Beggars Banquet:
The Structure Beneath the Devil
by Alissa Ordabai
This is a chapter from Alissa Ordabai's upcoming book on Nicky Hopkins, a full-length study of the pianist’s life, music, and the era that shaped him.
The Rolling Stones had three choices in 1968 after the establishment showed them its teeth: retreat, freeze, escalate. They chose escalate.
1967 had already run them through the wringer: February's drug bust, the News of the World campaign, the courts, the judges. With the full moral-panic machinery revving at them, the band decided to stop winking. No more psych-jester play of Their Satanic Majesties Request — once they saw that the state moved to humiliate and criminalize them, they painted Lucifer on the ceiling and refused to call it a joke.
This was the classic dissident move — be it of human rights activists or a rock band — same survival instinct: if you are to be destroyed, make the destruction public. The eight people (of the 230-million population) who took to Red Square that same summer to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia knew they were doomed before they unfurled the banner. But the point was to get stomped in full view, in daylight.
So when the Stones began to see how power actually works and began strategizing, the question became: What do we do with our outlaw status? And they've decided to go all-out — to put the goat's head on the table and say, Fine, here we are — beasts.
***
"Sympathy for the Devil" was meant to be their grand gesture — a deliberate claiming of the dark side. But like a lot of stances taken under pressure, the philosophy behind it was half-baked. And the music even more so. It entered Olympic Studios in March 1968 like a slop bucket of intentions — raw, liquid, spilling in too many directions.
And it was saved and given shape by the only fully equipped musician in the room, who traveled to and from sessions on whatever transport he could put together, at ungodly hours, and then sat at the piano for backbreaking stretches, bringing the Stones to shape: Nicky Hopkins. The one with the full kit: music theory, technique, discipline, and a brain wired both for structure and feeling. While Jagger was playing at being the devil, he was the one doing the actual conjuring.
***
Jean-Luc Godard, one of the most radical filmmakers of the 20th century, captured those early Olympic sessions on film in exhaustive detail for his film One Plus One. There is Hopkins — in a suit jacket, wrists thin inside shirt cuffs, left hand grabbing chord clusters like invisible bricks, stacking them around Jagger's yelps and half-mumbled incantations. Jagger is slouched nearby, rumpled, slightly spectral in a white shirt that looks like a nightgown. Hopkins is the inverse: back straight and motionless, face unreadable, eyes — fierce stillness, and right hand fluttering fast and clean across the keys. Conservatoire constructing rock's emerging new world in a moment when rock doesn't exactly know where it is supposed to go next.
The song opens with congas — played by the Ghanaian percussionist Kwasi "Rocky" Dzidzornu, whom the Stones, predictably, renamed Rocky Dijon — and a shaker by Bill Wyman. For Jagger, this was meant to signify transgression: that late-Sixties gesture in which Afro-Latin rhythm becomes the sonic shorthand for danger and a sense of freedom. Jagger's instinct is automatic — he reaches for "ethnic" the way a certain type of London boy reaches for silk scarves — a little costume that promises moral adventure.
Hopkins hears all of this immediately, and, being nobody's fool, understands exactly what Jagger thinks he is summoning. But instead of amplifying the exoticism, he answers it with something far more grounded. His piano comes in as an adult correction, straight from the conservatoire — not scolding, but steadying. It's his way of saying, with that signature mixture of tact and authority, We don't need to borrow someone else's mask to say what we mean.
The South American vibe doesn't hold in part because Jagger has no real grasp of where it can lead — he isn't versed in that tradition, not musically, not culturally — and in part because Hopkins, who feels the limits instantly, doesn't believe the song could travel down that road anyway. What follows is a pivot: Jagger retreats to safer ground with something far more British — the variety stage. "Please allow me to introduce myself" is the voice of English music-hall, a Dartford boy impersonating a suave lower-class devil on a theatre stage.
Yes, it lands as camp. But it doesn't sound wrong because the book the song draws from — Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, first published in English just the year before — itself depicts the devil as theatrically charismatic as he can possibly be. Written at the height of Stalin's mass arrests, executions, and show trials, the novel drops Satan into a Moscow paralyzed by fear and has him deal out punishments on petty bureaucrats, literary functionaries, theatre world gatekeepers, elite restaurateurs, housing committee members.
The modern academic line is that Bulgakov, watching his friends disappear, was making an oblique offer to the regime — equating Stalin's reign of terror with Satan's rule, but presenting both as a necessary, operatic cruelty. A frightened man flattering his seminary-educated tyrant, but doing so with style. This entire logic goes clean over Jagger's head, but that's where the Stones' song picks up.
***
CUT. Return to Barnes. In the early hours of Godard's "Sympathy for the Devil" reels, nothing really happens. The vamp loops and doesn't develop harmonically. Even when the voice tries to escalate ("I shouted out who killed the Kennedys…") the music stays inert. There is no journey, no transformation. Until Hopkins begins to think his way in — building the harmonic scaffolds, modulating keys without cue, adjusting to Jagger's rhythmic misfires, and subtly teaching Richards where the next bar should land. Odd, powerful chords begin to appear — neither quite jazz nor quite Rachmaninoff, though Hopkins once said Sergei Vasilyevich was the pianist he felt he most resembled. And suddenly the bones of the song don't just acquire flesh — they begin to wear a very dapper outfit.
Hopkins' piano is a structural intervention — it gives the song its first sense of inner logic. And here is his genius: He doesn't mimic the percussion — he stabilizes it. He doesn't reinforce Jagger's voice — he undercuts it. He introduces linearity into a circular vamp. He gives "Sympathy" what Jagger was groping for: not just a transgressive tone, but a transgressive vocabulary.
***
CUT. Paris 1968. When Godard descended on London in the summer of 1968 to film the Rolling Stones sessions, his silent question to Jagger and the band was, "Show me what you got." And you have to remember where he's just come from — the Paris of 1968, from sit-ins and occupations in Nanterre where students demanded the end of the professor-as-father teaching hierarchy. These were political demands – not grunting. And Godard was the man who was right in the thick of it.
Stéphane Courtois, one of the serious guys who was there, in an interview commissioned for the EastWest Review by this writer, described what it felt like on the ground: "There were anarchists, like Daniel Cohn-Bendit, some situationists, and militants of the UJCML (Union des Jeunesses Communistes Marxistes-Léninistes) which gave birth to a group that was at first called Vive le Communisme and then Vive la Révolution. This group was Anarcho-Maoist, something that theoretically cannot exist. There were ultra-Stalinist Maoists in this group, former members of the French Communist Party (PCF) and young people like me, without any particular foundation, who were rather anarchist. All that functioned in an unbelievable ideological mess. From 1968 to 1971-1972, I was a full-time Maoist activist. Until 1972, I ran a large Maoist bookstore in Paris, called La Commune. Among other things, I published all the pamphlets of the Black Panthers."
Amid the recollections of stockpiling weapons, hanging around people who'd trained with ETA in the Pyrenees, and witnessing the launch of the Homosexual Front of Revolutionary Action, Courtois remembers Godard not content with just filming revolution, but helping it along: "We were bathed in a kind of delirious mythology of armed struggle, some had weapons, others did not... Jean-Luc Godard, in Switzerland, had manuals of armed struggle printed which were smuggled into France and which I then sold in my bookstore, such as Carlos Marighella's Manual of the Urban Guerrilla."
Jagger's implicit answer to Godard's silent challenge of "Show me what you got" must have sounded baffling to the filmmaker who just got off the train from a city where young people were about to declare open war on the bourgeois state. Cosplaying Lucifer and tossing off lines about luring a 15-year-old upstairs must have looked like a pantomime to the man arriving from a place where gay people were about to march for revolution. "Stray Cat Blues" was provocation: "Are you shocked? Aroused? Complicit?" But across the Channel, the Homosexual Front of Revolutionary Action was preparing to ask something else: Can sexuality be a force that dismantles power?
***
CUT. Battersea junkyard. Godard throws a jab at Jagger, right there in the film: "White man never learned to speak our language," one of the black actors says in the junkyard scene — a line less about dialogue than indictment. But Godard doesn't stay on the surface. He still meets Jagger where it might count. "The devil is God in exile," confirms the film's character Eve Democracy, and this is the only moment in One Plus One where Godard seems to take the Stones' satanic posture seriously. This line has bloodline: the Book of Job, Boehme, Blake, Bulgakov, and then the modernity itself. The idea is that wrath is not the opposite of God — it is his shadow. Satan is not a rival, he is a fragment. "The devil is God in exile" means God still rules, but he has exiled his own powers. We live under those exiles.
CUT. Hopkins' hospital bed. Before it all floats off into theory, let's go back to Hopkins and watch how it actually plays out. Hopkins doesn't care who Godard is. Godard arrives with Marxist dialectics, looking to see where the history is supposed to be heading. But Hopkins — who'd already been cut open by surgeons 14 times before he turned 20 because the NHS botched the first operation in a filthy theatre, who'd been dragged through England's post-war medical system, and is now building the new epoch's language — doesn't need the Paris barricades, the Maoist bookshops, or the manifestos about "de-culturalization." He already experienced what it means to be gutted and left to rebuild from nothing. He knows what social powerlessness feels like and what creative power feels like. He doesn't need to dress it up in lofty rhetoric. He's already survived the thing Godard's still trying to name.
CUT. Hopkins' piano at Olympic Studios. In that room, at that piano, Hopkins holds light and shadow united. He saw what God did to him in that hospital and still signed on as a believer. Watch the footage, listen to him play — there is no bitterness, but no soft-focus halo either. Just a man who stopped believing that light and darkness were ever separate to begin with. Getting baptized twice wasn't piety — it was a declaration: the divine includes both the knife and the healing. The piano became the place he could let those forces speak in one voice.
That is why, in "Sympathy for the Devil," his playing doesn’t moralize. It isn't "good" countering "evil." It is integration: both in the same chord, major and minor. Not because he is clever, but because he's lived both. In Hopkins' universe the true act of faith is not to choose between light and shadow, but to comprehend them both and still make music.
CUT. The Process Church of the Final Judgment. In a 1967 interview for Process magazine (Issue No. 3 titled "Mindbending"), the house organ of a syncretic, neo-Gnostic movement which saw Jehovah, Lucifer, Satan, and Christ as its four archetypes — Jagger laid it out flat. "People say to me, 'Have you got a moral responsibility?' I always say 'No,' because it was true and still is true." And then a few lines later, like punctuation: "There are no morals." And maybe that's the thing you have to understand about him before any of the satan talk even begins to surface. Because once you hear that — really hear it — the whole devil business collapses into a sideshow.
CUT. Nellcôte. Three years later, in the South of France, at Nellcôte, Rolling Stone magazine tried to pin down Richards on the Lucifer thing. What did it mean, if anything? Keith wasn't eager to clarify, mumbling something about "black magicians" who think the Stones are secret agents of Lucifer — and others who think they are Lucifer. Then, with a shrug that seemed to flatten the whole cosmology: "Everybody's Lucifer." (Robert Greenfield, August 19, 1971).
Which, if you follow the logic — or the vibe — means that if every person carries Lucifer, then this world is his kingdom and the "satanic" label doesn't smear the band, it just reflects the species.
Could this be a muddled absorption of ideas he didn't fully understand? It could be. Could be posturing, could be personal metaphysics, could be something he half-believed or half-used to keep journalists spinning. You'll never really know. And this is probably the point where someone smarter stops parsing the words and just watches what the man does. That's where the real beliefs are. The rest is smoke.
CUT. Olympic Studios. Godard landed in London in spring 1968 with an open challenge in mind: Show me what revolution looks like in music. He wasn't there to document the making of a hit — he wanted to watch consciousness form in real time. Jagger, he hoped, might be someone who understood myth, power, spectacle — and how to break them down from the inside. That's why the film lingers in the slow grind of rehearsal, the repetition, the unfinished takes. Godard didn't care about polish. He wanted to see the process: the becoming.
His question to Jagger was real: "Show me what you've got." Not "Sing me something catchy."
And Jagger's most cutting, world-upending answer would have been: "I've got the conservatoire sitting right here," and point to Nicky Hopkins. "He is helping me dismantle bourgeois art."
Had Jagger presented that to Godard — "This man beside me is European order providing scaffolding for the wrecking-ball machine I am dismantling the culture with" — the film might have caught the true historical fracture.
Because that is Beggars Banquet's real content: young Englishmen playing with fire while the ghosts of the old world — Brahms, Chopin, Lizst, — through Hopkins — hold the matches.
Jagger didn't see it, Godard half-sensed it, and Hopkins played it.
Instead Jagger showed Godard a theatre of transgression: the devil, underage lust, power play. Godard wanted a revolution of thought. Jagger gave him a taboo theatre, barely explained. But what even Godard missed was that there was nevertheless something happening. Not transformation, exactly, but exposure. The Stones weren't trying to rebuild the world — they were pulling the curtains back on its lies. It wasn't manifesto art. It was reckoning. And in a class-bound culture founded on denial, that was its own kind of heresy.
CUT. Wartime, Europe. Before you write off the English youth of the late 1960s as tame next to their Molotov-lobbing French counterparts, keep this in mind: the English didn't have a clear reason to hate their fathers.
By 1968, young people in France had a target: their parents' hypocrisy. The fathers who profited under Vichy, who watched the Jews disappear, who stayed in their ministry posts and bank offices like nothing happened.
But in Britain, the moral situation was inverted. The fathers weren't shameful — they were heroic. Men who had endured conscription, rationing, blitz. Their authority rested on sacrifice.
If you were a young man in Britain in 1968, your father had likely spent 1940–45 doing something to stop Hitler. Maybe not with a gun, maybe with a wrench of a ledger, but still — you couldn't call him a coward or collaborator. You could only call him boring, uptight, repressed. Keith Richards' father fought in World War I. Godard's father owned a private clinic in neutral Switzerland — the country which protected Nazi gold. That's why the Stones — and not some Marxist vanguard — became Britain's rebellion in miniature. The English couldn't confront their parents as Nazis — they confronted them as prudes. The enemy wasn't collaboration. It was respectability.
CUT. London, 1930s. But even the prude accusation did not particularly stick. Nicky's father, an accountant who worked for Guinness, and who is often remembered as a person who liked things orderly and calm, in reality, was not conventional. He married a woman whose parents were Danish immigrants. She was British-born, yes, but with something looser in the wiring. By the early 1930s, they were taking photos of each other in swapped clothes, making faces, clowning for the camera. Those are signs of a man with a playful sense of humor, no fear of ridicule, and a wife who shared his delight in inversion and theatricality. A marriage built on humor and curiosity, not repression. Yes, Nicky's father didn't encourage Little Richard at full blast in his house the 1950s, but he let it happen. That grimace from the next room? It was a kind of permission too.
This kind of play was not separate from Nicky's own qualities: his mimicry, his absurdist wit, his willingness to be both self-mocking and gentle. It's the same emotional inheritance — the refusal to be embarrassed by imagination.
So the man who raised Nicky wasn't some grey figure of postwar dullness, but a realist with a sly comic streak — someone who wore masculinity loosely enough to parody it. That kind of balance — calm on the surface, humor just underneath — tends to raise kids who are serious without being rigid, who take things deeply but aren't scared of the absurd. Nicky's mix of precision and play starts right there.
And when Nicky lampooned his father, the sharpest it got were little cartoons: Alfred Hopkins with a phone receiver to his ear, speech bubble reading, "Hello! Hello!! What's that you say?" Where a Parisian son would write a manifesto, a Russian one a confession, Nicky sketches a cartoon — witty, miniature, heartbreakingly mild. "Hello! Hello!! What's that you say?" is the sound of middle-class deafness: a man sure he's tuned in, but missing the latest frequency of the modern age. There is no sting in it — just that English kind of irony — light-touch, dead-on, and quietly sad in its own way.
CUT. Chelsea, 1968. If you were a regular 23-year-old in London in 1968, your dream would not have been revolutionary in the Parisian sense. It would have been escape — from class, from smallness, from the suffocating order of the country that had just finished winning the war and immediately gone back to polishing the silver. Your fantasy, if a genie offered one wish, would be something like, "Get me out of this narrow life. Make it larger, freer, more vivid than my parents' world."
Maybe it meant a flat in Chelsea or Notting Hill, a guitar, a circle of witty friends, and freedom from office hours. Maybe a chance to travel — Morocco, Ibiza, India — not as a tourist but as someone "finding themselves." Or, more modestly, just to wear what you liked, sleep with whom you liked, and not be punished for it.
To someone like Godard, all this probably sounded like soft, provincial dreaming. In One Plus One, he pushes harder in that Eve Democracy scene: "A man of culture is as far from an artist as a historian is from a man of action." But Nicky Hopkins shatters that binary without even looking up from the keys.
Because there, in Olympic Studios, while Godard is still fishing for revolutionary content, Hopkins is showing him the real thing: a man of culture who acts. Not with slogans, but with sound. Not with a manifesto, but with a chord change that hits like a firebomb.
CUT. Olympic Studios. Godard's cultural education was wide — but thin. He had just enough history, literature, and philosophy to quote, to gesture, to disrupt. He built his reputation on attacking the custodians of culture and declaring the whole museum suspect. In total contrast to Hopkins, who had one tool: the piano. But with it, he could shape, structure, rescue. He didn't claim to understand the whole world — he just made order inside it. Where Godard theorized culture, Hopkins enacted it. No slogans, no commentary, just hands on keys, building inside broken material. Godard had ideas. Hopkins had form.
"We should build schools of de-culturalization," Godard riffs in One Plus One. What he doesn't realize is that he is already inside one: the Rolling Stones' recording session. Olympic Studios, spring and summer of 1968, was that very school of de-culturalization: No score, no teacher, no map, just endless takes, Jagger making sounds, Richards semi-communicative, everything running on instinct, tension, and guesswork. It's anti-intellectual, the dream of chaotic anti-culture. And it would have collapsed in minutes if not for Nicky Hopkins.
Hopkins didn't assert himself — he stabilized. He didn't theorize — he constructed. That's the full metaphysical tension of 1968, in a single scene: Rebellion depends on culture — or it crumbles. Relying on the thing it wants to destroy. And Godard films that. Whether he understands it is another matter entirely. But Hopkins knew.
***
If Godard had stuck around a little longer, he might have caught more than just the making of "Sympathy for the Devil." He might have caught the lightning striking again and again — the actual creation of other Beggars Banquet gems that now haunt the archives as nothing more than audio-only studio outtakes. And even those — just sound, no image — are jaw-dropping in the sheer sprawl of musical terrain Hopkins covers.
Producer Jimmy Miller came in with a plan: bring the Stones back to their roots — blues, R&B, keep it raw and tough. It worked, but Hopkins delivers much more than that. In fact, he delivers his entire repertoire of genres — jazz, blues, rock, classical. And some of the wildest, weirdest passages he played during those sessions were discarded to make the record more legible. The culling robbed the record of its full bloom, but also robbed rock of something it barely knew: ability to include the entire tradition of Western music into a recording session and make it sound inevitable.
Jimmy Miller was a man of instinct, not of culture of the panoramic sense. He had no formal education in the arts, no classical training, no deep sense of music history. His father Bill Miller — brilliant, driven, Russian-Jewish émigré impresario — came from a world that, in theory, could have given his son a vast cultural inheritance: Eastern European musical depth, the centuries-old tradition that often cling to immigrant families. But immigration scrambles transmission.
Whatever that old world might have offered Jimmy remained largely unrealized, dispersed in the noise of mid-century American show business. What he inherited instead was the smell of clubs, orchestras warming up, Sinatra's timing, the sheer professionalism of entertainment. That was what he excelled at: feel, the capacity to sense when a band's energy was authentic and when it was dying. He could sit behind the glass and know, immediately, when the pulse was alive and when it wasn't. That's why the Stones wanted him. Miller had production chops. But Hopkins had a universe.
Through the long, shifting takes of "Jigsaw Puzzle," Hopkins offers dozens of versions of its harmonic frame — jazz-shadowed blues, rock refracted through Romantic piano, touches of the avant-garde, like someone improvising with eras. Some takes are raucous, some are lyrical. Hopkins offers them the way a jeweler might open drawers in a shop — moods, styles, epochs arranged as if for sale, though no one quite knows the price.
And none of it is sketch, nothing is half-formed. Each take lands complete, virtuosic, album-ready. The piano leads, the slide guitar is only the filigree.
Sometimes Hopkins is lighthearted — like a cat playing in a shaft of sun, all flurry and mischief, flickering just for the pleasure of it. But then he darkens — symphonic, spare, reaching down into the minor depths, then rising again into that unmistakable high treble of his, so fragile it seems barely to touch the ground, yet anchored by chords so lush they feel almost upholstered.
He turns corners: from half-lit reverie to boogie in full riot, from melancholy jazz-blues back to something spectral and unnameable.
His harmonic imagination moves like a city seen from a train at night — flashes, windows, lives passing fast. Many of these takes unravel into improvisation, the tape still rolling as if even the machine had forgotten to stop.
If these sessions ever surface — properly, fully — they won't just reshape the album. They will rewrite, softly but surely, the history of what rock could have been in that incandescent year of 1968.
Hopkins shines on other tracks from those sessions too — lending a grave, adult weight to the close of "Jumpin' Jack Flash," framing the song so that its swagger resolves into art. On "Dear Doctor" he plays some of his most beautiful passages he's ever played in his life. On "Family" his piano breaks the heart by its mere honesty. On "Salt of the Earth" he bestows the dignity on an otherwise rouge track. And then the rough theme of "Memo From Turner" is transformed into dangerous luxury with his pneumatically ethereal touch.
On "Street Fighting Man" — as so often he does with the Stones — he plays the exact opposite to the mood of the song, in this case piano lines of drifting beauty, languid and unbound, like smoke over a battlefield. It deepens the song, gives it mystery, makes freedom itself audible. He would do this mood inversion thing again and again — through other Stones' records, and most notably on Exile, where he inserts crystalline shards of glass into the lurching mush of "Ventilator Blues."
***
Beggars Banquet was Hopkins' favorite Stones record. Not because it gave him more room to play, but because it gave him more reason to. The album still felt, to him, like a band in dialogue — a group of musicians building something together, and depending on him to hold it together. His playing gave the tracks both spine and swing, providing not just texture but shape. "I love that album," he told NME in July 1974, "probably because it's more of a complete album than perhaps any they've done since." It's a slightly oblique comment, but it aligns with what we actually hear. Beggars Banquet is the only Stones record where there is emotional and musical coherence: the songs speak to one another tonally, thematically, and even temperamentally. The sonic intent holds from start to finish. And within that structure, the piano is present, expressive, and foundational — not layered in post-production, not hidden under the guitars, but shaping the mood, momentum, and movement of tracks.
Hopkins himself traced that prominence to a simple truth: Brian Jones was fading. In a 1989 Crossroads radio interview, he put it plainly — as Brian's presence thinned, the band leaned on him.
Which brings us to the serious question you have to ask if you are to write truthfully about Beggars Banquet — not sentimentally, not conspiratorially, but structurally. Was Jagger able to treat Brian as disposable because he had Nicky Hopkins? The answer, if you follow the structure and not the folklore, is very likely yes.
Hopkins didn't replace Jones in a public or interpersonal sense. He didn't want power. He didn't fight for space. He was hired, he played, he left. But his presence structurally enabled the band to function without Brian. Hopkins could do what Brian stopped doing by 1968: give harmonic coherence, build arrangements on the fly, improvise tastefully, stay sober. The songs that once needed Jones — for color, tension, invention — could now be finished without him. So when Jagger looked at the musical landscape of Beggars Banquet, it's unlikely he felt guilt. He saw a man whose functions had already been silently replaced. Hopkins wasn't part of any conspiracy. He was merely the structural condition that rendered any conspiracy unnecessary.
***
The available fact-stock on Jagger's occult adventures is meagre, but not negligible. Yes, he scored Kenneth Anger's Invocation of My Demon Brother on the Moog. Yes, the film is unabashedly occult. Yes, Anton LaVey materialises in it. At minimum, it shows that Jagger was prepared to furnish a working occultist with his craft. That's not initiation, but not disinterest either.
In the early years he danced around the whole question — never quite denying, never quite confirming, never committing himself to either the literal or the theatrical reading. Later, when the stakes had shifted and the target audience had grown more "establishment," he began insisting the satanic imagery had been overblown, a journalistic confection. But it's the kind of line you are expected to deliver when there is a knighthood glinting somewhere on the far horizon.
Truth is, Jagger was neither aristocrat nor bohemian intellectual. This was the post-war lower–middle gradient of southern England — the bit of the map where people had an almost professional alertness to ceilings, both glass and otherwise, and an equally professional instinct for asserting control the moment the door opened half an inch.
Bill Wyman, in his autobiography Stone Alone and again on Redbeard's "In the Studio" broadcast of November 22, 1993, marked the 25th anniversary of Beggars Banquet with a telling recollection: he and Brian Jones, sitting in a studio, killing time until Jagger and Richards bothered to show, wrote riff and the bones of "Jumpin' Jack Flash." Later, the credits appeared, as if by natural law: Jagger / Richards. And this tells you everything about how things worked in that band.
***
"Making a deal with the Devil" is a folk metaphor for entering the marketplace — giving up innocence for power. It's also a staple smear on capitalism itself: the notion that success demands betrayal of the moral world of your parents. You don't have to believe in hell to feel its draft — the PE teacher's son senses, almost bodily, that once serious money starts pouring in, he has stepped over some ancestral line. The Satan posture exteriorizes that unease. But within that theatre, Jagger could also inhabit the idea in a limited, instrumental way: "If the devil stands for power and money, then yes — I'll dance with him." That's not metaphysical belief — that's ritualized opportunism, the emotional logic of class ascent.
***
And now that we've tested Jagger to the limit, let's extend the courtesy to Godard. The litmus test of conviction is always the same: what you are prepared to risk for it. As spoken by one of the Soviet dissidents, a Bulgakov reader, "Your beliefs mean nothing until you have sacrificed something for them."
So when Godard's Eve Democracy is asked, "Do we know who killed Kennedy?" and replies, flatly, that we don't, that is the moment when Godard the revolutionary reveals a caution indistinguishable from Jagger's. Jagger says "you and me" killed Kennedy. Godard simply says that we don't know. But Godard's version is even thinner: a revolutionary who will not risk a lawsuit.
Here, in the hard light of practical consequences, both men occupy the same square inch of ground. Push past the posturing, and they are governed by the same instinct for self-preservation. They know what happens when you meddle with the real levers — when you turn rumor into accusation, rhetoric into allegation. You don't get cancelled — you get sued, blocked, or — as the century amply demonstrated — shot. And neither Jagger nor Godard is willing to test the thickness of the ice.
By 1968, Godard is no longer the lucid polemicist of Le Petit Soldat or the free-wheeling ironist of Pierrot le Fou. He is a man who has absorbed too much theory, too much revolutionary rhetoric, and is trying to film the confusion rather than master it. One Plus One's incoherence is not a lapse — it's the point. The Battersea scenes, the gun waving, erotic magazines, the Nazi salutes — these are Godard's way to prove that in media all gestures now look identical. They don't advance his thesis — they show that no coherent one exists.
Courtois explains what happened: "The ideological muddle was such that finally everything exploded, and the decision was taken to dissolve the movement. The self-dissolution of Vive la Révolution had two main reasons: on the one hand, the leadership was impacted by feminists and gays, and on the other hand, there was the issue of the armed struggle: are we going for it or not? We were getting ready for it, but we hadn't yet taken any action. Finally, the self-dissolution put an end to the whole thing. Vive la Révolution dissolved itself and my militancy stopped there. That's how I've left Maoism: because there was no group anymore, no leader anymore, nothing! All of it had been happening in an absolutely incredible artistic blur."
Once the blur cleared, Courtois went to Nanterre to study history under Annie Kriegel — "the one who decommunized us," as he later said, "for the good reason that she had already made the journey herself, having once been a devout Stalinist." From that reversal came the work that would give him international fame: The Black Book of Communism. Published in 1997, it catalogued the century's communist atrocities with prosecutorial coldness, sold over a million copies, travelled into 26, and forced Communist and ex-Communist establishments to acknowledge what they had spent decades denouncing as slander.
***
Still, it is to Godard that we owe the most exacting visual record of Nicky Hopkins at work — his improvisational mind, the precision of his body, his way of thinking through sound. Godard's camera, uninterested in the conventions of rock cinematography, lingers on him for long minutes. It does not flatter him — it observes. And in that patient stare you get the nearest thing to a record of Hopkins' process — the work of a man whose entire artistry was usually erased by the frontman's shadow.
Whatever Godard thought he was doing politically, his aesthetic nerve understood the essential fact: this frail pianist was doing something closer to cinema than anyone else in the room — assembling time itself out of structure, repetition, and deviation.
And Godard likely never grasped who or what he had filmed. But what survives is not theory. Not slogans. Not revolutionary chic. What survives are the long, unbroken shots of a sick, brilliant man building form where there was none — and the director, miraculously, not cutting away. That's the grace of the encounter. Both of them misread each other. And both of them gave us something permanent.
