Nigel Havers Says Redlands Film Will Go Ahead This Year
Nigel Havers says a new film about The Rolling Stones’ Redlands drug bust is being developed, with the project expected to follow last year’s musical adaptation at The Chichester Festival. He said the film is due sometime this year and added that he is too old now to play his father, Lord Michael Havers.
Redlands in February 1967
In February 1967, police raided Redlands, Keith Richards’ Sussex home, during a party attended by Rolling Stones members including Sir Mick Jagger. Drug charges followed against Jagger, Richards and art dealer Robert Fraser, turning a private gathering into one of the defining moments of 1960s Britain.
Lord Michael Havers led the legal defence of Jagger and Richards, giving the new film a built-in legal spine as well as a music-business one. Havers later became Lord Chancellor under Margaret Thatcher from 1987 to 1988, so the story now sits at the junction of pop history and establishment power.
What Nigel Havers recalled
Havers said his parents hated The Stones and remembered his father first hoping not to be asked to defend them. He recalled: “My parents hated The Stones. Then one night on the telly the news came up, 'Rolling Stones in drugs bust'. And my dad said, 'I hope they don’t ask me to defend them.'”
He also said, “About an hour later the phone goes and dad came back into the room and said, 'I shall be defending them.'” That detail matters because it shows the defense was not a career move chosen in comfort; it was dropped into a family that was already watching the case unfold at home.
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards
Havers said Jagger and Richards came to stay with his family and were sworn to secrecy, with Jagger “very frightened about what was going to happen.” He added that the pair went to prison for a couple of nights because his father could not get them off at first, and remembered Jagger crying “like a baby.”
He also repeated Richards’ line to his father: “I’d like to prosecute the Queen because last night I was offered a spliff in jail, a very good one.” Lord Havers eventually had Jagger’s conviction overturned over doubt about whether he knew the drugs were illegal, while Richards’ prison sentence was quashed and replaced with conditional discharge.
The film now gives the Redlands case a fresh commercial life after the Chichester stage version last year, but the sharper story is the one Havers himself can carry into the project. If the film goes ahead this year, it will revisit a case that moved from raid to charges to appeals, and it will do so with the family of the defense lawyer still inside the frame.
