Friday 25 November 2022 11:11 PM The Norland Nanny hired to look after Jade Jagger but ended up managing the ... trends now

Tending to a bloodied Keith Moon when he erupted from a wardrobe, arms and legs flailing, wood splintering. Turning a blind eye to the very intimate antics of Anita Pallenberg and Ronnie Wood on board a private plane. Fending off the unsubtle advances of some of the most famous men in 1970s rock . . .

To former children’s nanny Sally Arnold, such hair-raising episodes were all, quite literally, in a day’s work.

The first female tour manager to some of the wildest rock bands in history, Sally was spectator at — and sometimes active participant in — a music scene that has since come to define the word hedonistic.

But, as she recounts in a new memoir, it was her qualification as a Norland Nanny, one of an elite brigade of childcare specialists favoured by royalty and celebrities, that made her the perfect woman for the job.

After all, the attributes that made her so fitting for childcare — patience, impeccable organisational skills, strictness tempered by kindness — were exactly what you also needed for life on the road with a bunch of rackety, drug-fuelled musicians.

‘Most of us were in our 20s when I started back in the 1970s, but looking after rock bands was like nannying overgrown kids,’ says Sally, 73.

‘I took care of them. It was my duty to make sure they were safe, secure and happy, and got to the next gig on time. I’d phone them to wake them up, tell them when to pack their bags and check out of the hotel, what time to get on to the tour bus. I was supervising them every step of the way, exactly like five-year-olds.

‘You have to be in control and quite bossy. And as the eldest of four children, I always was. Sometimes I even wrote them coded messages about sniffer dogs waiting at airports.’

Yet even the most recalcitrant toddler could not have taxed her patience as much as some of the rock stars. She recalls her first meeting with The Who’s mercurial drummer Keith Moon.

‘I went to their dressing room after a concert in Oxford and heard loud banging. My first sight of Keith was when he — quite literally — burst out of a wardrobe, planks of wood, splinters everywhere, screaming and shouting “Everybody f*** off out of my way!” But he became polite and charming when he’d calmed down. “My dear girl, how very nice to meet you,” he said.’

Placating irate hotel managers was very much part of her remit, too. At the Portobello Hotel in Notting Hill, West London, she was called by one in the early hours pleading: ‘You have to take all these mad people out of here. One of them has just strangled our cat and thrown it out of the window.’

Sally drove round London looking for the culprit, Bob Burns, drummer with the Southern American rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd. ‘I was thinking, “Where the hell has he gone?” I found him in Hyde Park, completely stoned. I couldn’t get him out until the morning as the park had been locked. He left the band soon after that [in 1974] thank God.’ She laughs.

Warm, funny and engaging company, Sally belongs to that hearty breed of intrepid, upper-middle-class women who are fearless pioneers and (almost) unshockable with it.

Her memoir, Rock N Roll Nanny, describes how she began her career in 1971 as the nanny to new-born Jade Jagger — the only child from the seven-year marriage of Mick and Bianca Jagger. It was after she left that post that she was invited to join the touring office of, among other bands, The Who and the Rolling Stones.

‘I was with Jade, who was adorable, 24 hours a day and she was getting too attached to me. When I was asked by Mick Jagger — via his assistant Alan Dunn — if I’d like to be tour manager instead, my initial response was “Why me? I’m a nanny” and they said it was because the boys in the bands liked me and their wives trusted me.’

Sally fulfilled her remit with brisk efficiency. She would also chastise any band member who had the temerity to make a pass at her if she knew their wives or girlfriends.

‘I was visiting Mick [Jagger] at his house in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, and Woody [Ronnie Wood] was there too. They both said “Come upstairs” and I said, “Don’t be so stupid. It’s me, Nanny, your tour manager.” Mick said, “Come on, baby girl. You know you want to.” I thought, “I’m not going to fall for that tired old line” and I never did.

‘Men are so funny. They think every woman should fall into their lap. I preferred to be the one who didn’t sleep with the rock stars, even though there were hundreds who did.’

She admits to a couple of lapses: a ‘drunken fumble’ with Pink Floyd’s Dave Gilmour when he was separated from his wife, and a brief fling with Artimus Pyle, the drummer who replaced Burns in Lynyrd Skynyrd. But it is an abiding sadness that the real love of her life, Skynyrd’s stage manager Dean Kilpatrick, died when the band’s private plane crashed in October 1977. Lead singer Ronnie Van Zant was among the six who died.

Sally and Dean had just become engaged. Her sorrow lingers, even 45 years on. ‘Sometimes, it still feels like it happened yesterday,’ she says. ‘I still look back with terrible sadness and think about what my life would have been if I’d married Dean.

‘I adored him and we would have had a wonderful life. I don’t think we’d have had children. The band were my children and I’d have looked after them for ever.’

She was married, briefly and unhappily, in the 1980s to music promoter Paul Loasby — ‘I knew it was a mistake pretty much straight away’ — but now lives alone, modestly, in Devon where, until recently, she sang the descant parts in the church choir. She never did become a mum.