’ ‘Angie’ Video

Yet if “Angie” was not an olive department to Angie Bowie, it wasn’t a dedication to Richards’ daughter both. In his 2010 memoir Life, the guitarist recalled writing the tune throughout a rehab stint in Vevey, Switzerland, whereas his associate, Anita Pallenberg, was giving delivery to their daughter.

“While I was in the clinic, Anita was down the road having our daughter, Angela,” he wrote. “Once I came out of the usual trauma, I had a guitar with me and I wrote ‘Angie’ in an afternoon, sitting in bed, because I could finally move my fingers and put them in the right place again, and I didn’t feel like I had to shit the bed or climb the walls or feel manic anymore.

“I simply went, ‘Angie, Angie.’ It was not about any explicit individual; it was a reputation, like ‘Ohhh, Diana,'” Richards added. “I did not know Angela was going to be known as Angela after I wrote ‘Angie.’ In these days you did not know what intercourse the factor was going to be till it popped out. In reality, Anita named her Dandelion. She was solely given the added title Angela as a result of she was born in a Catholic hospital the place they insisted {that a} ‘correct’ title be added.”

The exact inspiration behind “Angie” may never be certain, but other facts are clear as day. For one, the plaintive, acoustic ballad was an astronomical success upon its release in August 1973, shooting to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 5 on the U.K. chart. It was a moment of heartrending clarity on an otherwise disjointed, chaotic album that marked the beginning of the Stones’ downward spiral in the mid-’70s, a period of all-consuming debauchery from which it would take them years to recover.