Andy Johns Born January 1, 1952

Biography

Andy Johns got into the music business because his brother was already an established leader in the science and art of studio music production. As well as a successful big brother to light his way, Andy had great ears, a fine feel for the technology involved and, crucially for his work with The Rolling Stones, an adventurous and engaging personality that wasn't easily intimidated, not even by The notoriously intimidating Rolling Stones.

Given the opportunity to work with the band on the production of Sticky Fingers at Stargroves, Mick Jagger's country house, he got stuck in. But it wasn't easy...

"I remember Mick coming in after 2 or 3 days. They were playing rather poorly ,as they would quite often. Stargroves... no furniture, very spartan but the big room was absolutely wonderful.

"I just remember that big room and there was a huge rush mat, rush matting and I used to put Mick Taylor’s amp in the fireplace and put a mic up in the chimney. It was a lot of fun. I was scared witless, absolutely petrified but I didn’t let on.

" I was the engineer and Mick, you know, they played very badly for a couple of days and then they wanted to hear a playback on their brand new mobile studio, first time, right? And they had too many hangers on, I could never understand why they had all those dreadful losers hanging around to ego reinforce.

"And I do this playback and Mick, its like a nightmare come true, is looking at me over the mixer and he goes,
'I could do better than that on my Sony cassette machine, why are you here? This is absolute shit.'

"So I went,

"'Well it’s a very small confined space, perhaps if you got rid of some of these loser hangers on and we had another fucking listen, there’d be some room for the sound to actually happen.'

"'Sway, it was Sway, and he went

"'You’re worse than your brother ',and I went

"'No I’m not - you’re a cunt.'

"And then the next day I waited outside of his bedroom, hat in hand as it were, very humble and I said,

"'Look The Rolling Stones are far more important than anything to do with my soul or ego', and he went

'No, you’re in, you passed the test.'

"So it was one of those, lets test the little bastard things. And he could be extremely charming when he wasn’t doing his alter ego, 'I’m Mick Jagger and you’re not.' He was a very charming fellow because from nowhere like the rest of us, you know, I’m from 17 Bridge Road and his Dad was what? A PE teacher or something.?

Yeah, so come on Mick, hello?"