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The Stones: The Acclaimed Biography
Philip Norman


In 2012 the Rolling Stones celebrate their 50th anniversary. Their story – the band's meteoric rise to fame, the Marianne Faithfull, Brian Jones and Altamont scandals, the groundbreaking hits – is the stuff of twentieth century legend, and core to popular culture.But it is Norman's skills as a researcher and biographer which bring a whole new dimension to such a story. Written with the personal knowledge, trust and co-operation of the participants, this fully updated version is indisputably the best book on The Stones ever written.Norman spares no detail, covering the Jerry Hall/Mick Jagger split and the Stones' lives as tax exiles, the recording of Exile on Main St. as well as the iconic stage performances, Mick’s control of the band's affairs and his contractual disputes with managers and promoters.This a story of fame, money, drugs, booze, sex, hedonism and the greatest rock band of all time.







COPYRIGHT (#ud6910e98-c912-5b43-9cd1-8f861586d1bd)






an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

First published by Elm Tree Books/Hamish Hamilton 1984

Paperback edition published by Penguin Books 1993

Updated edition by Sidgwick and Jackson published by Pan Macmillan 2001

This updated edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2012

FIRST EDITION

© Philip Norman 1984, 1993, 2001, 2012

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Philip Norman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN 9780007477067

Ebook Edition © September 2012 ISBN: 9780007477074

Version 2016-11-01








To Angela Miller


CONTENTS

Cover (#u1d306233-09cf-53e1-91c1-75ddaf18a323)

Title Page (#u66b3cbcc-04cb-55ac-93dd-896f4bda4d9b)

Copyright

Dedication (#ud9b4ef22-9777-5067-961c-9f7f291b7234)

Foreword (#u07ae248c-07e4-55be-8542-49936f7eae39)

PART ONE

1 ‘I was schooled with a strap right across my back’

2 ‘Well, the joint was rockin’ …’ (#u96100f18-f397-5485-97c7-d35becdcf6ba)

3 ‘I belong to you and you belong to me, so come on’ (#ub8cf14d2-346b-545e-99fa-4302dc15b2f5)

4 ‘Beatle your Rolling Stone hair’ (#u1fcf8413-b23f-5701-b11a-1e994fdbad40)

PART TWO

5 ‘My client has no fleas’ (#u89dd0664-c383-57ba-aec4-654ab5502ae4)

6 ‘Everybody’s got something to hide’ (#litres_trial_promo)

7 ‘It’s down to me; the change has come …’ (#litres_trial_promo)

8 ‘The Oscar Wilde mistake’ (#litres_trial_promo)

9 ‘A Mars bar fills that gap’ (#litres_trial_promo)

PART THREE

10 ‘Sing this all together – see what happens’ (#litres_trial_promo)

11 ‘There’s just no room for a street-fighting man …’ (#litres_trial_promo)

12 ‘He hath awakened from the dream of life’ (#litres_trial_promo)

13 ‘We’re gonna kiss you goodbye’ (#litres_trial_promo)

14 ‘The Stones like France tremendously’ (#litres_trial_promo)

15 ‘Black and Blue’ (#litres_trial_promo)

16 ‘God Speed the Rolling Stones’ (#litres_trial_promo)

17 ‘Then there were four’ (#litres_trial_promo)

18 ‘Some girls give me children …’ (#litres_trial_promo)

Plate Section

Afterword (#litres_trial_promo)

Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)

Index (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by Philip Norman (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)


FOREWORD (#ud6910e98-c912-5b43-9cd1-8f861586d1bd)

I began researching The Stones in 1981, just after publication of my Beatles biography, Shout! I’d never been a particular admirer of the Rolling Stones, quite the opposite in fact, but chronicling the Beatles had shown me how closely the two bands’ histories were intertwined; so, having ‘done’ the Liverpudlians it seemed logical to move on to the Londoners.

As a journalist I’d interviewed the Stones only once, in 1965 when I was on a small evening paper in north-east England and they appeared at the ABC cinema in Stockton-on-Tees. It was the zenith of their British notoriety, just post-‘Satisfaction’; I expected surly Neanderthals but, even to a provincial nobody like me, they were perfectly nice. I talked to Mick Jagger sitting on a cold backstage staircase (he wore a white fisherman’s-knit sweater and swigged from a Pepsi-Cola bottle; such different days!), then to all five in their dressing-room.

Brian Jones was the friendliest, telling me in his quiet, educated voice about the constant hassles they faced between gigs in hotels and restaurants, not for any real bad behaviour – that didn’t come until later – but ‘just because we’re us’. When I requested an autograph for my sister, they all obliged, then former graphic designer Charlie Watts drew a decorative border around their signatures, adding ‘the Rolling Stones’ in case there should be any confusion.

In later years, as a roving correspondent for the Sunday Times Magazine, I’d written about rock, soul and blues legends from Johnny Cash, Bill Haley, the Everly Brothers, the Beach Boys and Fleetwood Mac to James Brown, Little Richard, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Wilson Pickett, B. B. King and Sleepy John Estes – but never a word about the Stones. There seemed far too many experts on the subject already, turning out miles of copy about them, not least for the magazine named Rolling Stone in their honour.

However, just as I’d previously found with the Beatles, what at first looked like formidable competition soon melted away. The vast slush-pile of articles on the Stones had, by and large, swallowed their mythology whole. The books published about them to date were either partial, highly suspect memoirs by former friends (such as the drug-dealer ‘Spanish Tony’ Sanchez) or glossy pulp for the fans. There had never been a real biography of a band that shaped the Sixties as much as the Beatles did, perhaps even more, and who, to general amazement, were soon to celebrate 20 years together.

Fortuitously, just as I committed to the project, the Stones announced a 20th anniversary world tour, to kick off at the John F. Kennedy Stadium, Philadelphia, on September 25, 1981. With the Sunday Times (and now also Shout!) behind me, I was given accreditation to cover its American leg.

When one says one has been on tour with the Rolling Stones, people’s eyes tend to light up with visions of Bacchanalian orgies. Actually, it was one of the most arduous, frustrating and, often, humiliating experiences of my career. Unlike previous chroniclers such as Truman Capote and Terry Southern, I was not embedded with the tour: I had to make my own way to each venue, then apply for show-tickets and backstage access to the Stones’ American publicist, Paul Wasserman.

This Wasserman was an overweight, bearded man with a bald head oddly like a tortoise’s, who constantly shed paper napkins from the ice-cream parlours to which he was addicted. Wherever he appeared, so did a crowd of journalists from newspapers, magazines and broadcasting organizations from all over the world, myself among them, pleading, expostulating, at times raging, at the inadequate media facilities he had provided. Nothing, however, moved Wasserman, whose fear of his clients overrode all normal PR instincts, to keep the press sweet. Under our onslaught his tortoise head would retract defensively into its shell and another paper napkin or two would float free: the Porter’s words in Shakespeare’s Macbeth – ‘Have napkins enough about you, here you’ll sweat for ’t’ – might have been written for him.

At the tour’s opening venue, Philadelphia’s vast, cheerless JFK Stadium, only photographers were allowed front-of-stage, for a few minutes each at a pre-ordained and immovable camera angle. The writing contingent were imprisoned in the bleachers, the block of empty seats behind the stage, under the hostile glare of innumerable thuggish-looking security guards, unable to see a thing or even hear very well. For my first unrestricted view of the Stones in performance, I had to travel to the tour’s third stop, Rockford, Illinois. There, and again in Boulder, Colorado, and again in Buffalo, New York, I asked Paul Wasserman if I could interview Mick and Keith; each time, the only response was a blank stare and more falling triangles of porous paper.

In despair, I filed a perfunctory story to the Sunday Times and flew back to London to try another tack (journalism was different then). I approached the Stones’ UK publicist, Keith Altham, himself a former music journalist, and said that the Times had guaranteed me the front of its prestigious Weekly Review section if he could deliver me Mick and the other Keith. A few weeks later (this is how different journalism was then) I returned to America with Altham to pick up the tour again in Orlando, Florida.

So, backstage at Orlando’s Tangerine Bowl, I was finally ushered through concentric rings of security into the enclosure where the Stones foregathered with a few selected VIPs before each show. In one corner, away from the social chit-chat, Mick was limbering up for his two hours onstage, wearing a bright yellow puffer jacket and American football-player’s knickerbockers. When Altham took me over for an introduction, I thought I’d better make it brief; a rock megastar about to face an 80,000-strong audience would hardly be in the mood for small talk.

How wrong I was. Even when psyching himself up to a feat of endurance that seemed remarkable enough for a 38-year-old, the sharp Jagger brain remained ever alert. He told me he’d read Shout!, then, while never slackening his workout, proceeded to correct a minor point of fact about Allen Klein, the manager whom the Beatles and Stones had once shared.

I interviewed him next afternoon beside the pool at his hotel, getting the quiet, thoughtful Mick he puts on for the broadsheet press – and hearing the bizarre claim, to be repeated many times later, that he recalled almost nothing of his career as a performer. That evening, I visited Bill Wyman in his room with the computer – still a great novelty then – on which he claimed to have stored the names and addresses of a thousand different women he’d slept with. Neither Ronnie Wood nor Charlie Watts was difficult to reach: Woody could usually be found propping up some bar or other, while Charlie, who’d always hated touring, was often around in the early morning, wearing what I can only describe as grey flannel culottes and watching rather enviously as British film-crews packed up to go home.

I even joined a trip to nearby Disney World with Keith Altham’s family and Ian Stewart, one of the original members of the band, who later became their roadie and back-up pianist. So I could legitimately say I’d been on Space Mountain with a Rolling Stone.

Confident I finally had my ‘in’, I followed on to the next gig, the giant Astrodome in Houston, Texas, where I saw Mick doing his pre-show recce of the arena, unrecognizable in combat trousers and a camouflage hat pulled down over his eyes. But at the entrance to the VIP enclosure, I was stopped by Jim Callaghan, the hulking Cockney security chief in a crumpled green caftan who’d waved me through so genially a few days before. ‘Where’s yore press-card?’ he snarled. VIP that I now thought myself, I’d left it at the hotel. ‘No press-card, no entry!’ I remember walking away from the Astrodome’s sparkly red lights, thinking, ‘Even when I went to Libya to interview Gaddafi, I wasn’t treated like that.’

Getting to Keith, as might be expected, was an odyssey in itself – one delayed until the following spring, when the 20th anniversary tour reached Europe. First, I was called to see him in Glasgow, where I hung about outside the Apollo Theatre for a whole afternoon and evening under the supervision of police as thuggish as any Stones minders. As I watched one officer roughly disperse a knot of inoffensive girls, he fixed me with a Jim Callaghan glare and demanded, ‘Are you lookin’ at me?’ Only by swiftly moving away did I avoid being put into the back of a van. Eventually, I received word that Keith would be very busy in both Scotland and England, so preferred to see me when the tour moved on to Paris.

At the Hotel Warwick just off the Champs Elysées I waited in the lobby, then in my room, for a total of fourteen hours. The summons into Keith’s presence did not come until past 3 a.m. We had been talking for only about five minutes when Paul Wasserman’s assistant, Alvinia Bridges, marched in and told me I’d have to stop there as it was ‘time for Keith to have some fun’. I’ve never wanted to strangle someone so much as at that moment.

Back in London, it was some consolation to talk again to Bill Wyman, the Stones’ unofficial archivist, over lunch at an old-fashioned French restaurant named Boulestin, which served Bill’s favourite Provençal rosé, Domaine Ott.

Afterwards, he and his then girlfriend Astrid Lundstrom were due to be photographed by David Bailey, and they invited me to go along. We’d talked so much that we arrived more than an hour late; the great photographer was fuming, but I just shut my eyes and told myself it wasn’t my fault. I expected Bailey to pose his subjects with a lot of Sixties schmoozing and cries of ‘Super!’. His only instruction to Bill, however, was ‘Stand over here, you cunt.’

I didn’t get the Keith interview until two months later, in his suite at the top of London’s Carlton Tower Hotel. I came away charmed by his articulacy and humour, and the honesty and directness that were such a contrast with Mick. Thanks to years insulated from reality by thick-eared bodyguards (quite as harmful to the brain-cells as drugs) he was also a bit of a malapropist. When I think of excitement pumping at a Stones concert, I remember Keith’s word for it: ‘andrenaline’.

Elsewhere I had a somewhat easier time. In 1982, most of the principal supporting characters in the story were still alive – miraculously so in some cases – and all of them agreed to talk to me.

My very first interviewee, in fact, was Andrew Loog Oldham, the inspired young PR man who moulded the Stones into British pop’s first anti-heroes, who almost singlehandedly created the Mick Jagger we know today, and remains unequalled in the music business (save, perhaps, by Malcolm McLaren) for vision, nerve and outrageousness.

By then minus the ‘Loog’ and living in New York, Oldham talked to me in his office in Broadway’s Brill Building, amid the shades of great songwriters like Leiber and Stoller, Goffin and King, and Neil Sedaka. We continued the conversation in downtown Chinese restaurants and then intermittently in London, long after my biography was completed and published. People do not always like what I write about them, but Oldham relished my description of him – prompted by the way he ultimately let the Stones slip through his fingers – as having ‘style to the point of self-destruction’.

Marianne Faithfull in 1982 was just coming out of the long cycle of addiction and self-degradation that had followed her break-up with Mick. I sent a message via her agent asking if she’d see me, and received a polite refusal; then the agent telephoned to say that she’d changed her mind as a result of reading Shout!

We talked in the Chelsea basement flat where Marianne was living with a punk musician, some years her junior, named Ben E. Ficial. Half-way through the evening, having discovered that I’d never taken cocaine, she insisted I must have a line and sent Ben out to get it. She’d already impressed on me (in the granddame manner that once so fascinated Mick) how ill-mannered it was to refuse drugs other people had paid for and taken trouble to obtain. So I inhaled the stuff while she stood over me, going, ‘Come on … you’ve left a bit!’ like a gym-teacher urging some sluggish pupil up the parallel bars. It did nothing for me but make my senses momentarily feel as if they were toppling sideways, and left a scab inside my nose that stayed for weeks.

Two of my most crucial informants were living essentially the same lives in the early Eighties as when they’d hung out with the Stones in the mid-Sixties. Christopher Gibbs, Mick’s one-time aesthetic counsellor, still had an antique shop on Chelsea’s King’s Road, where he gave me an eye-witness account of the legendary 1967 Redlands drug-bust. Robert Fraser, tried and imprisoned along with Mick and Keith – but not released quite so speedily – was still London’s most eclectic art-dealer. Sitting in his Mayfair flat, surrounded by original Jim Dines and John Lennons, he supplied an even more chilling description than Keith had done of heroin’s deadly seductive power.

Some sources had been tapped many times before, like Dick Taylor, Keith’s fellow student at Sidcup Art College, who was in the original Stones line-up, then went on to join an even hairier band, the Pretty Things. ‘I wondered what the spiel would be this time,’ he said after I’d explained at length how different and serious my book would be. Others came my way through the sheer luck every biographer needs. For example, there was Shirley Arnold, the Stones’ fan-club secretary and long-time assistant, who recalled a somewhat different Brian Jones from the amoral, devious, larcenous screw-up of legend. As also did Helen Spittal, a young fan who visited Brian a few days before he mysteriously drowned in his swimming-pool, leaving behind the fog of Kennedyesque conspiracy theory that lingers to this day.

Tracking down elusive interviewees sometimes became an obsession or, rather, a sickness from which one awoke cured the morning after finally reaching them. I spent months on the trail of Anita Pallenberg, by then separated from Keith. I got a phone-number for her that worked and persuaded her to see me in her suite at London’s Grosvenor House Hotel. But when I rang at the door, a croaky voice through the woodwork informed me she wasn’t well and I’d have to come back another time. Interviewing rock people hardens you to this feeling of so near, yet so far. Several more weeks passed before I was finally cured of Anita-itis. (For others, Keith included, it took longer.)

In the most bizarre instance of biographer’s luck, I also got to spend a Christmas Day at 3 Cheyne Walk, the Chelsea house Keith had abandoned when the Stones went into tax-exile in France a decade earlier. The wood-panelled eighteenth-century interior retained all its original rock ’n’ roll features, like the shrine to Jimi Hendrix in the first-floor drawing room and an en suite toilet with a bead curtain instead of a door. A few of Keith’s personal possessions were still scattered around the basement, including a right ski-boot and a block of three aircraft seats, torn from their mooring during some long-ago in-flight vandalism. The house’s temporary tenant, writer and painter Molly Parkin, was convinced the house was haunted. Might the restless spirits, I wondered, include a left ski-boot, seeking its lost brother, and a jumbo jet, seeking a lost segment of its first-class cabin?

Halfway through the project I relocated to New York, where I spent time with, among others, Allen Klein’s nephew Ron Schneider, who ran the Stones’ ‘renaissance’ American tour of 1969, and David Maysles, who filmed the free concert at Altamont, California, that was its bloody aftermath. I spent a further evening with Marianne, this time tête-à-tête, on nothing stronger than Stolichnaya vodka. And, in my greatest-ever stroke of biographer’s luck, I had an hour on the telephone with Mick’s first, most beautiful and most ill-used wife, Bianca.

I wrote the second half of the book in an artist’s loft in TriBeCa during New York’s hottest summer for decades. There was no air-conditioning, and roaches as big as fat, glossy dates galloped over the bare floorboards. The ‘loft’ (first floor actually) belonged to a sculptress who seemed to have only one subject: the naked human posterior. Sets of buttocks were everywhere, in stone or plaster, some mounted on the wall, some free-standing. In the centre of the main room, impossible to move, stood a tableau of two giant naked wrestlers, fashioned from khaki-coloured clay, balsawood and wire, and locked together in a pose showing off both their buttocks to the optimum.

I worked at a ratty silver card table, so close to the wrestlers that I could have used the anus of one as a pen-holder. I had no word processor – few writers then did – just a small portable typewriter and a pile of those peculiarly American yellow writing-pads. The cobbled street outside was a rat-run for heavy trucks en route to the Holland Tunnel; every few minutes, the building would shake as another consignment of McDonald’s or Tropicana orange juice thundered by.

For me, as for most authors, the final job in the writing of every book is polishing up its opening paragraphs. This I did in the old Long Island whaling town of Sag Harbor in midwinter, when the snow turned every street of wooden houses and picket fences into a Norman Rockwell nocturne. I worked in a bedroom decorated in nineteenth-century pioneer style, including a spiky four-poster, and ate each evening in a deserted bar whose owner greeted me with as much ceremony as if I were a party led by King Edward VII. It couldn’t have been a pleasanter contrast with buttocks and trucks in TriBeCa – or, for that matter, going on tour with the Stones.

The UK edition came out early in 1984 under the Elm Tree imprint. It reached number 6 in the Sunday Times bestsellers and was well reviewed, notably by Pete Townshend, then taking a sabbatical from The Who to work in publishing. Townshend opined that the Stones were ‘lucky’ to have me as a biographer, though I’m not sure they themselves ever felt that. In a television interview, Mick called me ‘a journalist on the make’, which I thought rich coming from him. My favourite comment was Vogue’s, that the book would appeal to ‘anyone with a scrap of naughtiness in them’.

In America, where it was re-titled Symphony for the Devil (a mistake), the critical response was more muted. There, unfortunately, it came out at the same time as The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones by Stanley Booth, who had accompanied the band in a semi-official status on their ’69 US tour and taken the next fourteen years to write it up. Although Booth’s narrative focused mainly on his efforts to get Mick and Keith to sign his publisher’s contract, with long digressions on his personal drug-use, The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones was inevitably reviewed alongside my book: in a metaphor never more apt, it muddied the waters. Newsweek magazine gave me a rave review, dismissing Booth in the same piece. But the New York Times’s Robert Palmer (not the Robert Palmer, by a very long way) declared that, spiritually speaking, the Stones were an American band, so their story could only be told properly by an American. Presumably, he meant one named R. Palmer.

In 1984, the accepted wisdom was that ‘not many people who like the Stones read books’. I’m glad this one proved the exception by staying in print continuously for 28 years – and still being around to mark their half-century.


PART ONE (#ud6910e98-c912-5b43-9cd1-8f861586d1bd)


ONE (#ud6910e98-c912-5b43-9cd1-8f861586d1bd)

‘I WAS SCHOOLED WITH A STRAP RIGHT ACROSS MY BACK’ (#ud6910e98-c912-5b43-9cd1-8f861586d1bd)

When the black man was alone and destitute, he played the blues. With a roof over his head, however leaky, he played rhythm and blues. The difference is as great as between the country and the city; between Southern cotton fields and Eastern ghettoes; between fatalistic old age and vigorous, upwardly mobile youth. It is the difference between a guitar powered only by its own mournful echo, and a guitar belligerently amplified, played with aggressive slides and swoops along the fretboard by a switchblade knife or broken bottle neck. It is the difference between bleak, dusty, desperate noontide and pulsating, pleasure-seeking night.

While the blues stretch back into vague infinities of work gangs and prison cells, rhythm and blues can be given an approximate time and place of genesis. It grew up first during and just after the Second World War, amid the mass redistribution of American blacks into their country’s war machine. Its sound was of newly explored streets and unfamiliar alleys; of cheap neon, soda-fountain sugar and wafting gasoline; of the old, sleepy twelve-bar blues reacting in astonishment, delight – and sometimes fury – to all the varied stimuli of big-city life.

Nowadays, there are expensively illustrated books to familiarize us with r & b’s golden postwar age. There are the photographs of Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed, Otis Rush or T-Bone Walker, in their white shirts and gabardine trousers, singing against heavy silver microphones, perspiring over huge guitars with pearled fretboards, in clubs, bar lounges or juke joints, some tropic Forties night below the Mason-Dixon line. There are the show bills – usually from the Apollo Theatre in Harlem – which depict the young B.B. King, Bo Diddley or Fats Domino, wearing demure tuxedos and tiny bow ties, and smiling with a strained, reassuring politeness.

The smile of an r & b artist circa 1949 was the smile of someone expecting to be beaten up at any moment. The blues – stigmatized since the Twenties as ‘race’ or ‘specialty’ music – had been generally too esoteric for whites to understand. Rhythm and blues, with its flash suits, flaunted saxes and unrepressed sexuality, seemed to offer the most blatant threat to respectable – that is to say, all-white – society. It was denounced as lewd, ungodly, demented, a corrupter of children. Its clubs were raided and wrecked by white vigilantes; its performers attacked and, in not a few cases, lynched. Up to 1956 or so, every blues band travelling in its own country was a band on the run.

Throughout the Forties and early Fifties, its greatest creative period, the music remained segregated and submerged. Though r & b songs often appeared in the American hit parade, they were bowdlerized versions, purged of their sexual content by all-white crooners and dance bands. Roll With Me, Henry, an overt sexual challenge, for instance, became Dance With Me, Henry, an invitation to foxtrot. The original artists, with a few exceptions, were unknown to the general record-buying public. They could perform only in black clubs, record only on obscure black-owned labels, have their discs played only by the handful of radio stations controlled by blacks. When Bo Diddley finally got a booking on nationwide TV in 1958, it was stipulated that, to preserve decency, he must perform completely motionless. On camera, Diddley forgot his promise, lapsed into a shuffling pas seul and was docked his entire fee.

‘Help save the youth of America!’ – so ran one anti-r & b pamphlet of the early Fifties. ‘Don’t let your children buy or listen to these Negro records. The screaming, idiotic words and savage music are undermining the morals of our white American youth …’

A prophecy of things to come if ever there was one.

It is a journey further than any bluesman could imagine from Beale Street, Memphis, to Bexley in deepest Kent and the playground of Maypole infants’ school, where, one sunny day in 1950, teacher Ken Llewellyn called a group of his favourite pupils together for an informal photograph. The boys who assembled were the brightest and liveliest in Mr Llewellyn’s class. They included Robert Wallis and John Spinks and Michael Jagger, the least likely of all to stand still for a photograph. The others reined him in with arms around his shoulders, neck and waist. They stood together in their flannel shorts, their elastic school belts with metal S-clasps, English schoolboys at their apotheosis, laughing into the warm, safe, quiet Fifties sky.

Kent as a county begins in London, south-east of the Thames, in ranks of suburbs barely distinguishable from one another, crossed by railway bridges, whose names are synonyms for dullness and decorum – Bexley, Bromley, Beckenham, Dartford, Sidcup, Sevenoaks and the rest. One must travel far on grubby trains, crossing many bridges, to discover what is still called ‘the Garden of England’, with its apple orchards, hop fields and oast houses. It is a large and bewilderingly imprecise county, ranging from the miles of drab dockland around Chatham and Rochester to the Regency splendours of Royal Tunbridge Wells; from the medieval majesty of Canterbury Cathedral to the faded Victorian seaside of Margate and Broadstairs, where Charles Dickens wrote Bleak House. Somewhere in the sprawling landscape is the field in which Mr Pickwick lost his hat while watching military manoeuvres, the bucolic landscape, bespoken by Alfred Jingle, of ‘apples, hops, cherries, women’.

Least romantic of all Kentish suburbs is Dartford, where, on December 7, 1940, Basil Joseph Jagger married Eva Scutts. The bridegroom was a slight, quiet-looking man whose wiry frame betrayed his calling as physical-training teacher. The bride was a pretty young woman with a wide smile and that air of determined gentility which sometimes goes with slight foreignness. Eva, in fact, had been born in Australia and had emigrated to Britain with her family in her early teens. The best man was Basil’s more ebullient brother, Albert. Afterwards, there was a reception for fifty guests at the Coneybeare Hall.

Basil – known as Joe to his family and friends – was not merely a drill sergeant in white singlet and gym shoes, exhorting local schoolchildren to lift up their knees and swing their arms. He subsequently became a lecturer in physical education at Strawberry Hill College, Twickenham. Horace Walpole’s sumptuous mock-Gothic mansion was – and still is – the nucleus of this teacher-training institute, run by a Catholic order, the Vincentians, to supply Catholic schools all over the world. Joe Jagger’s job was to give a grounding in physical education simple and comprehensive enough to be passed on to student priests or mission children in the wilds of Africa or Asia.

He also worked as a lecturer with the nascent British Sports Council. His speciality was basketball, an American sport not much in vogue in mid-Fifties Britain. Joe Jagger was among the pioneers of the British basketball movement and was the author of what remains the definitive book on the subject, published by Faber and Faber in 1962.

His wife Eva was a lively and energetic person whose vivacity at times seemed to verge on the domineering. Eva had always been secretly rather ashamed of her Australian origin, with its implied stigma of roughness and unsophistication. Marriage to Joe, with his markedly superior social standing and education, increased her determination to show herself the equal of any true ‘Brit’. Their small house, in Denver Road, Dartford, was scoured by Eva into a spotless state the equal of any neighbour’s. Joe and Eva’s whole life as a young married couple was dictated by consideration of what those ever-vigilant neighbours might think.

Their first son, Michael Philip, was born on July 26, 1943. The tide of the Second World War had long since turned in the Allies’ favour, but Britain was still an embattled redoubt of air-raid precautions, white-helmeted wardens, clothing coupons and butcher-shop queues. Though the RAF nightly pounded Hamburg and Essen in ‘thousand-bomber raids’, attacks by the German Luftwaffe on London continued. The Kent suburbs heard the distant thunder and saw the horizontal flashes as the poor old East End caught it from the sky again.

Michael Jagger was a child of absolutely conventional beauty, with chubby cheeks, guileless eyes and hair that assumed a reddish tinge. As a toddler, he proved amiable and obedient, though prone to boisterous spirits that could sometimes go too far. Once, on holiday at the seaside, his mother remembers, he marched along the beach, deliberately kicking down every other child’s sandcastle in his path. His reign as an adored only child lasted until 1947, when Eva presented him with a younger brother, Christopher.

Home life for the Jagger brothers was pervaded by their mother’s house-proud fastidiousness and their father’s devotion to physical fitness. Their Denver Road neighbours were accustomed to seeing the small back garden of the Jagger house littered with sports equipment – weight-training barbells, cricket stumps and archery targets. Other children asked home to tea by Mike or Chris were somewhat intimidated by the schoolmasterly regimen, which included Grace before meals and a system of fixed penalties and punishments for misbehaviour.

Mike’s physical prowess showed through early at Maypole infants’ school and afterwards at Wentworth County Primary, to which his Maypole teacher, Ken Llewellyn, an expatriate Welshman, had also transferred. Mr Llewellyn remembers him fondly as one of an outstanding junior class whose ascent to grammar school and university seemed assured. ‘It was a joy to teach them. They were full of life, full of all sorts of questions. I took them for games as well. Mike was already looking like a useful cricketer. If I remember him at all, it’s running in from the playground with both knees grazed and a great big smile on his face.’

John Spinks lived in Heather Drive, Dartford, not far from the Jaggers in Denver Road. He was Mike’s playmate in the sandpit that lay between their houses. When Mike accidentally impaled a hand on a spiked metal railing, it was John Spinks who, with praiseworthy coolness, pulled it free. To John, he seemed at times almost too conventionally law-abiding and obedient. ‘I always thought he was a bit of a mother’s boy. He did everything he was told at home. He was an indiarubber character, really. He could bend any way to stay out of trouble.’

Even as a small boy, his other friend Robert Wallis remembers, he had a strangely remote, abstracted quality – a sense of being preoccupied with matters far weightier than their schoolboy games together. Joe Jagger was currently acting as adviser to a commercial TV programme called Seeing Sport, designed to promote physical fitness in children. Once a week, he would take his elder son with him to the studios, to act as model for instruction about athletics or camping. ‘Mike is going to show you how to light the fire,’ the voiceover would say, or: ‘Here’s Mike, getting into the tent.’ ‘He became a bit of a star for doing that,’ Robert Wallis says. ‘He always had some interest outside the ones we had as a group. He gave the idea the he’d sooner be somewhere else than with us, doing far more glamorous things.’

Robert, John and Mike took the eleven-plus exam together, passing it as effortlessly as Ken Llewellyn had predicted. This crucial step determined whether they would go on to receive a mundane basic education at a secondary modern or be admitted to the far superior privileges of Dartford Grammar. Eva Jagger had every reason to be proud of her boy in his smart new uniform of gold-trimmed maroon blazer and cap.

Dartford Grammar School, when Mike Jagger arrived there in the early Fifties, possessed most features of an English public school – masters in gowns, house captains, societies, ceremonial Speech Days, ritualized athletics and sport. As its school magazine, The Dartfordian, attests, scholarship was generally excellent, yielding an unusually large annual export to Britain’s redbrick universities. Prominent in the school curriculum was the Army Cadet Force, designed to cushion the shock of the two years’ compulsory National Service each boy would face before embarking on his chosen career.

At Dartford Grammar, Mike Jagger’s academic promise – and his buoyant enthusiasm – mysteriously evaporated. From the first form to the fifth he merely coasted, doing only enough work to stay out of trouble. It became a sore provocation to the several teachers in whose subjects he was obviously gifted. The senior languages master, Dr Bennett, particularly resented his indifference, for – aided by unusual powers of mimicry – he showed all the signs of a first-class linguist. ‘There was one occasion when I spoke to him about his attitude very severely,’ Dr Bennett says. ‘He was so deliberately insulting that I simply knocked him down.’

His apathy extended even to sport. He seemed to lose interest in cricket after discovering he was not the deadly spin bowler he had supposed himself at Wentworth. The only sport he played regularly was basketball, his father’s speciality. Joe Jagger, in fact, introduced the sport to Dartford Grammar and helped coach the Basketball Society, of which Mike was Hon. Sec. ‘He was most keen on that, I think, because it was American,’ Robert Wallis says. ‘Mike was the one who had real American basketball boots to play in when the rest of us only had gym shoes.’

His appearance, from the age of fourteen onward, seemed to reflect his slack and insubordinate attitude. The chubby, laughing schoolboy of Ken Llewellyn’s class had grown into an adolescent whose skinny frame, hovering on the edge of effeteness, caused uniform distaste among his teachers. Likewise his face, with its somnolent eyes, its retroussé nose; most of all, the wide, sagging lips, set in what seemed a permanent grimace of either scorn or dumb insolence.

As he moved higher in the school, he became adept at flouting its dress regulations. Instead of the prescribed black lace-up shoes, he would arrive for class in French slip-on moccasins. In place of his blazer, he acquired a black, gold-threaded ‘Teddy boy’ jacket, which, to Dr Bennett’s annoyance, he wore even to the annual Founder’s Day ceremony.

He was already a source of much discussion at the nearby girls’ grammar school, where opinion as to his attractiveness remained sharply divided. In terms of conventional handsomeness he was obviously a non-starter. Yet some of the very girls who dismissed him as ugly or ‘a weed’ still looked for him in the after-school swarm and made bold attempts to talk to him – since he seemed uninterested in talking to them. It became almost a competition to pierce that scornful reserve and bring forth that rare smile which could split open the sullen face, making him look still the happy schoolboy who had laughed into the sun.

In 1955 came the plague called rock ’n’ roll. Bill Haley and the Comets invaded Britain’s sleepy hit parade with Rock Around the Clock, See You Later, Alligator, Everybody Razzle Dazzle and Rockin’ Through the Rye. Britain’s regimented teenage boys awoke to the sound of a braying sax, a slapping, spinning double bass, a voice that did not croon but jerked and jogged and hiccupped and jumped. What Haley was in fact playing was black rhythm and blues, purged of its bite and wit and wrapped in a swing or country-western beat. The very phrase ‘rock and roll’ was black slang for energetic fucking. Even in America, its origin had scarcely been realized. In Britain it was simply the most exciting noise that ever confused an adolescent’s glands. A British tour by Haley and the Comets in 1956 left a trail of wrecked theatres and slashed cinema seats. Music became, for the first time, a source of conflict between the young, who adored this outrageous new noise, and their parents, who loathed it and strove to extinguish it by every possible means.

A few months earlier, the British Decca label had released a record which, though quieter than Haley’s joyous gibberish, was destined to transform many lives more permanently. The record – one of the newfangled ‘long playing’ kind – was New Orleans Joys, by the Chris Barber Jazz Band.

Barber, twenty-five, led Britain’s most commercially successful Dixieland band. He remained, however, principally an archivist, devoted to keeping alive sources and style that might otherwise have been overlooked in the current ‘Trad’ boom. His New Orleans Joys LP included two blues songs played in the ‘skiffle’ style evolved in the Depression years, when musicians were often reduced to instruments extemporized from household utensils. The songs, Rock Island Line and John Henry, were performed by a primitive rhythm section of double bass, kitchen washboard and banjo, the last played by a skinny Glaswegian named Tony Donegan who had changed his name to Lonnie in honour of the American bluesman Lonnie Johnson.

The two songs, released on a single in 1956, became a stupendous British Top Ten hit. Haley and his group, in their plaid jackets and bow ties, owed their appeal to outlandish remoteness. But Donegan, with his nasal whine, his ex-serviceman’s haircut and backing of mundane domestic implements, made comparably exciting sounds that anyone could reproduce. Within days of Lonnie Donegan’s first appearance on national television, acolyte skiffle groups had sprung up all over Britain. The craze centred on London’s Soho, its jazz cellars and newly fashionable espresso coffee houses, into whose gloomy recesses record-company talent scouts now plunged in a hectic search for ersatz Lonnie Donegans. For the first time ever, musical talent was held to be of secondary importance to looks. Any boy who played a guitar and wore a plaid shirt with the collar turned up, if he sat around long enough in coffee bars like the Heaven and Hell, the Gyre and Gimble or the 2 I’s, could hope to follow the starry path of Lonnie Donegan or ‘Britain’s First rock ’n’ roller,’ Tommy Steele.

All over Britain, in suburban living rooms, boys crouched together with their matchwood guitars, their mothers’ washboards and basses improvised from tea chests and wire, struggling to learn the blues songs made popular by Donegan and his successors, grateful for the easy chords and pattered tempo, blissfully unaware that the lyrics, as Woody Guthrie or Huddie Leadbetter had written them, were violent political tracts; that Midnight Special was a cotton slave’s suicidal lament or that Lonnie Johnson’s plaintively sweet Careless Love was a song about syphilis, ending with murder.

Eva Jagger remembers that even as a very small boy her elder son would stand in front of the family wireless set, singing along to music with words made up in his head. Most of all he seemed to like Latin American rhythms, which he would accompany with a stream of Spanish-sounding nonsense. At the age of ten, on a Spanish holiday with Joe and Eva, he posed for a snapshot in a straw sombrero, playing a toy guitar. Sombrero tipped back, guitar flourished flamenco-style, the pose was, even then, self-consciously theatrical.

The skiffle craze swept through Dartford Grammar as through almost every other British school. Two of Mike’s friends, Bob Beckwith and Alan Etherington, acquired guitars and began practising together. But Mike, though he too had a guitar, joined none of the ad hoc classroom skiffle groups that would strum together, perched on desks during break time.

He never really liked Bill Haley, or even Elvis Presley, after the gold-suited, magical lout had superseded Haley as the corrupter of Britain’s youth. His first fan worship, significantly, was for Little Richard, the original black rock ’n’ roll star whose r & b beginnings were now camouflaged in a demented scream, a wobbling drape suit and an aura – though few perceived it then – of sexual ambiguity.

He did succumb, as most did, to the charm of Buddy Holly and the Crickets. Holly is blessed by countless guitar demigods for having first showed them the way from skiffle to rock ’n’ roll, in simple but inventive chord sequences through G and E. As his enormous output shows, he was a stylistic chameleon, equally at home with Texas rockabilly and black r & b. Soon to die, he visited Britain on tour only once, in March 1958. Mike Jagger went with another Dartford Grammar School friend, Dick Taylor, to see the Holly stage show at the Granada Cinema, Woolwich. Buddy Holly that night played one of the more esoteric items in his repertoire – a song called Not Fade Away, set to a halting, staccato beat invented by the blues star Bo Diddley. Dick Taylor remembers what an impression that song in particular made on Mike Jagger.

A wispy, amiable boy, son of a plumber in nearby Bexleyheath, Dick Taylor came nearer than most to penetrating the Jagger reserve. For Dick knew about American music far more exotic and exciting than Elvis and Little Richard. What Dick Taylor liked was real blues – the scratched and blurred master sketches that the rock ’n’ roll industry had turned into glib cartoons. It was at Dick Taylor’s house that Mike Jagger listened to Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed, Howlin’ Wolf, giants of the urban blues with heart-shivering voices, calling and answering their virtuoso guitars, that could change the view beyond the lace curtains from Kentish suburbia to the dark and windy canyons along Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive. From then on, the blues became Mike’s consuming passion.

Part of the music’s attraction was its sheer unavailability. Simply hearing it was complicated enough. You could not buy blues records in the Dartford or Bexleyheath record shops. As with all truly worthwhile things, it involved a trip to London. Mike and Dick would spend their Saturday afternoons at the jazz record shops in Charing Cross Road, thumbing through the blues ‘import’ stock in sleeves already dog-eared and thumbed in their wandering journey across the cultural hemispheres. The very label logos excited them – not boring British Decca and Philips, but Okeh and Crown and Chess and Sue and Imperial and Delmark.

If listening to blues was difficult, seeing it was virtually impossible. Though famous bluesmen like Big Bill Broonzy did perform in Britain during the late Fifties, news of their coming did not percolate down the line to Dartford. The only glimpse given to Dartford Grammar School’s secret blues caucus involved sitting through Jazz on a Summer’s Day, a film documentary about the American Newport Jazz Festival. Almost at the end, a lanky young black man got up onstage and sang through a derisive grin and played a red guitar that dangled almost to the level of his wildly knocking knees. That, for Dick Taylor, Mike Jagger and countless other British boys, was their first tantalizing sight of Chuck Berry. The film sequence ended with Berry dodging a hail of flashbulbs thrown by photographers in fury that the pure jazz had been so disrupted.

Mike Jagger’s earliest attempt at blues singing was at the house of a boy named David Soames in Wentworth Drive, Dartford. David was trying to form a rhythm and blues group with Mike Turner, another ex-pupil of Wentworth County Primary School. Both quickly decided that Mike Jagger sang in far too strange a fashion to be their vocalist. He accepted the decision without rancour and afterwards walked home with Mike Turner, discussing their forthcoming GCE O-Level examinations.

Dick Taylor owned a second-hand drum kit, which gained him admittance to several small amateur groups otherwise top-heavy with guitarists. By his last year at Dartford Grammar, he was practising regularly with Bob Beckwith, Alan Etherington and Mike Jagger. It was hardly a group at all, since they had no equipment – only the Etheringtons’ radiogram to amplify the guitars – and because Mike Jagger, their singer, refused to play a guitar himself, as was customary. He just stood or sat there and sang, diffidently until his powers as a mimic came to his aid. ‘The first song I remember him doing was Richie Valens’s La Bamba,’ Dick Taylor says. ‘Mick used to come out with this stream of words that sounded just like Spanish. He’d just make them up as he went along.’

The group was called Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys, in order that there be no mistake concerning their musical intentions. From first to last in their two-year history, Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys never played to an audience other than Dick Taylor’s mum. ‘She dug Mick right from the start,’ Taylor says. ‘She always told him he’d got something special.’

Their repertoire was limited to the precious store of blues import discs Dick Taylor had collected – Howlin’ Wolf’s Smokestack Lighting; Don and Bob’s Good Morning Little Schoolgirl; Dale Hawkins’s Susie Q. ‘We never even thought of playing to other people,’ Dick Taylor says. ‘We thought we were the only people in England who’d ever heard of r & b.’

After Jazz on a Summer’s Day, Chuck Berry dominated their thoughts. It was Mike Jagger who found out you could get Berry records by writing direct to the Chess record company in Chicago. Berry’s voice, light and sharp and strangely white-sounding, had a pitch not dissimilar to his own. Singing along with Sweet Little Sixteen or Reelin’ and Rockin’, he suddenly felt something more than just a mumbling impersonator. And Chuck Berry was the first intimation that rhythm and blues might be an expression of youth. Each Berry song was a novel in miniature about American teenage life, teeming with brand-name cars, sassy high-school queens and anarchic exhortations to forsake the classroom in favour of car-driving, singing and dancing.

Practice sessions took place at Alan Etherington’s house – because of the radiogram – or in Dick Taylor’s bedroom at Bexleyheath, seated on the bed around a big old-fashioned tape recorder. Dick remembers an anxious moment when Mike turned up to rehearse for the first time after accidentally biting a piece out of his tongue in the school gymnastics class. ‘He was terrified it was going to affect the way he sang. We all kept telling him it made no difference. But he did seem to lisp a bit and sound more bluesy after that.’

His own home, though welcoming to his friends, did not suggest itself as a practice place for Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys. Eva Jagger was not discouraging. She had nothing against their music, she told them – it was just that the neighbours might mind the noise. Joe Jagger’s main concern, as always, was keeping his son up to the mark in physical education. Once, when Mike was going off with Dick Taylor, his father called out, ‘Michael – don’t forget your weight training.’ Mike turned back obediently, went into the garden and exercised with barbells for a conscientious quarter of an hour.

He had passed his GCE O-Levels in a respectable enough seven subjects, and had qualified for entry into the Sixth Arts form to do Advanced Level English, History and French. He also became a school prefect, despite the headmaster’s manifest disapproval. The head, Mr Hudson, had never quite forgiven him for leading what seemed like an organized insurrection by lower-school boys against compulsory enrolment in the school Army Cadet Force.

He stuck out the two-year A-Level course with no idea what he was working for, beyond a vague notion that journalism might be interesting. For a brief time, too, he toyed with the idea of becoming a radio disc jockey. A London record producer named Joe Meek was currently advertising for would-be deejays to submit demonstration tapes. Robert Wallis remembers copying out Meek’s address from a newspaper and passing it on to Mike Jagger. But the project languished, apparently under parental discouragement.

His A-Level passes in English and History were only mediocre but by then it did not matter. He had already secured himself a place at the London School of Economics, to follow a two-year course in the subject that seemed best suited to his indecisive talents. ‘I wanted to do arts but thought I ought to do science,’ he says now. ‘Economics seemed about halfway in between.’

So, each morning, from the autumn of 1961, Mike Jagger, in his striped student scarf, joined the daily crowd of business people at Dartford railway station, his face turned towards a future that still seemed to lie only a little way up the commuter line to Victoria.

Each morning, from the top deck of the green Kentish bus, Dick Taylor would see the same thin, slouching figure trailing reluctantly up the long hill to Sidcup Art College. Winter or summer, Keith Richards wore the same tight blue jeans, Italian pointed shoes, denim jacket and the violet-coloured shirt that never seemed to be given a rest or a wash. In summer as well as winter, he contrived to look pinched and cold, his bullet head accentuating protuberant ears, his nose red raw, his mouth specked with teenage pimples. In one hand, he held a Player’s Weights cigarette; in the other, his only possession, a guitar. Dick Taylor knew it would be another day of abandoned study, and of rock ’n’ roll practice in the college lavatories.

Guitars, and loving them, are among Keith’s earliest memories. His mother’s father, Theodore Augustus Dupree – the family were originally Huguenots from the Channel Islands – led a small semi-professional dance band in the 1930s and himself played several instruments including saxophone, violin and guitar. The guitar still stood in ‘Grandfather Gus’s’ house, in a corner of the sitting room. Keith remembers with what excitement, even as a tiny boy, he would approach it and draw his hands with a soft thrum across its untuned strings.

‘He was a great character, my grandfather Gus. At that time, when I was small, he had a job in some tailoring sweatshop – he’d always be bringing little squares of felt out of his pocket and showing us. He carried on playing music, too, right up to the Sixties – touring the American air force bases with a country band. He’d got a job as janitor at Highgate School where Yehudi Menuhin’s son was a pupil. My grandfather, in the end, got to know Yehudi; they’d even have a bit of a scrape together on their violins. What a fantastic hustler!’

Bert Richards, Keith’s father, was a very different character, quiet and cautious with a reserve that – his son thinks now – was created largely by overwork and exhaustion. Bert worked as a supervisor at Osram’s light bulb factory in Hammersmith. He got up each day at 5 a.m. and did not come home in the evening until six. ‘He’d have something to eat, watch TV for a couple of hours, then go to bed, absolutely knackered,’ Keith says. ‘He must have been horrified to see what a thug he’d produced in me.’

The boy born in December 1943 thus grew up closest to his mother, Doris, a warm and jolly woman who had inherited the Dupree fondness for music and romance. Keith remembers how, as Doris did the housework, the radio would constantly pour out American big band music. When he first started school and was too nervous to walk there, Doris carried him all the way, bundled lovingly in her arms. From his earliest childhood, she encouraged him to do, and be, exactly what he wanted.

As a small boy, Keith had a beautiful soprano voice, good enough to be heard in Westminster Abbey itself. ‘Only three of us, in our white surplices, used to be good enough to do the hallelujahs. I was a star then – coming up by coach to London to sing in the inter-schools competition at the Albert Hall. I think that was my first taste of show business: when my voice broke and they didn’t want me in the choir any more. Suddenly it was “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.” I think that was when I stopped being a good boy and started to be a yob.’

Doris and Bert Richards lived in Chastillian Road, Dartford, just a street or two away from the Jaggers in Denver Road. Keith attended Wentworth County Primary School and was taught by Ken Llewellyn. He had met Mike Jagger, too, briefly, in the scream and jostle of the infants’ playground. Jagger, who customarily affects to remember nothing past, can none the less recall what a strong impression Keith made on him. ‘I asked him what he wanted to do when he grew up. He said he wanted to be a cowboy like Roy Rogers and play a guitar. I wasn’t that impressed by Roy Rogers, but the bit about the guitar did interest me.’

That first acquaintance was to be short-lived. Doris and Bert moved soon afterwards from Chastillian Road to a house on a new council estate on the other side of Dartford. Thereafter, Keith Richards became the very last kind of companion Joe and Eva Jagger could have wished for their elder son.

The Richardses lived on the Temple Hill Estate, in a small semi-detached house, 6 Spielman Road, the estate was brand new, dumped down on raw new tarmac roads without amusements or amenities. Bert Richards, as before, got up at five each morning to go to work at Osram’s in Hammersmith. Doris worked part-time in a Dartford baker’s shop. And Keith, between his father’s indifference and his mother’s over-indulgence, began to go resolutely to the bad.

It was not that he lacked ability – even talent. He could be, Ken Llewellyn remembers, a bright, attentive boy, responsive especially to words and language. He enjoyed cricket, swimming and – most surprisingly – tennis. He was, besides, good-natured and open, with a mischievous wit that made even schoolmasters unbend towards him.

What he could not do was accept discipline in any form. It was a lawlessness partly compounded of running wild on the estate; partly of his mother’s soft-hearted pampering. Doris did not mind if he failed to do his homework or went AWOL from cross-country runs or – as increasingly happened – if he failed to turn up for school altogether. She would leave him money at home to buy fish and chips for his lunch. Even when he dumped the fish and chip leavings in the kitchen sink, newspaper and all, Doris cleared up after him without complaint.

By the time he was thirteen, ordinary teachers despaired of educating him. It was decided he should go straight to Dartford Technical School, where his father hoped he might succumb to learning a useful trade.

Now, however, the long-suffering Bert Richards faced an additional vexation. ‘Every time the poor guy came in at night,’ Keith says, ‘he’d find me sitting at the top of the stairs with my guitar, playing and banging on the wall for percussion. He was great about it, really. He’d only mutter, “Stop that bloody noise.”’

Doris had bought Keith his first guitar, for seven pounds, from her wages at the baker’s shop. ‘I never knew what make it was,’ Keith says. ‘The name had been painted out.’ The only stipulation Doris made, supported by Grandfather Gus, was that he must learn to play properly. Soon afterwards, she gave him more money for a record player, from Dartford Co-Op shop, so he could learn by listening to the skiffle and rock ’n’ roll hits.

Now was the time of British rock ’n’ roll – of Tommy Steele and Terry Dene and the ‘cover’ versions of American songs put out on a label called Embassy that was sold only at Woolworth’s. Embassy records were the first that Keith Richards tried to copy, sitting at the top of the stairs at 6 Spielman Road. ‘I always sat on the top stair to practise. You could get the best echo that way – or standing in the bath.’

He soon realized that what made British rock ’n’ roll so tinny and false was not the vocal so much as the backing – the staid guitars played by bored ‘session men’, and sounding just as plumply complacent. Better by far to scrape up the full six shillings and fourpence for the original American version with guitars that shrilled and echoed as from a separate universe. Keith’s next idol, after his grandfather Gus, was Scotty Moore, Elvis Presley’s session guitarist. He still thinks Moore’s solo on Presley’s I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone the most exciting thing ever recorded. ‘I could never work out how he played it, and I still can’t. It’s such a wonderful thing that I almost don’t want to know.’

His guitar, allied with the life of a Dartford Teddy boy, became the final, irresistible temptation to play truant. In 1958, he was expelled from Dartford Technical School. A sympathetic teacher suggested there might be one last hope in the art college in the neighbouring dormitory town of Sidcup.

Sidcup Art College sounds immeasurably grander than it ever was. It existed, in fact, to give just such last chances to those whose inglorious school careers had fitted them for nothing better than what was then belittingly called ‘commercial art’. Sidcup’s art college was remarkably similar to the one in Hope Street, Liverpool, which – also in 1958 – admitted a similar habitual truant named John Lennon.

For Keith, Sidcup Art College was a first introduction to authentic blues music, never captured on a Woolworth’s Embassy label. A group of students – including Dick Taylor – would meet in an empty room next to the principal’s office, and play Little Walter and Big Bill Broonzy songs among the drawing boards and paste pots. It was from one of them Keith acquired his first electric guitar, swapping it for a pile of records in a hasty transaction in the college ‘bogs’.

So far as Dick Taylor was concerned, Keith Richards was just an incorrigible and hilarious distraction from the business of studying graphic design. ‘When I think of Keith at college, I think of dustbins burning. We used to get these baths of silk-screen wash, throw them over the dustbins and then throw on a match. The dustbins used to explode with a great “woomph”.

‘We were all popping pills then – to stay awake without sleep more than to get high. We used to buy these nose inhalers called Nostrilene, for the benzedrine, or even take girls’ period pills. Opposite the college, there was this little park with an aviary that had a cockatoo in it. Cocky the Cockatoo we used to call it. Keith used to feed it pep pills and make it stagger around on its perch. If ever we were feeling bored, we’d go and give another upper to Cocky the Cockatoo.’

One morning, on his railway journey from Dartford to Sidcup, Keith happened to get into the same dreary commuter carriage as Mike Jagger, en route to the London School of Economics. They recognized each other vaguely from Wentworth County Primary School and a subsequent meeting when Mike had a holiday job selling ice cream outside Dartford Library. This meeting might have been as casual as the previous ones were it not that Mike had under his arm a pile of import blues albums he had got from America by mail order. Keith noticed the sacred names of Chuck Berry and Little Walker, and, with some incredulity, asked the striped-scarfed LSE student if he liked that kind of music, too.

Chatting further, they discovered they had a common friend in Dick Taylor. Dick had already mentioned to Keith that he was rehearsing with a group sworn to play nothing but blues and r & b. By the time their train reached Sidcup, it was half-arranged that Keith Richards should come along and try rehearsing with Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys.

He brought with him his semi-solid Hofner cutaway guitar and what seemed to the others a stunning virtuosity. Sitting on the stairs at home, he had managed to master nearly all Chuck Berry’s introductions and solos, even the swarm of notes running through the Berry classic Johnny B. Goode that created an effect like two guitars at once. He understood that even this complex break, like two guitars in unison, required something more than simply playing notes fast. ‘Keith sounded great – but he wasn’t flash,’ Dick Taylor says. ‘When he came in, you could feel something holding the band together.’

Keith’s arrival, even so, did not advance the fortunes of Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys. They continued to practise as before, with no thought of any audience beyond Dick Taylor’s mum – no inkling that r & b music was a secret vouchsafed to anyone in Britain but themselves. The nearest they came to a public performance was playing together for a snapshot outside the Taylors’ back door. The snap shows Dick and Keith with their guitars parodying Chuck Berry’s duck walk, and Mike Jagger, in his student’s button-up cardigan, striking a dramatic pose against the background of drainpipe and pebbledashed council house wall.

Music in that era forged many friendships between personalities that might otherwise have remained polar opposites. It had happened three years earlier between cynical, trouble-prone John Lennon and cautious, conservative Paul McCartney in Liverpool. It happened now, when Keith Richards, the ‘Ted’ from a council flat on the wrong side of Dartford, started to go around with Mike Jagger, the economics student from middle-class Denver Road.

Though the LSE in 1961 was not the political hotbed it later became, a mild radicalism was as de rigueur among its students as the prevailing ‘bohemian’ look. For Mike Jagger it was to be little more than a look, expressed in his new leather tie and knitted cardigan. Just the same, armed with new words like ‘capitalism’ and ‘proletariat’, he seemed intent on rejecting his careful upbringing and sliding down to the class his mother so abhorred.

At the LSE, he dropped the ‘Mike’, which now seemed redolent of bourgeois young men with sports cars. ‘Mike Jagger’ would henceforward be a creature only in the memory of his earliest friends. It was Mick Jagger who hung around with Keith Richards, talking in broad Cockney and affecting some of Keith’s chaotic nonchalance and street-tough recklessness.

The mimicry was not completely one-sided. Keith on occasion could become thoughtful, self-effacing, even shy. It was as if each provided the other with a role he had desired but never dared assume before. Dick Taylor noticed what was to become a regular interchange of identities. ‘One day, Mick would become Keith. But then on another day, Keith could go all like Mick. You never knew which way round it would be.

‘But from then on, Mick and Keith were together. Whoever else came into the band or left, there’d always be Mick and Keith.’

Before Alexis Korner and his wife Bobbie went to bed in their flat in Moscow Road, Bayswater, they would be careful to leave the kitchenette window slightly ajar at the bottom. Next to the window was a table positioned in such a way that the late-arriving or unexpected guest could enter by rolling sideways across it. When Alexis and Bobbie got up next morning, four or five sleeping figures might be peacefully disposed under the table, against the cooker legs or among the food bowls of the Korners’ several cats.

The sleepers were American blues musicians on tour, for whom Alexis and Bobbie Korner provided refuge and hospitality in an otherwise bewildering land. Big Bill Broonzy, Muddy Waters, T-Bone Walker, the guitar giants so often visualized by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in their windy and harsh Chicago heaven, might be sitting barely twenty miles from Dartford in that Bayswater kitchenette, eating the Southern-style ham hocks that Bobbie Korner had learned to cook.

Alexis Korner’s antecedents were as richly cosmopolitan as the syllables of his name suggest. His father was Austrian, a former cavalry officer, and his mother was Greco-Turkish. By his father’s first marriage he had a Russian step-grandmother. He himself was born in Paris and spent his early childhood in Switzerland and North Africa. There was something more than a little Moroccan in his dark skin and tightly curled hair, and the vibrant, husky voice which only accidental circumstance was to bend into the brogue of suburban West London.

His father, the former cavalry officer, was an autocratic, distant figure, vaguely connected with high finance and – Alexis later thought – international espionage. ‘I know he lost a lot of money in the Twenties, when Britain went off the gold standard, and he couldn’t live as well as he had before. He was also supposed to have had something to do with the scandal surrounding the Zinoviev Letter. I’m sure he’d done something pretty major to earn the gratitude of the British government. When war broke out in 1939, we were living in England; my father could have expected to be interned as an enemy alien. Instead, he got his naturalization papers as a British subject virtually overnight.’

One Saturday in 1940, Alexis, a pupil of St Paul’s School, went from his home in Ealing to nearby Shepherd’s Bush market to indulge in the boyish pastime of pilfering from the stalls. His haul that morning included a record by the blues pianist Jimmy Yancey. ‘From that moment,’ he remembered later, ‘I only wanted to do one thing. I wanted to play boogie-woogie piano.’

When he attempted to do so on the family piano, his father would come along in a fury and slam down the lid. Nor was the elder Korner any better pleased when Alexis brought home his first guitar. ‘My father used to say the guitar was a “woman’s instrument”. He imagined it in operettas, tied with pink ribbon.’

Two years’ military service brought relief from this parental prejudice. Alexis served with the British Army in West Germany and – as well as playing football for his regiment – became a part-time announcer over the Forces’ radio network. He could saturate himself, not only in the music played to British troops, but also in the far more exciting output of AFN, the American Forces Network. As surreptitiously listening German boys already knew, AFN broadcast the very best in jazz and swing and even types of black music not available to civilians back home in the States. So the blues took root, on NATO bases and, later, in local clubs, amid pornographic bookshops, strip joints and mud-wrestling pits.

Back in London, working in the shipping firm owned by his mother’s Greek family, Alexis gravitated naturally to that first postwar ‘younger generation’, which haunted the Soho cellars, avid for politics and traditional jazz. ‘We were elitist – and highly political. We used to speak quite seriously in those days of founding a “fourth class”. There’d be the upper class, the middle class, the working class and us. That was how the blues came into it. When we heard a Leadbelly song or a Woody Guthrie song, we knew we were listening to a powerful political protest.’

The principal jazz bandleaders of the period did what they could to bring blues to the larger Dixieland audience. Humphrey Lyttelton, trumpeter, Old Etonian and friend of royalty, had brought Big Bill Broonzy to Britain as early as 1953. Ken Colyer, most pure of all the jazz and folk purists, featured some of the greatest American bluesmen at his London club, Studio 51, just off Leicester Square.

Chris Barber remained the music’s most passionate, consistent champion – the only one, in Korner’s words, to ‘put his money where his mouth was’ and plough actual cash into keeping blues alive. Barber, in the early Fifties, had been the moving spirit behind a formal conservation body, the National Jazz League. The league flourished, acquiring sufficient capital to buy its own Soho club, the Marquee in Wardour Street.

Alexis Korner joined the Barber band as banjoist during Lonnie Donegan’s absence on National Service. When Donegan returned and Rock Island Line became a hit, Korner was well placed, had he desired, to participate in the nine days’ skiffle wonder. He almost joined another successful skiffle group, the Vipers, signed up at the 2 I’s coffee bar by a then obscure EMI-label executive called George Martin. Instead, he formed his own group, bowing to commercial pressure with the word ‘skiffle’ only for its first extended-play record. Thereafter, the group was to be known as Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated.

The first band in Britain to play nothing but blues was a curious amalgam of fervent fantasy wedded to unlikely and incongruous human shapes. Its chief member, after Korner himself, was Cyril Davies, a fifteen-stone panel beater from South Harrow, a virtuoso on blues harmonica and twelve-string guitar, whose every waking moment was clouded by chagrin that he had not been born a black man. On saxophone there was Dick Heckstall-Smith, who in aspect and manner bore a passing resemblance to Lenin. On double bass there was the future bass guitar maestro, Jack Bruce. The drummer – when Alexis could persuade him to sit in – was a sad-faced boy called Charlie Watts. ‘I’d met Charlie at the Troubadour in Brompton Road, and always liked his playing. I’d said to him, “If I ever form a blues group, would you come in as drummer?” But he’d only do it part-time. He was too busy, studying commercial art in Harrow.’

It was Korner’s plan from the beginning to start his own club, as Ken Colyer and other musicians had, to protect their chosen music from the jibes or hostility of rival factions. Soho cellars or pub backrooms in those days could be hired for a few shillings a night. Alexis Korner’s first such venture, grandly styled the London Blues and Barrelhouse Club, was a room at the Round House pub in Wardour Street. The residency was sometimes interrupted by disputes between Korner and Cyril Davies, which led one or other to storm off and play in some rival club like the Troubadour.

As Blues Incorporated became more established, they started to receive bookings further and further outside London. One night, towards the end of 1961, Alexis found himself playing the blues to a rapturous crowd at a municipal hall in the genteel spa town of Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.

After the performance, a boy came up to Alexis in the pub across the road and talked to him earnestly – but with evident authority – about the blues and bluesmen. The boy was short but broadly built, and looked well-to-do in his smart Italian suit, white tab-collar shirt and Slim Jim tie. He spoke in a soft, well-mannered voice, lisping slightly. He said his name was Brian Jones. He was a musician himself, playing saxophone semi-professionally in a rock group called the Ramrods. What he really wanted to do, he told Alexis, was play Delta-style slide guitar with a band like Blues Incorporated. Alexis said – as Alexis always did – that if Brian Jones ever came to London, he was welcome to sleep on the Korners’ kitchen floor.

In March 1962, tired of battling against the prejudice of the Soho jazz crowd, Alexis Korner decided to see how a new blues club would go in his own West London suburb, Ealing. The venue was a small room under the ABC teashop, just across the road from Ealing Broadway station. The first session, March 17, was announced by a small display ad in the New Musical Express.

The ad caused astonished excitement twenty miles away in Kent, among a self-defeatingly modest group called Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys, to whom it still had not occurred that anyone else in Britain shared their musical fixation. The following Saturday, crammed into Alan Etherington’s father’s Riley ‘Pathfinder’ car, they set out for Ealing to investigate the extraordinary possibility that other people were playing the blues, to an audience, for money.


TWO (#ud6910e98-c912-5b43-9cd1-8f861586d1bd)

‘WELL, THE JOINT WAS ROCKIN’ …’ (#ud6910e98-c912-5b43-9cd1-8f861586d1bd)

It truly was happening, in a poky downstairs room between the ABC bakery and a jeweller’s shop: their secret music, the contraband repertoire of Muddy Waters, Otis Spann and the Chicago bluesmen, translated from inconceivable distance to deafening propinquity by the oddest imaginable group of men. Blues Incorporated performed, like jazz musicians, with almost professorial seriousness. Alexis Korner, curly-haired and moustachioed, in a white business shirt and tie, occupied the foreground with his Spanish guitar, seated on a chair. Cyril Davies stood next to him, sucking and coaxing the blues ‘harp’ with a breathy passion that made his pleated trousers wobble. Their audience stood around the tiny recessed stage in equal formality, nursing half pints of beer. As ‘Squirrel’ ended his harp solo, snatched the silver slide from his mouth and mopped his streaming brow, he received a round of polite applause like a speaker at a temperance meeting.

The instant success of the Ealing club proved to Alexis what he had always suspected – that the blues music, for some reason, had its most devoted following in suburban West London. After the second or third night at Ealing, something even more satisfactory happened. Alexis had brought Blues Incorporated away from Soho partly to escape the hostility of the traditional jazz faction. Now, the very clubs that had rejected him were starting to lose business, as more and more of their customers made the long Saturday night trek to Ealing. Even the purist National Jazz League could not ignore the commercial possibilities implied. Harold Pendleton, manager of the league-owned Marquee Club, came out to Ealing to hear Blues Incorporated, and afterwards offered Korner – whom he had previously not admired – a regular Thursday night engagement at the Marquee.

The band, at that time, had no regular vocalist. ‘I’d sing lead – or Squirrel would,’ Korner later remembered. ‘But we didn’t really believe in words. We were instrumentalists. The words just got in the way.’

Each Saturday night audience, in any case, was filled with young men, eager to exchange their world of Magicoal electric fires and Bournvita cocoa for the blues shouter’s world of tin tenements and dance-hall queens. Anyone who wanted to sing with Blues Incorporated was welcome to try, though Alexis knew from long experience that the results were generally terrible. Then one night, a 6 foot 7 inch, sandy-haired and pink-faced youth got up and sang in a voice so black and raw, it was like having Chicago there in the room. The boy’s name was ‘Long’ John Baldry. He became Blues Incorporated’s first featured singer at the Ealing club on Saturdays and on Thursdays at the Marquee.

A few days after the first Ealing session, Alexis Korner received a letter with a Dartford postmark enclosing a small spool tape. The letter, from someone called Mick Jagger, solicited Korner’s opinion of three songs by a group named Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys. The material offered was Reelin’ and Rockin’, Bright Lights Big City, and Around and Around. The tape was subsequently lost; all Korner could ever remember of it was that it sounded ‘absolutely terrible’.

The tape served a useful enough purpose, introducing Little Boy Blue himself to an established musician, known for unusual kindness towards musical beginners. Mick Jagger received the same invitation as everyone else to Ealing, to join Blues Incorporated on the bandstand for what singers, too, called a ‘blow’. So, the next Saturday, taking all his courage, Jagger stepped on to the little stage, with its grubby tarpaulin canopy, and sang in public for the very first time.

He did so looking every inch the LSE student in his white poplin shirt, half-unknotted tie and chunky ‘bohemian’ cardigan, glancing nervously behind him as the dignitaries of Blues Incorporated began to vamp the – for them – absurdly simple chords of Chuck Berry’s Around and Around. He himself has only a hazy recollection of standing there, half drunk, off key, forgetting his words and almost paralysed with fright. ‘The thing I noticed about him wasn’t his singing,’ Alexis Korner said. ‘It was the way he threw his hair around. He only had a short haircut, like everyone else’s. But, for a kid in a cardigan, that was moving quite excessively.’

The song died into silence. Then – to the singer’s vast astonishment – there was a burst of applause. Even tetchy ‘Squirrel’ Davis was prepared to clap someone whose love of blues could take him so far beyond the embarrassment barrier. The fact that he had copied Chuck Berry’s phrasing note for note was further proof of being a true disciple.

The next time Mick Jagger sang for Alexis Korner, it was for a fee of fifteen shillings, plus beer. Within a month, he had become Blues Incorporated’s second-string vocalist, singing with Korner for that same modest stipend whenever Long John Baldry was not available.

On Saturdays, it became a habit for the Dartford boys, Mick, Keith, Alan and Dick, to call at Alexis’s flat in Bayswater and spend a couple of hours with the Korners before going on to Ealing together. Bobbie Korner would give them tea while Alexis told them stories of what Muddy and Broonzy had said in that very same kitchen – how Big Bill could never pronounce his fellow bluesmen’s names (he called Fats Waller ‘Fat Wallace’) or how T-Bone Walker, fuddled by distance and drink, had once enquired, ‘Is this Paris, France?’

The Korners both remembered Jagger in this period as quiet and polite, though with political pretensions that Alexis found mildly aggravating. ‘We were talking about the blues one day and Mick said, “Why are you playing our working-class music?” I said, “Mick – you’re at the LSE! What could be more middle class than that?”’

Keith, by contrast, was instantly sociable and engaging. ‘He’d sit at the kitchen table and talk to Bobbie for hours. I remember how he loved words. I didn’t really know him as a musician then – only that he played guitar in that group of theirs in Dartford. He never pushed himself forward as a musician. He just seemed happy to be around Mick.’

By this time, the hospitable Korners had another young visitor regularly sleeping on their kitchenette floor. It was the boy Alexis had talked to in Cheltenham, little realizing how that morsel of encouragement had ignited the boy’s fierce desire to be in London, playing blues. So, late at night in Moscow Road, the kitchenette window would slide up. A dim figure would roll sideways across the table, down to the floor. Like Muddy Waters and Big Bill Broonzy before him, Brian Jones would fall asleep somewhere between the cats’ bowls and the legs of the electric cooker.

Hatherley Road, Cheltenham, lies just outside that smugly elegant Gloucestershire spa town which will be ever associated in the English mind with retired army colonels and colleges for genteel young ladies. Hatherley Road is a long suburban avenue of identical 1930s houses, each with a single bay window, a neat front lawn and a wrought-iron ‘sunrise’ gate. Here and there, beyond a uniform creosote-covered garage, one can see the terraces of Cheltenham’s exclusive district and beyond, the soft green Cotswolds, striding away towards Wales.

That Lewis Jones was a Welshman could not be doubted by his colleagues at Dowty and Co., Cheltenham’s aeronautical engineering works. Short, straight-backed, severe in manner, he possessed the inflexible virtues of Welshness in exact measure with its irreproachable faults. He was, in other words, respectable, decent, hard-working, religious, conventional, puritanically intolerant of those less strong-minded than himself. Like many of his countrymen, he regretted the advance of the twentieth century almost on principle. ‘Times change but I don’t,’ he would say, adding a heartfelt ‘Thank God!’

The Welsh have almost an obligation to be musical. Lewis Jones played the organ at his local parish church for some years, until his dislike of petty ecclesiastical politics led him to resign. His wife Louisa – also Welsh – possessed a more pronounced talent, and supplemented Lewis’s income from Dowty’s by giving piano lessons to local schoolchildren.

Their first child, Brian Lewis Hopkin Jones, was born on February 28, 1942. Of the two daughters who followed, only one – Barbara, born in 1946 – survived. The other, Pauline, died of leukaemia when Brian was three. Brian thought his parents had given her away and, for a long time afterwards, lived in terror that the same would be done to him.

He was, his father said, a thoroughly normal and happy small boy, healthy but for childhood ailments and an attack of croup which left him prone to bronchitis and chronic asthma. At his first school, Dean Close, he worked well, enjoyed sport – particularly cricket and badminton – and became an excellent swimmer and diver. Sea air aggravated his asthma, however; after a single day at the beach, he would be confined to bed, wheezing and croaking piteously.

Like his parents, and the race from which he sprang, Brian Jones was instinctively musical. Louisa started giving him piano lessons from the age of six; he afterwards took up the recorder and clarinet. Though able to read music, he mastered the reed instruments by ear and intuition, stumbling on melody by means he himself did not fully understand. So marked was his talent as a small boy that Lewis Jones thought he might be destined for a career as a classical musician.

He passed the eleven-plus exam without effort and went on, as his parents had hoped, to Cheltenham Grammar School, down in the exclusive district of ‘The Promenade’, the retired generals and the Ladies’ College. This exclusive seminary, in fact, stood immediately adjacent to Cheltenham Grammar School and daily provided its senior boys with an unreachable fantasy as the young ladies ran forth, squealing, for their mid-morning break.

Brian began well at Cheltenham Grammar, getting good marks for work, especially science and languages, excelling at cricket and swimming and winning a place as a clarinettist in the school orchestra. ‘Then, all of a sudden,’ Lewis Jones said bleakly, ‘he became very difficult. He started to rebel against everything – mainly me.’

The trouble began when Brian ceased practising classical pieces on piano and clarinet, and began listening to a kind of music that Lewis Jones abhorred. At thirteen, he discovered jazz and, at fourteen, the saxophone-playing of Charlie Parker. He sold the clarinet his parents had bought him and used the proceeds to buy a second-hand alto sax. Within a few days, to his parents’ horror, the sound of a first, shaky solo brayed through the quiet house in Hatherley Road.

He was soon good enough to sit in with local bands playing the trad jazz of Chris Barber and Humphrey Lyttelton. Even Cheltenham had its bohemian quarter, centred on the art college, on coffee bars like the Aztec, the Patio and the Waikiki, or pubs like the Wheatsheaf Inn, Leckhampton, where the 66 Jazz Club convened, with Brian Jones as membership secretary.

At Cheltenham Grammar, meanwhile, he became known as a troublemaker, able to disrupt a whole class by his blandly outrageous behaviour. A classmate, Peter Watson, remembers how Brian would sit in class in football boots, claiming they were more comfortable than shoes. ‘Brian said it was boring to drink the regulation milk at break time, so he started the fashion of drinking brown ale instead. It became a whole fashion to drink brown ale at break time instead of milk.’

At break, according to immemorial custom, the whole class would crowd at the window and gaze longingly down on the Cheltenham young ladies as they frolicked on the grass below. Brian Jones, it was well known, belonged to the select few Grammar School boys whose sexual adventures had gone beyond mere kissing and ‘petting’. It was known, too, that he scorned the Durex contraceptives that other boys carried symbolically in their wallets. ‘Bareback’ was the best way, he would insist, smiling a smile so lascivious, yet so mischievous, no one knew whether to believe him.

They believed him when, in 1958, a fourteen-year-old pupil at the girls’ Grammar School became pregnant and named Brian Jones as the father. The news caused a scandal in Cheltenham and even got into a Sunday newspaper, the News of the World, where Brian was destined to feature many times more. The baby was born but put out to adoption. All that could be hoped, after bringing such disgrace on his family and himself, was that Brian had well and truly learned his lesson.

The scandal brought about his premature exit from Cheltenham Grammar School, despite nine passes at GCE O-Level and Advanced-Level passes in Physics and Chemistry. For the next eighteen months, he worked variously as a shop assistant, a coalman and a trainee in the Borough Architect’s office of Cheltenham Council. A boyhood passion for buses led him to a brief career on Cheltenham municipal transport, as conductor and driver. He continued to play alto sax in various trad bands, then in a rock ’n’ roll combo called the Ramrods, which enjoyed some local fame until its lead singer went away on honeymoon and choked to death while eating a chip.

In 1961, Brian made a second girl pregnant. Her name was Pat Andrews: she had met Brian at the Aztec coffee bar during one of his spells of unemployment. He had left home by now and was living with a friend named Dick Hattrell at a flat in Cheltenham’s art college district. This time, he seemed resigned to marrying the girl he had put ‘in the club’. After the baby was born, he visited her in hospital, bringing a vast bouquet of flowers he had bought by selling some of his precious LPs. On his insistence, the baby was named Julian, after the jazz musician Julian ‘Cannonball’ Adderley.

Brian did not marry Pat Andrews. Instead, shortly after his conversation with Alexis Korner, he took off for London suddenly, accompanied by Dick Hattrell, to start a job his father had found for him with a firm of opticians. Lewis and Louisa Jones heard no more from him until he had become nationally notorious.

He continued to write to Pat Andrews, assuring her he still loved her and would be sending for her and the baby soon. Pat grew increasingly restive after learning he had several girlfriends in London. Finally, one day in 1962, she bundled Julian Mark in her arms and, with just one pound note in her purse, set off from Cheltenham by long-distance bus to track the baby’s father down.

He had left even his name behind in Cheltenham. It was not Brian Jones but ‘Elmo Lewis’ who made his first guest appearance with Blues Incorporated at the Ealing club. He had changed instruments, too, from alto sax to electric guitar, a brand-new, shiny Gibson, bought with money half saved, half stolen, and mastered by his usual blend of intuition, willpower and desire.

No greater contrast could have been imagined between the middle-aged, rather beery-looking blues sidesman and the boy who stepped up beside Alexis in his neat Italian suit, holding the shiny new Gibson with one finger pointed stiff across its pearled fretboard. His debut was the Elmore James classic Dust My Blues. In his West London bedsitter, he had taught himself to play it exactly as James did, with a metal ‘slide’, swooping the metal bar along the guitar neck to lengthen each note into almost a second angry, sarcastic voice. The sudden appearance of Pat Andrews and baby Julian had only temporarily interrupted the transfiguration of Elmore into Elmo.

Even then, Alexis remembered, his stage presence was subtly but unmistakably flavoured with aggression. The fact that he stood absolutely still somehow intensified an air of challenge to all comers, even as his eyes remained studiously downcast, his wide mouth pursed in virginal tranquillity. ‘He’d learned how to bait an audience, long before anything like that occurred to Mick. You should have seen those kids’ reaction when Brian picked up a tambourine and gave it one tiny little shake in their faces.’

Even the Korners, his best London friends, knew almost nothing of Brian beyond what he inadvertently betrayed. He told them nothing of his home or family, and only under gravest sufferance mentioned the detested word ‘Cheltenham’. Alexis and Bobbie, as surrogate parents, came to realize in time that frustration and unhappiness of an abnormal depth lay beneath Brian’s driving wish to become famous by any means whatever.

He had abandoned his traineeship as an optician by now, and had a job as an electrical-appliance salesman at Whiteley’s department store in Queensway, just a block away from the Korners’ flat in Moscow Road. Alexis would sometimes see him after work, crossing the road to meet a girl waiting reproachfully for him in the doorway to the MacFisheries shop. Though Pat Andrews and the baby had moved into Brian’s tiny Notting Hill bedsitter, she saw little more of him now than she had in Cheltenham. Eventually, she was forced to take a part-time job to support the child Brian now scarcely acknowledged as his.

To the Korners and the Ealing club crowd, he presented the aspect of a young bachelor, interested only in clothes and in forming a blues band that would take the world by storm. Each time he arrived at the Ealing club he seemed to have a new suit, a new tab-collar shirt, a new bouffant-haired girlfriend admiringly in tow. The money for both, more often than not, would have come from Pat Andrews’s minuscule pay packet or from robbing the till in Whiteley’s electrical department.

He stayed always one jump ahead of retribution, buoyed up by belief in his destiny and by that way he had of looking as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. When Brian fixed anyone with his big baby eyes and spoke in his soft, lisping, well-brought-up voice, it was impossible to imagine such chaos accumulating behind him. ‘He had a way of talking that was all his own,’ Alexis Korner said. ‘It was a most beautiful mixture of good manners and rudeness.’

Ostensibly still living with Pat, Julian and Dick Hattrell, he contrived to lead a semi-nomadic life in London and outside, travelling from town to town, reconnoitring the music clubs, sitting in with local groups in the hope of finding musicians for a band of his own. One of his regular haunts was Guildford, where he would play at the Wooden Bridge Hotel with a scratch band called Rhode Island Red and the Roosters, featuring a pale and – it then seemed – deeply unpromising guitarist named Eric Clapton.

In Oxford, a city catacombed with student-run jazz and blues clubs, he became friends with an English undergraduate named Paul Pond who led a blues group called Thunder Odin’s Big Secret. Paul Pond subsequently became Paul Jones, singer with the Manfred Mann group, ‘Brian was terribly smart in those days,’ Jones says. ‘Italian box jacket, winklepicker shoes, never a hair out of place. Whenever he passed through Oxford, he’d sleep on my couch. I remember waking up one morning to hear this awful wheezing and snorting from the next room. Brian was lying on the couch, hardly able to breathe. He gasped out that he’d got asthma and had left his inhaler at the party we’d both been to the night before. I had to jump on my bike and go dashing off to get it back for him.’

After sitting in with Thunder Odin’s Big Secret a few times, Brian decided that ‘P. P. Pond’ was the blues partner he needed. The two made a tape which impressed Alexis Korner so much he gave them the job of interval band at the Ealing club. It happened that P. P. Pond was singing Dust My Blues, accompanied by Elmo Lewis on slide guitar, when Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Dick Taylor walked through the door together.

On Keith especially, the effect was instant hero worship, heightened by Keith’s tendency to mix up one name with another. ‘It’s Elmore James,’ he kept whispering to the others. ‘It is, man – really! It’s fuckin’ Elmore James!’

They met up with Brian, afterwards and, over half pints of beer, talked blues for the rest of the night. To the Dartford boys, he seemed a raffish figure, only a year older than Mick and Keith but already a ‘semi-pro’ and – it emerged – the father of a baby. Keith remembers how, at close quarters, Brian’s slight body seemed to thicken on his short and powerful legs. ‘He was like a little Welsh bull,’ Keith says. ‘He was broad, and he looked very tough.’

That first conversation produced only an exchange of views. Brian, interested mainly in jazz-influenced blues, had not yet discovered Chuck Berry. He listened intently to what Keith told him about Berry and Jimmy Reed. He made it clear, though, that his ambitions went somewhat higher than Alexis Korner’s part-time student vocalist and a red-nosed, pimply guitarist whose only public appearance to date had been in the garden of a Bexleyheath council house.

The partnership between Elmo Lewis and P. P. Pond lasted only for that one engagement. Paul Pond returned to Oxford to resume his studies and await his destiny with Manfred Mann. Elmo Lewis, on the lookout for partners again, placed an advertisement in Jazz News, Soho’s club information sheet, grandly inviting prospective sidesmen to audition with him in the back room of a Berwick Street pub, the Bricklayer’s Arms.

The first recruit, Ian Stewart, arrived by racing cycle, looking anything but the part of the blues pianist he claimed to be. Thick-set and muscular, with a long, pugnacious jaw, he entered the rehearsal room in leather shorts, carrying a pork pie he had bought for his lunch. When he sat at the piano, however, all such visual reservations vanished. Pumping with one burly leg, he could make even those nicotine-yellowed keys give out the hectic, tinny airs of ragtime and barrel-house. He then sat back, took out his pork pie and began to eat it nonchalantly.

‘Stew’ became the nucleus of Brian’s group, together with an accomplished solo guitarist, Geoff Bradford. Over the next few days, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Dick Taylor also drifted in and auditioned to Brian’s satisfaction. Stew recognized them from the Ealing club, but rated none of them as musicians in his or Bradford’s class. Tough and short-spoken as he was, there was something about Keith, especially, that put him on his guard. ‘I think Keith was very shy in those days. Mick had got very friendly with Brian, and that seemed to make Keith edgy and uncomfortable.’

Soon there were arguments between Geoff Bradford, a pure blues guitarist in the Muddy Waters style, and Keith, the Chuck Berry acolyte. Bradford refused to have anything to do with ‘rock ’n’ roll rubbish’ like Roll Over Beethoven and Sweet Little Sixteen, and walked out, never to return. By this time, Elmo Lewis, the three Dartford boys and the lantern-jawed Stew had found enough in common to carry on together.

Practice sessions at the Bricklayer’s Arms took place three times a week, even though the embryo – and untitled – group still had no prospect of a booking. ‘It was a seven o’clock start, and we’d all be there sharp at seven,’ Ian Stewart remembered. ‘The one you could never depend on was Brian. He’d suddenly disappear for a few days, then he’d turn up again and want to get another rehearsal going. I never really trusted Brian – mainly because he was always saying, ‘Trust me, Stew.’

The solid Stew had a steady daytime job as a shipping clerk with Imperial Chemical Industries in Buckingham Gate. His first impression of Mick and Keith was of semi-vagrants, permanently broke, shabby and ravenous. Mick had no money but his seven pound per week student grant, plus the few shillings he got for singing with Alex. Keith, at the point of expulsion from Sidcup Art College, was entirely dependent on handouts from his mother. ‘They looked like they were going to starve together. But Mick was rather better off. Every so often, he’d leave Keith and go off to a slightly better caff. Mick always was very fond of his stomach.’

The first spark of originality in the group was struck by spontaneous interaction between Brian on his Gibson guitar and Keith on his Hofner. They would play, not as lead and subordinate rhythm, but as a duet, matching one another solo for solo, merging in a natural two-amp harmony, one zigzagging down the bass notes as the other climbed into treble register. This emergence of a ‘two-guitar band’ seemed an infinitely more exciting prospect than the skinny LSE student who sat about patiently, awaiting his chance to sing. Even then, in the trio of Mick, Keith and Brian, the joining of two inexorably left the third one out in the cold.

The sound they made could be heard in the main pub and, one night, fell on appreciative ears. Later, in the bar, a middle-aged man came up and introduced himself by visiting card as ‘David Norris, Artists’ Representative, Cockfosters’. He told them he’d liked what he’d heard, and could get them some engagements in ballrooms and dance halls – perhaps even at military bases on the Continent – provided they got themselves some decent instruments and stage suits. Mr Norris, for his pains, was firmly snubbed. All five had vowed they would never sell out their music to the commercial world, even if it meant they never got a single engagement.

Alexis Korner remained the only real star in the blues firmament. And, in the summer of 1962, it seemed as if Korner’s meteoric career was about to leave Mick Jagger behind. Blues Incorporated had been offered their first nationwide broadcast, on the BBC Light Programme’s Jazz Club. There were, however, two drawbacks. The first was that the BBC appearance, on July 12, clashed with Korner’s regular Thursday booking at the Marquee. The second was that the BBC, with typical frugality, would pay for five musicians only. Korner must therefore shed the most dispensable one in his line-up, the vocalist.

Jagger did not mind being dropped. He was, on the contrary, anxious for Korner to seize this chance to bring blues to a national audience. It was arranged that the Marquee date should be filled by Korner’s original Ealing vocalist, Long John Baldry. For an intermission band, the Marquee’s manager, Harold Pendleton, agreed to give a chance to the group which had been rehearsing at the Bricklayer’s Arms, though with so little hope it did not yet have a name.

The engagement was sufficiently important to merit a paragraph in the July 11 issue of Jazz News.

Mick Jagger, R & B vocalist, is taking a rhythm and blues group into the Marquee tomorrow night while Blues Inc. is doing its Jazz Club gig.

Called ‘The Rolling Stones’ (‘I hope they don’t think we’re a rock and roll outfit,’ says Mick), the line-up is: Jagger (vocals), Keith Richards, Elmo Lewis (guitars), Dick Taylor (bass), ‘Stew’ (piano) and Mick Avory (drums).

The name was chosen by Brian, in honour of the Muddy Waters song Rolling Stone. Ian Stewart, for one, objected strongly to it. ‘The Rolling Stones – I said it was terrible! It sounded like the name of an Irish show band, or something that ought to be playing at the Savoy.’ Mick Avory, the drummer they had recruited, felt equally dubious, but accepted – as the others did – that, since Brian had formed the group, he could call it what he liked.

So on July 12, 1962, with a playing order written on a page of Ian Stewart’s pocket diary, the six Rolling Stones faced their first audience. Mick wore a sweater, Brian a cord jacket and Keith a skimpy dark suit which left his shirt collar and cuffs exposed like the surplice of the angelic choirboy he formerly had been. Behind them, Dick Taylor, Ian Stewart and Mick Avory glanced at one another ominously. ‘You could hear people saying “Rolling Stones … Rolling Stones …”’ Dick Taylor remembers, ‘“Ah … rock ’n’ roll, are they …” Before we’d played a note, we could feel the hostility.’

Britain in 1962 was a nation still predominantly interested in recovering from 1939. The only generation that mattered was the one which had survived the war and its scarcely less uncomfortable aftermath, inspired by a common belief that one day butter would cease to be rationed; that coupons would no longer be needed to buy clothing or chocolate. These miracles had come to pass – and more. In British homes, as in American ones seen on the cinema screen, there were now TV sets, washing machines, garages containing cars with fins. There were transistor radios, cocktail cabinets and ‘genuine champagne perry’. Harold Macmillan, prime minister since the Suez Crisis, could be believed when he told the country, ‘You’ve never had it so good.’ Largely through that powerful superstition, government remained firmly in the hands of an elderly Edwardian whose winged white hair and drooping moustache gave him the appearance of a dilapidated but complacent sea lion.

The decade which still had not defined itself in 1962 was actually starting to form in 1955, with early sightings of that problematical new species, the ‘teenager’. It was a species, however, which for the next five years caused little profound effect on British life. For it sprang almost wholly from what was still dismissively called the ‘working’ class. Rock ’n’ roll music, skiffle, long hair and coffee bars were condemned all in one as a deviation of the lower proletariat. ‘Pop’, the rock sound watered down, figured not much higher in the social register. Its most successful British exponent, Cliff Richard, owed his survival to having exchanged the grubby aura of the Rocker for that of a conventional show-business personality.

Change was coming, even now, in a battered van making its way to London from the unregarded northern city of Liverpool. In June 1962, the head of an obscure record label, Parlophone, gave an audition to four young Liverpool musicians who had, up to then, been rejected by all the major companies. Their first record – chosen with difficulty from an eccentric and uncommercial repertoire – was not released until the following October. The record was called Love Me Do; the group was the Beatles.

For the Rolling Stones, in October 1962, the most pressing question was whether they could survive another week. It scarcely mattered that their debut at the Marquee Club had gone better than any of them dared hope. To the club’s jazz and pure blues crowd, merely the sight of Dick Taylor’s bass guitar had been reason enough to detest them. But there had also been a contingent of Mods, up on the town from Wembley or Shepherd’s Bush, who loved Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley as much as Keith did, and – being Mods – had conclusively drowned out the jazz fans’ disapproval. That endeared the new group still less to Harold Pendleton, who ran the Marquee on behalf of the National Jazz League, and loudly disapproved of their music, their clothes, their attitude and – as it seemed to Ian Stewart – their perversely ill-chosen name.

The only further bookings Harold Pendleton would offer them were as dogsbodies, filling in for other bands that had not turned up. Often, after booking them, Pendleton would telephone Brian Jones and say he didn’t want them after all. On the nights when they did make it to the Marquee stage, Pendleton would indulge in sarcasm at their expense. Keith Richards was a frequent target, gawky and shy, with his skinny black suit and pimple-chapped face, playing the Chuck Berry guitar riffs that Pendleton so despised.

The slights they continually received from the jazz faction led Brian Jones, in his capacity as leader, to compose a long, erudite letter to Jazz News, complaining of ‘the pseudo-intellectual snobbery that unfortunately contaminates the Jazz scene … It must be apparent,’ Brian continued weightily, ‘that Rock ’n’ Roll has a far greater affinity for r & b than the latter has for Jazz, insofar that Rock is a direct corruption of Rhythm and Blues whereas Jazz is Negro music on a different plane, intellectually higher but emotionally less intense …’

Harold Pendleton had some cause for complaint. The Rolling Stones, though top-heavy with guitarists and their non-playing singer, could persuade no drummer to throw in his lot with them. While anyone could buy a guitar and strum at it, a drummer, with his vast capital investment of fifty pounds or more, conferred instant professionalism and permanence. Mick Avory, on that first Marquee night, had sat in only as a favour. All the drummers they had tried since then were from jazz bands, unable or unwilling to find the r & b backbeat. The only exception was Charlie Watts, Blues Incorporated’s part-time drummer, who sat in also with a Soho band called Blues by Six. Charlie, despite his jazz background and long, glum face, always gave them just what they wanted. But he seemed altogether too well set up and prosperous to consider joining them for good. ‘We were all a bit in awe of Charlie then,’ Keith says. ‘We thought he was much too expensive for us.’

Brian Jones’s double life as a reluctant family man and fancy-free London bachelor took on a new complexity, late that summer, when he, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards rented a flat together in Edith Grove, Chelsea. The three shared two rooms halfway up a shabby house racked by the noise of lorries thundering through to Fulham Road. The flat was squalid even by London bedsitter standards, with its damp and peeling wallpaper, grubby furniture, filthy curtains and naked light bulbs that functioned at the behest of a single, iron-clad electric coin meter. The lavatory was communal, on the staircase to the flat above. Those who visited it after dark did so with a supply of newspaper, matches and a candle. Keith spoke of buying a revolver, so that he could sit there and shoot at the rats.

The minuscule rent was paid by the pooling of Mick Jagger’s student grant with Brian’s wage as a shop assistant at Whiteley’s. Keith – apart from one brief stint as a Christmas relief postman – contrived to remain unencumbered by any job but playing his guitar. His contribution was a supply of food parcels sent up from Dartford by his mother. Doris Richards would also descend on the flat once a week and take away mounds of dirty underwear and shirts to wash.

To help with the rent, they found a fourth tenant – a young printer whom they knew only as ‘Phelge’. ‘He was the sort of madman you’d meet around Chelsea then,’ Keith says. ‘You’d walk in through the front door and there would be Phelge, standing at the top of the stairs with his underpants on his head.’

For Mick, the Edith Grove flat was a chance to break free of the constraints of home and his mother’s reproaches for the opportunities he was wasting. He remained, even so, primarily an economics student, tacitly acknowledging that he must one day give up blues singing to work for his degree. Up all night at the Marquee, and Chelsea’s perpetual bottle parties, he would still go off next morning to the London School of Economics in Aldwych. His father’s waning influence could not altogether remove the habit of exercise. The pale, languid Chelsea layabout still turned out at regular intervals to play soccer in the LSE second eleven.

Keith, jobless and almost penniless, spent most of his days at the flat with no other company than the coin meter and his guitar. Brian, at the outset, still had a job at Whiteley’s and, it was presumed, an alternative home with Pat Andrews and the baby. The Whiteley’s job vanished when Brian was caught pilfering from the cash register. The link with Pat and the baby was similarly broken – although his friend, Dick Hattrell, remained a faithful follower. After that, Brian also had nothing to do, and would sit around the Edith Grove flat all day with Keith, practising their guitar duets, working out on the harmonica he had almost mastered and plotting where their next meal was coming from. He taught Keith the trick, learned in his Oxford wanderings, of creeping into neighbours’ flats on the morning after bottle parties, collecting all the empty beer bottles and returning them to a pub or off-licence to collect the twopence deposits.

A tiny trickle of money came from dates arranged by Brian at venues he had already reconnoitred on his travels outside London. The venues were mostly weekend dances, put on in church halls or suburban sports pavilions. The fee – seldom more than a couple of pounds a night – would be received by Brian, then shared among the other five. They did not know, since Brian thought it not worth mentioning, that he had invariably obtained an extra payment for himself as their leader and – he would also say – their manager and booking agent. Brian, in those days, was always ahead by a tiny, surreptitious percentage.

One of their regular dates was at St Mary’s Parish Hall, in Hotheley Road, Richmond, playing in alternation with a group from Shepherd’s Bush called the High Numbers, later transfigured into The Who. Another was in a dilapidated wooden dance hall on Eel Pie Island in the River Thames at Twickenham, crossed by a footbridge that levied a sixpenny toll. They would go there by public transport, by bus or by tube, accompanied by Dick Hattrell, whom Brian seemed able to persuade to do almost anything. Hattrell acted as their road manager until he left London for a stint of part-time soldiering in the Territorial Army.

At the Marquee, meanwhile, Harold Pendleton’s sarcasm continued unabated. Even Cyril Davis, who had liked the Stones at first, now joined the jazzers against them, brusquely sacking them from a bill on which his band was headlining. No one in those days knew Keith Richards well enough to recognize the warning signs. One evening, late that autumn, after carefully considering something Harold Pendleton had said to him, Keith picked up his guitar like a caveman’s club and swung it at Pendleton’s head.

After that, there could be no more Marquee dates for a while. There was even less hope at Ken Colyer’s Studio 51 or Giorgio Gomelsky’s Piccadilly Club, where they had had one disastrous flop. The Rolling Stones therefore decided to do what Alexis Korner had when snobbery and prejudice were threatening to extinguish Blues Incorporated. They set out to start a club and a following of their own.

The club was a peripatetic one, convened on Saturday nights or Sunday afternoons in a succession of pubs in Sutton, Richmond, Putney and Twickenham. Each date along the meridian would display the same laconic poster: ‘Rhythm and Blues with the Rollin’ Stones [sic]. Admission 4s.’ Fortunately, Ian Stewart owned a van as well as his racing bike, and could chauffeur them and their equipment to pubs in places even further distant, like Windsor, Guildford and Maidenhead. Stew proved a sterling hand at unloading guitar cases and amps, even though he might not himself always get the chance to play. ‘If there was no piano, I’d just settle down in the van and go to sleep. I did have to be up the next morning to go to work at ICI.’

The lack of a permanent drummer continued to be vexing. Mick Avory, who sat in with them most often, had little natural feel for r & b. Carlo Little, from Cyril Davies’s group, whom they liked much better, had more pressing extra-curricular work with Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages. Unable to approach Charlie Watts, they reluctantly settled for a boy called Tony Chapman, who had played in several semi-pro rock ’n’ roll groups. But Chapman, a commercial traveller, wasn’t always reliable and was frequently out of town on business trips.

Just before Christmas came another setback. Dick Taylor, their bass player, announced he was quitting to begin a course at the Royal College of Art. The others asked Tony Chapman if he knew any bass guitarists looking for work. Chapman said he might know someone, an ex-colleague of his in a conventional pop group called the Cliftons. It was arranged that Tony Chapman’s friend should come for an audition with Brian, Keith and Mick at their local Chelsea pub, the Wetherby Arms, one cold, snowy day in December.

Bill Perks had always hated his family name, and wished he could change it to something more in keeping with his nature and ambitions. His grandfather Perks, he knew, had done the same thing fifty years earlier when fighting illegally as a bare-fist pugilist. ‘And when he got older and used to breed racing pigeons, he still went on using another name,’ the metamorphosed Bill Wyman says. ‘He always raced his pigeons under the name of Jackson.’

The son born to William and Kathleen Perks on October 24, 1936, showed little sign of his ultimate destiny for almost the first quarter of his life. As a child, he was thoughtful, steady, quiet, rather pious. His mother remembers how he would spend hours in his bedroom, in Blenheim Road, Penge, just reading the Bible. At Beckenham Grammar School he was proficient in art and mathematics and a useful athlete. With his precise mind and prodigious memory, he would have been natural university material if born just one decade later. Then, amid Britain’s post-war and class-ridden chill, the best a bright working-class boy could hope for was respectable clerkship. His father, a bricklayer out of doors in all weathers, was delighted to think Bill might get a comfortable office job.

His first employment was with the City Tote, a firm of multiple bookmakers in London’s West End. He was then called up for two years’ service as a clerk in the Royal Air Force. Some of that time he spent in West Germany, at an RAF station near Bremen, where he heard rock ’n’ roll music for the first time over the American Forces Network. He remembers, too, what a liking he developed for a fellow serviceman called Lee Wyman, not realizing it was the surname that really appealed to him.

He already thought of himself as Bill Wyman when, demobbed from the RAF, he took a job as storekeeper with an engineering firm in Streatham, south London. He organized the stores with fastidious efficiency, cataloguing the stock and recording its level by a neat system of dockets and coloured strings. In 1959, he married a girl named Diane whom he had met at a dance in Beckenham, and moved with her into a flat above a Penge garage.

His first guitar, bought during his RAF service, was a Spanish model, so badly made he could hardly hold down the strings. He played with scratch groups, in and out of the service, for the next year or two. ‘I was never much of a guitarist. I was no good at playing chords. That’s why I switched to bass as soon as they started coming in.’

In December 1962 he was already semi-professional, playing bass regularly in the Cliftons and, occasionally, in stage shows presented by the great pop impresario Larry Parnes. He had risen as high as backing Parnes’s discovery Dickie Pride, a tiny youth then billed as ‘Britain’s Little Richard’. ‘We had to wear stage make-up … little suits all the same. Horrible, they were. You always knew they’d been passed on to you from someone else.’

It was, therefore, with no great hope or expectation that Bill Wyman walked into the Wetherby Arms in Chelsea and beheld the group with whom Tony Chapman had arranged for him to audition. His first thought – tinged with working-class resentment – was that they looked off-puttingly ‘bohemian’ and ‘arty’. They, on their side, felt no instant rapport with the hollow-cheeked, unsmiling newcomer, seven years older than Mick and Keith, and whose reserved manner suggested the superiority of a bass player who had once accompanied Dickie Pride.

What made him desirable was the sheer magnificence of his equipment. With his bass guitar, he hauled in two enormous black and gold amplifiers. Even the one he airily called his ‘spare’ was a Vox 850, bigger than Keith Richards had ever seen outside a shop window. Plugging in his bass, he indicated the 850 and said, ‘One of you can put your guitar through that.’

‘I wasn’t sure – I thought I’d just try things out with them for a bit,’ Bill says, ‘even though I did think they looked too bohemian. Not long afterwards, they decided they wanted to get rid of Tony Chapman as drummer and bring in Charlie Watts. Tony came to me and said, “Well, that’s it, Bill. We can form a new group of our own now.” I said, ‘No – I think I’m all right where I am.” I think I made a wise decision.

Initially, it seemed far from wise. Bill Wyman’s recruitment to ‘the Rollin’ Stones’ coincided with heavy snowfalls, which, as they grew steadily worse, prevented them from getting to all but a scattered few of their suburban dates. At those they did manage to reach, attendance was disastrously reduced. Even their large Eel Pie Island following seemed reluctant to brave the toll bridge over the fast-freezing Thames. Wyman, perched on his amplifier rim, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, regretted his folly in exchanging Larry Parnes’s stage shows for arty types like this, who did not even stand up to play, but sat on chairs or stools in a semicircle behind their head-shaking vocalist.

The winter, it turned out, was Britain’s worst for more than a hundred years. The entire country became submerged in a featureless white plain, swept by unremittingly savage cold which turned milk to creamy granite and made beer explode spontaneously in its bottles. From December to mid-February, the weather was Britain’s sole talking point – apart from a brief scandal, reported from Carlisle just after Christmas, when a group called the Beatles was ejected from a Young Conservatives dance for the impossibly tasteless offence of arriving in black leather jackets.

At Edith Grove, the water pipes were now all frozen solid: Mick, Keith, Brian and Phelge could not wash or pull the lavatory chain. What puny room heaters they had barely took the edge off the biting cold. Bill Wyman, the settled married man, could hardly believe the squalor of the conditions. ‘They weren’t cooking – just living on pork pies and cups of instant coffee,’ Bill says. ‘I used to get through pounds, just feeding that electric meter of theirs.’

Their diet was mainly potatoes and eggs, which Brian and Keith would pilfer from Fulham Road grocery shops, and stale bread scavenged from the debris of parties given by other tenants in the house. Bill Wyman, when he dropped by, would bring food and cigarettes as well as shillings for their ravenous coin meter. Once a week, Ian Stewart would hand them a supply of six-shilling (30p) luncheon vouchers, bought up at a shilling each from weight-conscious secretaries in his office at ICI.

On many days, Keith remembers, it would not be worthwhile even getting out of bed. ‘We hadn’t got any gigs. Nothing to do. We’d spend hours at a time just making faces at each other. Brian was always the best at that. There was a particularly horrible one he could do by pulling his eyes down at the corners and sticking his fingers up his nostrils. He called it “doing a Nanker”.’ Even when every pipe in the flat was frozen, Brian somehow managed to wash his hair every day, and find a shilling somewhere to blow-dry it into its elaborate cresting wave. He seemed, for all his fastidiousness, the most adept of them all at living rough. Even Keith did not have Brian’s sublime assurance, as each frozen midday dawned outside their filthy, iced-up windows, that the wherewithal of keeping warm and not starving could always be borrowed, begged or stolen.

An unexpected windfall was the reappearance of Dick Hattrell, fresh from Territorial Army camp, his £80 gratuity in his pocket, and willing as ever to do anything Brian told him. Within a week, Brian had annexed every penny of Hattrell’s money for meals, drinks, even a brand-new guitar. On Brian’s orders, Hattrell took off his army greatcoat and handed it to the shivering Keith. He would obediently follow them to their local hamburger bar, hand them more money and, at Brian’s command, stand patiently in the snow until they came out again. When Dick Hattrell’s money ran out, so did his welcome at the flat. One night as he lay in bed, Brian threatened to electrocute him with a guitar lead. Hattrell fled into the snow, terrified, wearing only his underpants. ‘He wouldn’t come back for an hour, he was so scared of Brian,’ Keith says. ‘When they finally did bring him in, he’d turned blue.’

The new year 1963 found Britain still snowbound, with villages, towns, even whole counties cut off, most transport paralysed, all sport fixtures cancelled, a whole nation gone to ground and huddled round the fitful blue warmth of its television screen. On January 12, the Saturday night pop show Thank Your Lucky Stars provided its snowed-in bumper audience with the spectacle of the Beatles, in the mop-top haircuts and crew-necked suits, miming their new record Please Please Me, not with scowls and prissy dance steps like Cliff Richard’s Shadows, but jigging about uninhibitedly, grinning at the camera and each other. To viewers over twenty-one, the interlude seemed no more than faintly comic. But on a million British teenagers, pent up by so much more than cold, that zesty ‘Whoa yeah’ chorus had an altogether different effect. By February 16, Please Please Me was number one on the Melody Maker’s Top Twenty chart.

The Beatles were also beginning to make regular radio appearances on the BBC Light Programme’s Saturday Club, giving live performances from their stage repertoire in a far-off Liverpool cellar club called the Cavern. Much of their material was rhythm and blues which they had copied from import discs brought from America to Liverpool by stewards on the transatlantic ships. Brian and Keith, listening to Saturday Club, huddled under their blankets at Edith Grove, were astonished to hear Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley songs on the stuffy BBC.

Since Saturday Club had a reputation for booking groups which had not yet even made a record, Brian sent off one of his prosy letters to the BBC, requesting an audition for the Stones. A fortnight later, they received a summons to report to a BBC rehearsal room. Before they set off, Brian shampooed and blow-dried his hair into a Beatle cut thicker and more eye-enveloping than the Beatles wore. ‘It shocked even us a bit,’ Keith says. ‘He looked like a Saint Bernard with hair all over his eyes. We told him he’d have to be careful or he’d bump into things.’

The audition took place under the eye of the show’s producer and of its compere, Brian Matthew. Both men based their musical judgement on the hidebound prejudices of a corporation which, for years, had banned even the phrase ‘Hot Jazz’ as being sexually suggestive. ‘We got a letter back from the producer in the end,’ Bill Wyman says. ‘He said they liked us as a group but they couldn’t book us because “the singer sounds too coloured”.’

Wyman still did not quite know why he stayed on in the Stones, especially now that his friend Tony Chapman had left. The country-wide thaw, and consequent improvement in suburban club dates, only emphasized their desperate need of a regular drummer even as semi-reliable as Chapman had been. Brian’s idea was to bring in Carlo Little, a bravura performer with Cyril Davis. But to Mick, Keith and Ian Stewart, there was only one possible candidate. ‘One night, we all just looked at each other and that did it,’ Stew says. ‘We went up to Charlie Watts and said, “Right, that’s it. You’re in.”’

The boy with the long, thin, dourly soulful face and the neat mod three-piece suit came from several social worlds away. Charlie Watts was a true Londoner, born at least within a rumour’s distance of Bow Bells, and with that air peculiar to many cockneys of being older than his years. His father worked for British Railways at King’s Cross station as a parcel deliveryman. His mother had formerly been a factory worker. The family lived in Islington, North London, in a house which, however modest, was ruled by Charles Sr’s punctilious tidiness. ‘My dad made me cover all my books with brown paper,’ Charlie says, ‘– even my Buffalo Bill annual.’ He cherished that annual, with its colour portrait of William F. Cody, looming ferociously from a Wild West that was – and remains – Charlie Watts’s abiding passion.

Charlie, at twenty-one, seemed set on a promising professional career. Since leaving Harrow Art College, he had worked as a lettering and layout man for the Regent Street advertisement agency Charles Hobson and Gray. It was a prestigious and – for that time – well-paid job which Charlie was reluctant to jeopardize, even for his beloved jazz. He had, indeed, recently given up playing with Blues Incorporated for fear that too many late nights would impair the daytime steadiness of his hand.

For the Stones, it was not simply that Charlie Watts owned a handsome set of drums and played them with an unobtrusive skill that held each ramshackle blues song together like cement. He was also warmly liked by each of them. He seemed to get on best with the group’s shyest and most uncertain member, Keith. Dapper as Charlie himself was, something in Keith’s incorrigible raggedness stirred him to wistful admiration. He would sit for hours at Edith Grove, listening to Keith play guitar duets with Brian, listening to their accumulated wisdom concerning Chuck Berry B-sides and, every so often, putting another shilling in the electric meter.

The drawback, in Charlie’s eyes, was that he loved jazz above everything, and saw no prospect, via these hard-up student types, of realizing his ambition to visit New York and see Birdland where Charlie Parker used to play. At the time the Stones pounced on him, he was also considering the offer of a regular place in the far more respectable Blues By Six. ‘He came to me, agonizing about it,’ Alexis Korner said. ‘I told him I thought the Rolling Stones were likely to get more work than the others, in the long run.’ So at last, with that resigned shrug – that look of placidly expecting the worst – Charlie Watts was in.

On Sunday evenings in the sedate Thames-side borough of Richmond, crowds of teenage boys in corduroy jackets and peg-top trousers, accompanied by white-faced, bare-kneed, shivering girls, could be seen emerging from the railway station and streaming up a narrow passageway by the side of a Victorian pub. At the end, under an improvised sign, CRAWDADDY CLUB, a black-bearded young man, somewhat like Captain Kidd in the comic books, stood guard on the door into the pub’s mirror-lined committee room, chaffing his customers in an accent exotically and indeterminately foreign. ‘Any girls who want to come in …’ Giorgio Gomelsky would say, ‘we’re so full, you’ll have to sit on your boyfriends’ shoulders.’

Giorgio was a twenty-nine-year-old Russian emigré, born in Georgia, exiled to Switzerland, educated in Italy and Germany, and now one of the best-known figures on the London jazz scene. He had worked for Chris Barber in the Fifties, helping to set up the National jazz league and, later, organizing the first of the League’s annual Jazz Festivals at Richmond Athletic Ground. He had discovered blues while working as a courier, escorting American blues singers on from London to Continental dates booked for them by Barber’s organization. ‘Sonny Boy Williamson lived in my house for six months. I travelled all over with him. We were in Liverpool when the Cavern was still only a Trad Jazz club.’

In the early Sixties, Giorgio combined the role of assistant film editor and West End Jazz Club manager, running the old Mississippi Room, with earnest attendance at classes to study Stanislavsky’s Method acting. Among his fellow students in the class was a young Irishman named Ronan O’Rahilly, whose family was rumoured to own the greater part of County Cork, and who was also trying to crash into the London entertainment scene by managing Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated.

Gomelsky’s first blues club was the Piccadilly, set up on a Russian shoestring in the old Cy Laurie folk cellar. The Rolling Stones played there just once, shortly before Harold Pendleton and Cyril Davies squeezed them out of the Marquee. Much as Gomelsky liked them as individuals, he thought their playing ‘abominable’. Counting Mick Jagger’s younger brother, Chris, only twenty or so people turned up that night to see them.

In early 1963, the Piccadilly Club had closed and Giorgio needed a new venue that could be hired with the single five-pound note he had in his pocket. He knew the landlord of the Station Hotel in Kew Road, Richmond, and knew that the pub’s substantial back room had not been in use since its regular trad jazz sessions had petered out. ‘I said, “Let me try blues here, just for one night …”’ The club was called the Crawdaddy, after a Bo Diddley song, Do the Crawdaddy. Sessions took place on Sunday nights within the Station Hotel’s licensing hours, 7 to 10:30 p.m. Its first resident attraction was the Dave Hunt Group, featuring Ray Davies – who would one day lead the Kinks – and playing in Louis Jordan’s 1940s ‘jump band’ style.

Brian Jones had long been pestering Giorgio to do something to help the Rolling Stones. ‘He had that little speech impediment – kind of a lisp. It used to be part of his charm. “Come and lithen to us, Giorgio,” he’d plead with me. “Oh, Giorgio, pleathe get us some gigs.”’

Since their first disastrous tryout at the Piccadilly Club, Giorgio had seen the Stones again – at the Red Lion in Sutton – and had noticed a vast improvement. ‘But what could I do? Dave Hunt’s group already had the Richmond gig.

‘It was the weather, really, that got them their chance. Dave Hunt’s band couldn’t make it, because of the snow – and anyway, I didn’t go so much for that jump-band stuff Dave was playing. So, Monday, I rang Ian Stewart – it was so funny: to get the Stones you had to go through to ICI. I said, “Tell everyone in the band you guys are on next Sunday.”’

That first Sunday night when the Rolling Stones played the Crawdaddy instead of Dave Hunt’s group, attendance was disastrously reduced. ‘I even went through to the main pub to try to round some more customers up,’ Giorgio says. ‘Anyone who’d buy a ticket was allowed to bring in another person for nothing.’

Giorgio himself stood in the half-empty room, watching a group that, in the few weeks since their Red Lion date, had changed almost beyond recognition. The principal change was Brian Jones with his new, heaped, yellow Beatle cut, coaxing and caressing the blues harp in his cupped hands to produce sounds like silvery minnows darting in and deftly out of Keith’s guitar riffs. Another change was the boy in the dapper three-piece suit, seated behind his drums with all the pleasure of a convict trying out an electric chair, yet playing with an impeccable, light-handed touch that pulled every loose thread together and closed up every crack. Everything had come right behind the lead singer who was so far from right, but compulsively wrong, in the sweater that slipped off one shoulder like a teagown, his smear of a mouth parroting a black man’s words as his opaque eyes searched for his reflection in the mirrors all round him. That snowy Sunday night, behind a Thames-side pub, where bottles clashed into basketwork skips and feathered darts thudded against targets, the Stones began to be brilliant.

Within three weeks, they had attracted a huge following, of whom r & b enthusiasts were only a minor part. Richmond, Twickenham and Surbiton on a Sunday night offered little enough excitement of any kind. The larger and larger crowds that converged on the Station Hotel and flooded down its side passageway contained samples of every teenage faction that had ever done battle on Brighton or Margate beach. There were Mods in high-button suits, newly dismounted from Lambretta scooters. There were black-leather Rockers, in studs and cowboy boots. Unified by the bond of the polo-neck, there were art students and shop assistants and well-brought-up boys and girls from middle-class riverside homes at Putney, Hammersmith and Strand-on-the-Green. ‘And do you know – there was never one fight in that place,’ Gomelsky says. ‘All that glass on the walls, and not even a mirror broken.’

At first, the Crawdaddy crowd behaved like jazz fans, merely standing and watching the Stones in the red-spotlit dusk. Then one night, Giorgio’s young assistant, Hamish Grimes, jumped up on a table top and began to leap and flail his arms with the music like a dervish. From Hamish’s impromptu outburst there evolved a dance peculiar to the Crawdaddy Club, partly derived from the Twist and the Hully-Gully but unique in that it could be performed by single males or even pairs of males, locked in a strange, crablike embrace, each gripping the other’s elastic-sided ankles. The climax of each Stones session was a Bo Diddley song, either Do the Crawdaddy or Pretty Thing, when, at Giorgio’s encouragement, the whole 300 would form a solid mass of corduroy, op-art strips and red-spotlit shirt collars, jumping and gyrating together for as long as twenty minutes at a time.

Giorgio Gomelsky became the Rolling Stones’ first manager, mainly through his own reluctance to be considered anything so bourgeois. ‘It was always a partnership. I used to divide the door receipts from each Sunday equally with them. They would help me keep the club going. For instance, we never paid to advertise the Crawdaddy Club. The Stones and I would put illegal fly posters all over. I got them printed for four pounds a thousand, and the Stones mixed up the paste in the bath at Edith Grove.’

From the moment they began pulling in the crowds at Richmond, Giorgio had been urging his contacts in the London music press to come to Richmond and see the Stones perform. He also began shooting 35mm film of them onstage at the Crawdaddy and arranged for them to make a soundtrack of two Bo Diddley songs at a small studio in Morden. It was typical of the idealistic Russian that, while working to launch the Stones, he never attempted to put them under exclusive contract to himself. His advice, on the contrary, was to let no one have control over them but themselves. ‘I kept telling them, “Wait. Get strong, so that you can handle all of it yourselves and don’t have to ask anyone for anything. Don’t run the risk of someone walking in here and taking you over.”’

Giorgio, in fairness, had a somewhat larger project on his mind. Two years previously, while living in West Germany, he had visited Hamburg’s sleazy St Pauli district and had seen the Beatles in their earliest incarnation as black-leather rockers, pouring out bowdlerized r & b and their own primitive compositions to an audience of whores, transvestites and merchant seamen. Watching them now, in their crew-necked suits, bobbing and frolicking on the torrents of ever wilder hysteria, Giorgio Gomelsky realized they were something more than merely the biggest pop attraction since Cliff Richard and the Shadows.

The tiny world of London impresarios soon brought Giorgio Gomelsky into contact with the Beatles’ twenty-seven-year-old manager, Brian Epstein. ‘I would be there when dance hall promoters rang up Epstein, offering him £50 for one appearance by the Beatles. He’d say, “I don’t know …” and start looking in his diary. So then the promoter would offer him £60. “I don’t know …” he’d still say. The promoter would offer £70, thinking Epstein was stalling for more money. He wasn’t. He just couldn’t find the right date in his diary.’

Giorgio approached Brian Epstein in his role as avant-garde movie director, proposing a film that would bring out the still unperceived wit and knockabout charm of the Beatles’ offstage characters. He was now working on a rough script, helped by Ronan O’Rahilly, his fellow Method-acting student, and the jazz writer Peter Clayton. With the Beatles themselves he was on good enough terms to invite them to the Crawdaddy one Sunday after their appearance on Thank Your Lucky Stars at the ABC-TV studios in nearby Twickenham.

As the Stones played that night, they were astonished to see all four Beatles, in expensive leather overcoats, being escorted by Giorgio to a special vantage point beside the stage. Still more astonished were they, later, to be approached by people they looked on as big-time celebrities, and to be told in thick, pally Liverpool accents that their music was ‘fab’ and ‘gear’. John Lennon, in particular, looked at Brian Jones with something like hero-worship. ‘You really play that harmonica, don’t you,’ he said. ‘I can’t really play – I just blow and suck.’

A lengthy and amicable conversation ensued. For the Beatles, it had been a poignant experience to see a group so much like their former selves, before Brian Epstein cleaned up their music and appearance. The Stones, on their side, recognized blood brothers in the r & b cause who had only reluctantly dropped Chuck Berry in favour of original compositions the pop public increasingly demanded. It fascinated Mick Jagger, especially, to learn that John Lennon and Paul McCartney had already written more than a hundred songs together and that, after just one Top Ten hit, they had a share in their own music-publishing company. For a brief while, Mick cast aside his reserve and quizzed the Beatles closely about how much per song one could earn in royalties.

A week later, the Beatles appeared in their first major London concert, a Pop Prom run by the BBC at the Royal Albert Hall. The Rollin’ Stones received front-row tickets and access to the Liverpudlians’ embattled dressing room. Later, Giorgio and Brian Jones helped the Beatles’ two road managers, Mal and Neil, to load their stage equipment into their van. Some girls, spotting Brian’s blond dome of hair, mistook him for a Beatle, crowded round him, despite his protests, and clamoured for autographs.

The incident, Giorgio remembers, had a transfixing effect on Brian. ‘As we walked away from the Albert Hall, down the big steps at the back, he was almost in a daze. “That’s what I want, Giorgio,” he kept saying. “That’s what I want.’”

Knowing the Beatles was all very nice – but it did not help Giorgio in his efforts to interest powerful London people in a group whose venue, ten miles from the West End, might as well have been in another hemisphere. For record company talent scouts, the only worthwhile journey, if not to Soho, was 200 miles north to Liverpool, in their frenzied search for new groups in the Beatles’ image. It was a quest pursued with especial fervour by Decca, whose head of A & R, Dick Rowe, was celebrated as The Man Who Turned The Beatles Down. A letter from Giorgio Gomelsky about a new blues group in Surrey did not even reach Dick Rowe’s in-tray.

The Stones themselves knew only one person connected with the record industry. This was a school friend of Ian Stewart’s named Glyn Johns, who worked at IBC Studios in Portland Place. Part-owned by the orchestra leader Eric Robinson, IBC had very little to do with pop music. But Glyn, a talented engineer, was allowed to record any artists he thought promising. At his invitation, the Rolling Stones came to IBC and, in a single evening, recorded four songs for their stage act, including Chuck Berry’s Come On.

The excitement of being in a real studio, supervised by a young engineer who was also a Crawdaddy fan, rather tailed off, since IBC carried little weight with the major record companies. A colleague of Glyn’s knew someone at Decca – but on the classical music side. It seemed just more effort wasted on a world whose ears were deaf to all but the Beatles’ second number one single, From Me to You.

On April 13, when the Stones’ spirits were at their lowest ebb, Giorgio Gomelsky’s hustling of newspapers, small as well as large, finally began to pay off. The weekly Richmond and Twickenham Times devoted a full page to the blues club behind the Station Hotel and its effect in taking custom from trad jazz clubs in the area. ‘The Rolling Stones’ – the ‘g’ once more reinstated – received a somewhat incidental mention: “Save for the spotlit forms of the group on the stage, the room is dark … A patch of light catches the sweating dancers and those who are slumped on the floor, where no chairs are provided …’

A few days later, Peter Jones of the Record Mirror succumbed to Giorgio’s entreaties and agreed to give up his Sunday lunchtime to watch Giorgio’s group being filmed onstage at their Richmond pub club. Jones was a prescient as well as a prolific journalist, the first to interview the Beatles in any national music paper. He watched the Stones perform on camera, and afterwards met them in the Station Hotel’s saloon bar. ‘They were hungry, and they were very bitter,’ Peter Jones says. ‘They told me no one had even been bothered before to drive ten miles out from London to see them. I promised to do my best to get a story about them into the Record Mirror.’

Jones was as good as his word. He persuaded the Record Mirror’s star reporter, Norman Jopling, to go out to Richmond with a photographer the following Sunday. Jopling – a blues and soul fanatic – was even more impressed than Peter Jones had been. ‘The Stones had got the real r & b sound, not just a copy of it,’ Jopling remembers. ‘When they played a Bo Diddley number, it sounded like Bo Diddley. And the whole scene around them in that room was unbelievable.’

Norman Jopling’s feature article in Record Mirror, the following Thursday, surpassed Giorgio’s wildest hopes:

As the Trad scene gradually subsides, promoters of all kinds of teen-beat entertainments have a sigh of relief that they’ve found something to take its place. It’s Rhythm and Blues, of course. And the number of R & B clubs that have suddenly sprung up is nothing short of fantastic.

At the Station Hotel, Kew Road, the hip kids throw themselves about to the new ‘jungle music’ like they never did in the more restrained days of Trad.

And the combo they writhe and twist to is called the Rolling Stones. Maybe you haven’t heard of them – if you live far from London, the odds are you haven’t.

But by gad you will! The Stones are destined to be the biggest group in the R & B scene, if that scene continues to flourish …

It was, indeed, an astounding plug for unknown musicians in a paper read throughout the tight community of agents and A & R men. As Norman Jopling recalls, the feedback was instantaneous. ‘Record Mirror hit the streets at about one p.m. in the West End. By four o’clock that afternoon, three different record companies had phoned me, saying “Where can we get hold of these guys?”’ Jopling supplied particulars, although fully aware – as Peter Jones was – that the guys had by now been well and truly got hold of.


THREE (#ud6910e98-c912-5b43-9cd1-8f861586d1bd)

‘I BELONG TO YOU AND YOU BELONG TO ME, SO COME ON’ (#ud6910e98-c912-5b43-9cd1-8f861586d1bd)

At the age of eleven, Andrew Loog Oldham was already incorrigibly addicted to glamour. While other boys read the Eagle comic or swapped matchbox labels, Oldham walked the Soho streets, breathing in with delight the mingling scents of coffee beans, salami, striptease and primitive rock ’n’ roll. Glamorous as these surroundings were, they paled next to the glamour he already perceived in himself. From an even earlier age, he had visualized his own life as an epic film of which he was both the star and the rapt audience. ‘It was the only way I could get to school in the morning. As I walked in through the gates, I’d see the opening credits start to roll …’

The name which in later years seemed so typical a product of its owner’s imagination was, in fact, genuine. Andrew Loog Oldham was the son of a Dutch-American air force officer, killed on a bombing mission over Germany in 1944. Born out of wedlock, the baby received both parents’ names. His Dutch origins were always faintly manifest in a pink complexion, butter-coloured hair and eyes whose myopic pallor gave Oldham, even at his most uppity and outrageous, the look of a rather studious small boy.

A private boarding school to which his widowed mother sent him provided an early object lesson in the relation of fantasy to profit. The school – in Witney, Oxfordshire – was run by an ex-army officer, a dashing figure whose frequent absences were rumoured to be connected with vital work for the government. The head was, in fact, a prisoner on parole who moved around the country, setting up small schools, collecting fees, running up bills, then vanishing without trace. That headmaster was Andrew Loog Oldham’s first lesson in the principle that, provided you had nerve and style enough, you could get away with almost anything.

In 1955, the pink-faced Hampstead schoolboy was a familiar figure among the teenage crowd at Soho’s famous 2 I’s coffee bar. Norah, the doorkeeper, knew him well and would let him downstairs into the skiffle cellar without paying the usual one-shilling cover charge. His taste in pop heroes was eccentric even then – Wee Willie Harris, green-haired and wizened; Vince Taylor, an early American rocker, afterwards famous in France. ‘It was always the sex in rock ’n’ roll that attracted me … the sex that most people didn’t realize was there. Like the Everly Brothers. Two guys with the same kind of face, the same kind of hair. They were meant to be singing together to some girl, but really they were singing to each other.’

From the age of thirteen or so, Oldham saw himself as an amalgam of two movie roles, both portrayed by his screen idol, the suave if faintly reptilian Laurence Harvey. He wanted to be Harvey’s version of Joe Lampton, ruthless working-class hero of Room at the Top. He wanted just as much to be the jive-talking young Jewish hustler whom Harvey played in Expresso Bongo, sashaying round Soho in Italian box jacket and rakish trilby hat, scouring the pasteboard streets for any quick way to a dividend.

He left Wellingborough College at sixteen with three GCE O-Levels – in English, divinity, and, he claims, rifle shooting – and at once set about making his way in the world as Laurence Harvey had shown him. His first coup was to go to Chelsea, walk into Mary Quant’s clothes boutique and ask for a job in any capacity whatever. Mary Quant and her husband, Alexander Plunkett-Green, were amused by the blond-haired youth and his barefaced effrontery. They agreed to take him on as an odd-job boy, teamaker and messenger.

He worked for Mary Quant throughout the period when her plungingly simple black and white dresses, short skirts, sailor necks and oversized bows altered the look of haute couture, and of London, forever. In February 1962, the first issue of a colour supplement by the hitherto stuffy Sunday Times featured a Quant dress worn by a new young model, Jean Shrimpton, and photographed, not by the customary middle-aged society acolyte but by a young man, David Bailey, who came from London’s East End and – still more outrageously – made no attempt to conceal it. This first ‘in crowd’, as defined by the Sunday Times, did not, of course, include anyone named Andrew Loog Oldham; still, he was happy. ‘I was where I wanted to be – around stars.’

At this stage, the only way of achieving stardom himself, as his mental scenario had dictated, was to become a pop singer. The fact that he could neither sing nor play an instrument seemed hardly relevant. Over a period of months, London agents and managers would be intermittently persecuted by the same blond, bespectacled, unmusical youth, posing under such aliases as ‘Chancery Laine’ and ‘Sandy Beach’.

By working for Mary Quant all day, and by night as a waiter at Soho’s Flamingo Club, he saved enough to migrate to the French Riviera. There, for several months, he worked in sea-front bars and as an itinerant window dresser. There, too, in company with two freelance journalists, he concocted his first great money-making scheme. The plan was to kidnap a wealthy heiress. Andrew would keep her, drugged, in a flat in Monte Carlo while the journalists sold the story to the London Daily Express. It would give the story a piquant twist, they said, if Andrew were subsequently to marry the heiress. This he was quite willing to do. Unfortunately, the scheme foundered after the, not unwilling, girl had been taken to the Monte Carlo flat. Her father had friends in the British government, and got an official D-notice issued, prohibiting any newspaper from running the story. Andrew Loog Oldham thus failed to become nationally famous either as a kidnapper or as a cad.

Back in London, a job with the Leslie Frewin publishing house provided an entrée into the decidedly glamorous world of public relations. He left Frewin to join a PR company whose clients included the pop singer Mark Wynter. Handsome, blow-waved and insipid in the prevailing American style, Wynter was following what seemed an inexorable course from Top Twenty hit to low-budget ‘exploitation’ feature film. One of Oldham’s jobs was to accompany him on location to Twickenham studios and share a bedroom with him at a nearby small hotel. ‘Every morning, Mark used to get up very early and creep off to the bathroom to wash and shave and fix his hair. Then he’d come and get back into bed. A bit later, he’d sit up and say “Well, Andrew – time to set off for the studios.” He was convinced I thought he always woke up looking like that. I thought that was great – that really was looking after your image.’

Two major pop impresarios, Larry Parnes and Don Arden, between them controlled all the singers and groups for whom Oldham hoped to work as publicist. Parnes ran a menagerie of exotically named singers from offices in Cromwell Road, opposite the headquarters of the Boy Scout movement (at which, in spare moments, he liked to gaze through binoculars). Don Arden, an authentically frightening figure, rivalled Larry Parnes in promoting pop package tours, cobbled from the hitmakers of the moment. Andew Loog Oldham joined Arden for a while but was fired after inviting journalists to view cinema seats which, during a particularly well-appreciated package show, had been slashed with razors and drenched with female urine.

He was by this time a well-known figure around ABC-TV’s studios in Aston Road, Birmingham, where Thank Your Lucky Stars was recorded. In February 1963, he stood and watched the Beatles give their first nationwide performance of Please Please Me. He later approached Brian Epstein, and offered himself as publicist for Epstein’s company, NEMS Enterprises. Brian Epstein, it happened, was preparing to launch two other Liverpool acts, Gerry and the Pacemakers and Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas. He agreed to hire Andrew Loog Oldham to promote the two groups on a monthly retainer of £25.

The arrangement was somewhat hampered by Tony Barrow, a London-based Liverpudlian already writing press releases about the Beatles and sleeve notes for their first album Brian Eptstein ordained that Barrow should concentrate on written handouts while Oldham – by now running his own PR company – dreamed up stunts to get paragraphs into the papers. The Beatles themselves, watched over with obsessive jealousy by Epstein, remained always tantalizingly out of reach. His NEMS work was for the advancement of Gerry Marsden and Billy J. Kramer, each awaiting Top Twenty success in cardboard shoes and cheap little shortie overcoats.

Oldham’s journeys north, though chilly and unglamorous, brought one further big advance. In Manchester, he met Tony Calder, a young agent handling local groups like the Hollies and Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders. Manchester groups were by now starting to benefit from London’s obsession with the Mersey Sound. Tony Calder also took on Oldham as publicist for his firm, Kennedy Street Enterprises. ‘It felt just like tiddlywinks. I’d already got Liverpool sewn up, with Epstein and NEMS. Now I’d got Manchester as well.’

A chance PR assignment for the American record producer Phil Spector, early in 1962, altered Oldham’s conception of how he might seize his still unspecified destiny. Up to then, in pop music, celebrity had come only to performers – the singers first, then the star guitarists and, latterly, the groups. No fame, or even credit, was given to the A & R men who arranged and supervised even the biggest hit recordings. Phil Spector was the first A & R man to be as well known as the artists he recorded – to produce each three-minute disc in his individual and unmistakable style of complex multitrack effects and cavernous echo: the Spector Wall of Sound.

Phil Spector became the epitome of all Andrew Loog Oldham wished to be. His persona was that of a semi-gangster, riding round in dark-windowed limousines, protected by ugly bodyguards with bulges under their arms. While Spector was in London, Andrew Loog Oldham rode round with him, devoutly questioning him about the secret of his success. Instead of the hoped-for technical hints, Phil Spector imparted a piece of advice which Oldham at the time found rather disappointing. If Oldham ever found a group to record, Spector said, he should on no account let them use the record company’s studio but should instead pay for an independent studio session and afterwards sell or lease back the tapes to the record company. That way, you had control and you had much more money.

In April 1963, the Beatles were number one in every chart with From Me to You. Gerry and the Pacemakers were Number Two with How Do You Do It? Oldham lost his retainer from NEMS Enterprises, and began looking around for something else to make up that monthly £25. Calling in at the Record Mirror office – a habitual haunt of his for picking up tips – he found Peter Jones enthusing over an unknown blues group whose fortunes Norman Jopling was about to change with a eulogistic article. As Oldham listened, the pop singer and the publicist faded; a brand-new incarnation of himself took shape on his mental Cinerama screen.

He drove to Richmond the very next Sunday. In the narrow passageway beside the Station Hotel, he met a boy and girl coming out into the warm spring dusk. Neither Mick Jagger nor his girlfriend Chrissie Shrimpton noticed Andrew Loog Oldham, for the simple reason that they were having a furious argument.

The Crawdaddy that night was anything but the wild spectacle Norman Jopling had described. Giorgio Gomelsky had been called away to Switzerland by the death of his father. Without Giorgio to enliven it, the club was in a torpid mood. The Stones had even resumed their old purist habit of playing seated on a ring of bar stools. ‘There was no production,’ Oldham says. ‘It was just a blues roots thing … “Here I am and this is what I’m playing.” Even so, I knew what I was looking at. It was Sex. And I was maybe forty-eight hours ahead of the pack.’

Suffering an uncharacteristic fit of shyness, Oldham did not approach the Stones that first night. For all his hubris, he knew he was in no position on his own to try to manage a pop group. As a PR man he could exist on the wing, using other people’s office desks and telephones. As a would-be manager, he could not function unless connected to the crucial network of tour promoters, song pluggers and record company talent scouts. He realized there was no alternative – his discovery would have to be shared.

His natural first choice was the PR client who happened to be Britain’s most famous pop manager. Oldham went to Brian Epstein and said he would be leaving NEMS Enterprises as he’d found this great group out at Richmond and wanted to have a shot at managing them. He offered a deal whereby, in exchange for some office space and minimal funding by NEMS, Epstein could have 50 per cent of the Rolling Stones. But Epstein felt that, with the Beatles and his other Liverpool acts, he already had enough and more to think about. He thus passed up the chance to manage what would become the two greatest supergroups of all time.

Oldham’s next approach was to Eric Easton, an agent handling such middle-of-the-road acts as guitarist Bert Weedon, singer Julie Grant and the pub pianist Mrs Mills. A former electronic organist, bespectacled and quiet, he seemed the least likely of all patrons for a shaggy r & b band. None the less, he agreed to go with Oldham and see them the following Sunday night, even though it would mean missing his favourite television programme, Sunday Night at the London Palladium.

For a second time, Oldham watched the Stones play their ‘blue-roots thing’ behind their diffident, loose-lipped vocalist in his sloppy student pullover. At the end, Eric Easton, who also hired out electronic organs to Butlins holiday camps, gave Oldham a look that was only the faintest ‘maybe’. Oldham approached the group’s drummer, a sad-faced, smartly dressed boy, and asked who their leader was. Charlie Watts pointed to Brian Jones. Oldham remembers with what determination Brian headed him off from talking to either Mick or Keith. ‘Brian was a really weird shape with that big head, broad body and short legs, like a little Welsh pony. But he had incredible magnetism. He could make you focus on just his face.’

There were subsequent meetings at Eric Easton’s London office, at which the cautious agent said he might be able to do something for the Stones though he was making no promises. His one creative suggestion, to Oldham privately, was that Mick Jagger’s voice might not be strong enough to stand the pressure of performing night after night. When Brian, as ‘leader’, was brought into the discussion, he seemed quite amenable to dropping Mick if necessary. But Oldham, for reasons he himself still did not quite understand, insisted that the vocalist was irreplaceable.

While Easton pondered overall strategy, Oldham applied himself to getting on friendly terms with the six Stones in a way that might have warned his older colleague of things to come. It was, indeed, the most brilliant self-selling job the nineteen-year-old had yet pulled off, expertly mixing audacity with intuition. He came on to Brian, Mick, Keith, Stew, Bill and Charlie as a London big shot who could give them anything they wanted and get anywhere they cared to go. At the same time, he was one of them, a rebel, an outsider who shared their quasi-Marxist ideals and evangelistic zeal for bringing pure blues and r & b to a wider audience. Without being able to play or sing a note, Andrew in effect joined the band.

When Giorgio Gomelsky returned from Switzerland early in May, he found that the Stones had signed an exclusive management agreement with Andrew Loog Oldham and Eric Easton. Brian Jones broke the news to Giorgio, mysteriously claiming that Oldham was a schoolfriend of his. Brian, in fact, had signed the agreement on behalf of all the Stones and had, additionally, done a private deal with Easton to receive £5 a week over and above what the others were paid in salary.

In 1962, the most unenvied figure in British pop music was Dick Rowe of Decca Records, The Man Who Turned The Beatles Down. It made no difference to remind himself – as Rowe constantly did – that his decision at the time had seemed entirely logical. Two auditions, in Liverpool, then London, had failed to detect any noticeable merit in a quartet of juvenile eccentrics singing Besame Mucho, Your Feet’s Too Big and other items perversely unsuited to current teenage fashion. So, in January 1962, Dick Rowe passed on the Beatles, instead signing up a group with the altogether more desirable and commercial name of Brian Poole and the Tremeloes.

Ten months later, the calamity of Dick Rowe’s decision confronted him each day of his working life. The Beatles had become the biggest thing in teenage entertainment since Elvis Presley. Dick Rowe had let them slip through his fingers and into the waiting clutches of Decca’s deadly rival, EMI.

For twenty years, these two companies had controlled British popular music, producing 95 per cent of all discs on their myriad labels as well as manufacturing the wireless sets, record players – and even needles – required to bring their product to life. Of the two, Decca seemed more wholeheartedly devoted to entertainment. The blue Decca label, the white Decca factory at Wimbledon, were synonymous with the age of the wind-up gramophone. Decca introduced the first long-playing record into Britain when EMI was still mainly an electrical company, manufacturing TV sets, radiograms and weapons systems for the then War Office.

Decca was the creation – and, substantially, the property – of Sir Edward Lewis, a white-haired, gangling man who, even on days that paid high dividends, was seldom observed to smile. For Sir Edward, recorded music was a commodity little different from soap or safety pins, and only really in tune if it harmonized with a good showing on the Stock Exchange, Sir Edward Lewis’s favourite place in the world. ‘I only ever knew of one person who could make him laugh,’ Dick Rowe remembered later. ‘That was Tommy Cooper. If Sir Edward ever left the office early, you could be sure Tommy Cooper was on television that night,’

Decca’s pre-eminence as a record company ended in 1954 with the arrival of Sir Joseph Lockwood, a successful flour miller, to the EMI chairmanship. Lockwood instantly halted EMI’s decline, ending the manufacture of radiograms and investing in a new record-pressing plant just in time for the first pop music boom. Sir Edward, for his part, took Lockwood’s success as a personal insult, and would speak of him only in the most slighting manner. He took some comfort from the fact that Lockwood, unlike himself, owned no substantial part of his company’s stock and was, therefore, ‘just an employee’.

Now, thanks to Dick Rowe, Lockwood had carried off the greatest prize of all. Not only the Beatles but all other northern groups and their new money-spinning sound seemed to have been engorged by EMI. No one wanted Decca after the preposterous mistake of its hapless A & R chief. ‘Things got so bad,’ a former Decca employee says, ‘that if a boy with a guitar had just walked along Albert Embankment past our office, the whole A & R staff would have rushed out to sign him up.’

Rowe’s only consolation was that no group, however big, could possibly appeal to British teenagers for longer than six months. He might have lost the Beatles, but he had a sporting chance of finding the next Beatles. It was to this objective that Rowe’s entire A & R department was now frenziedly devoted. Like every other record company, Decca had sent teams of talent scouts up to Liverpool to scour the Merseyside clubs and ballrooms. The fact that the Beatles’ home town was a seaport acted powerfully on the A & R men’s overheated minds. The search for new Beatles was widened to other seaports, Cardiff, Bristol and Southampton.

Dick Rowe himself was still drawn back, with remorseful fascination, to Liverpool. He was there again in the first week of May 1963, hoping to find the next Beatles in a talent contest he had been asked to help judge at the city’s Philharmonic Hall. To add to his discomfort, a Beatle, George Harrison, sat with him on the judging panel. Rowe remarked to George with a brave show of lightheartedness that he was still kicking himself. Though John Lennon had been heard to say he hoped the Decca man kicked himself to death, George seemed to cherish no animosity. ‘In fact,’ Rowe said, ‘he told me I’d been right to turn the Beatles down because they’d done such a terrible audition.’

Halfway through the talent contest, the next Beatles still had not materialized. George Harrison remarked to Dick Rowe that there was a group down in London he should consider signing; a group called the Rolling Stones who played each Sunday night at the Station Hotel, Richmond … When George turned round, he found he was talking to himself. Rowe’s chair was empty.

He remembered that, as he drove through Richmond after his headlong journey down from Liverpool, the sun was low in the sky, red and warm like a portent of redemption. ‘The sun was so bright that when I got into the club, I could hardly see anything at all. Just crowds of boys – I couldn’t see any girls. Crowds of boys, rising and falling on the balls of their feet.’ Unannounced – unnoticed in the Crawdaddy’s Sunday night crush – Dick Rowe stood and watched the five figures who were about to rescue his reputation.

Elated as he was, he forced himself to follow A & R protocol. ‘I’d never speak directly to a group that interested me. It was always to their agent or manager. I couldn’t find anything out in the club about who managed the Stones. Next morning, I was in my office at eight o’clock ringing round all the main agencies. No one I spoke to seemed to have heard of the Rolling Stones. Eventually someone said, “Try Eric Easton.” I knew Eric, of course. Once I’d spoken to him, the whole deal went through in a matter of days.’

Before the Stones could sign with Decca, one small difficulty had to be overcome. The tape of five songs they had recorded with Glyn Johns at IBC studios was still held by IBC, and could thus be termed a prior recording commitment. Eric Easton’s advice was that the Stones themselves should approach IBC, saying they had now split up and wanted to buy the tape back as a souvenir. An unsuspecting IBC agreed to return the tape for what it had cost in studio time: £109.

Within less than a week, Easton and Dick Rowe were concluding what Decca’s A & R chief presumed would be a straightforward two-year recording contract. If anything, Rowe considered, it showed largesse on Decca’s part. When Brian Epstein signed the Beatles with EMI, he had been forced, after many previous rejections, to accept a miserly rate of one old penny royalty per double-sided record, rising in yearly increments of one farthing. Rowe, therefore, felt it almost a point of honour to offer the Rolling Stones, however unknown and untried, the standard record royalty rate, five per cent of the retail price of each copy sold.

Thus far, Dick Rowe’s dealings had been with his pleasant and obliging contemporary, Eric Easton. The familiar process, of doing deals quietly over the heads of inexperienced boys, was now rudely shattered by Easton’s nineteen-year-old associate. Before Andrew Loog Oldham even walked into Decca he had imagined the film cameras starting to roll on yet another version of himself. ‘I’d decided I was going to be a nasty little upstart tycoon shit.’ At his first meeting with Decca’s managing director, Bill Townsley, Oldham sat down, uninvited, and coolly put his feet up on Townsley’s desk.

Dick Rowe gazed just as expressively at the fair-haired youth who had peremptorily cut across his genial suggestions to Eric Easton about possible dates for the Stones to cut their first record at Decca’s West Hampstead studios, and which of Decca’s staff producers might supervise them. Oldham replied that the Stones would not be using Decca studios and, while Rowe was still goggling, added that they did not need a producer. They already had one, named Andrew Loog Oldham.

Oldham had never forgotten the advice imparted to him in the depths of Phil Spector’s limousine. That advice was, simply, that all material taped in the studios of a record company remained the company’s copyright. By recording the Stones independently, then leasing the record ‘masters’ back to Decca for manufacture and distribution, Oldham would retain the copyright and, simultaneously, rob Decca of control over what was recorded. Such a deal had not been proposed in the whole history of British recorded music. It was a measure of Decca’s desperation to launch the ‘new Beatles’ that Oldham’s conditions were accepted.

The sunglasses through which Andrew Loog Oldham blandly surveyed his disgruntled new associates were a further ploy borrowed from Phil Spector. Through his mind’s movie camera, he saw himself already as an English Spector – an entrepreneur as famous and glamorous as any performer in his care. So Oldham, despite never before having set foot in a record studio, announced to Dick Rowe and Decca that the Rolling Stones’ first single would be under his exclusive direction.

It was a simple matter, anyway, to hire a studio at Olympic Sound, just off Baker Street, at a fee of five pounds per hour. There, on May 10, 1963, Oldham met the six Stones under the slightly bemused eye of the single engineer, Roger Savage, whose services were included in the price.

Oldham had instructed the Stones to choose what they considered the five best numbers in their repertoire. He himself would then decide which would be the A-side and which the B-side of the single. That decision proved more troublesome than he had expected. The Stones’ best stage numbers were Roll Over Beethoven, Dust My Blues, Roadrunner – rhythm and blues standards, now so widely in use among other groups they could have little impact on the commercial record charts.

The final choice for the A-side was Come On, the Chuck Berry song they had already taped at IBC studios. As a number, its chief virtue was its obscurity. Few of Berry’s British fans had heard the original version with its uncharacteristically ill-humoured lyric and odd rumba beat. The B-side – which did not have to be so commercial – was another song already taped at IBC, Willie Dixon’s I Want to Be Loved.

For three hours or so, the Stones worked to polish a version of Come On, which, even at its best, would still betray for all time their sense of uneasy self-compromise. Chuck Berry’s perverse rumba was stripped down to bare guitars and bass, played at the tempo of rapid feet pattering in and out of a wah-wah harmonica riff. Mick Jagger’s vocal similarly purged the lyric of its exasperation at ramshackle cars and crossed telephone lines. Where Chuck Berry sang of ‘some stupid jerk’, Jagger felt it more judicious to say ‘some stupid guy’. Even with a key change, allowing much of the song to be repeated, the finished track lasted barely a minute and three-quarters.

As producer, Andrew Loog Oldham confined himself to watching the studio clock, fretting that another hour had passed and another five pounds had been spent. The final take was finished at just before 6 p.m. Unwilling to spend five pounds more, Oldham said that one would do and began to walk out of the studio. ‘What about mixing?’ the engineer asked in bewilderment. Britain’s putative Phil Spector had not realized that, after a song was taped, its separate vocal and instrumental tracks were then ‘mixed’ for internal balance. ‘You mix it,’ Oldham said airily. ‘I’ll drop in and pick it up in the morning.’

The result, even after mixing, was clearly far below even the very moderate standard of a 1963 pop single. Dick Rowe said so, and the Stones agreed. They were now as keen as Rowe that the single be recorded under experienced supervision in Decca’s own studios. There, at last, both Come On and I Want to Be Loved reached a standard satisfactory to musicians and A & R man. Then it was decided to go with the IBC version after all. The release date was fixed as June 7.

The Stones were now Decca recording artists, part of a galaxy of talent that included Little Richard, Tommy Steele, Duane Eddy and the works of Buddy Holly. For all that, while Eric Easton worked on their future career, present circumstances remained much as before. They continued playing the same few club dates for the same few pounds each – Giorgio’s Crawdaddy, the Marquee, Ken Colyer’s Studio 51. Even that former nest of folk purists was now so packed out each Sunday afternoon that girls could reach the lavatory only by letting themselves be lifted up and passed along over people’s heads.

One Sunday at Studio 51, the crush was so fierce that a girl named Shirley Arnold fainted. She came to in the band’s changing room, under the solicitous gaze of the Stones and their young manager. Shirley was a passionate blues fan, then going out with a member of another r & b group, the Downliner Sect. She got talking to Oldham who, after very few minutes, offered her the job of organizing the Stones’ embryonic fan club. ‘I said I’d give it a go. There and then, Andrew handed me about three hundred postal orders that girls had sent in as subscriptions and said, “Okay, get on with it.”’

Decca, meanwhile, prepared to launch their new acquisition with all the fire and verve of civil servants on a Friday afternoon. Decca’s promotional strategy – in common with everything else – came directly from the chairman’s office. Sir Edward Lewis did not believe in publicity. In his experience, greater profits accrued from artists whose private lives remained obscure. So it had proved in the case of Ted Heath the bandleader, whose very death had gone largely unnoticed by his sizeable American public, thus allowing Decca to go on recording the Heath band as if he were still conducting them.

As Andrew Loog Oldham knew from his months as a publicist, there was only one sure way of pushing a debut single by an unknown group into the national Top Twenty charts. The group must appear on ABC-TV’s hugely popular Saturday night pop show, Thank Your Lucky Stars.

It seemed a great stroke of luck that Brian Matthew, compere of Thank Your Lucky Stars – and of BBC Radio’s equally influential Saturday Club programme – was also one of Eric Easton’s clients. Unfortunately, Matthew had so far reacted adversely to the Stones, criticizing Mick Jagger’s vocal style and their general scruffiness. To get a booking on Thank Your Lucky Stars, the Stones must conform to the pattern for all pop groups that the Beatles had ordained. They must wear matching stage suits, and look neat and clean and amiable.

Whatever outrage the Stones felt at his proposal was subdued by their eagerness to get in front of the TV cameras. They allowed themselves to be presented to Matthew and his producer, Philip Jones, in uniform outfits whose Carnaby cuteness might better have suited a team of chorus boys. The jackets were houndstooth check bumfreezers, high-buttoning, with velvet half-collars. With the jackets went round-collar shirts, slim ties and Cuban-heeled Beatle boots. The ensemble had been financed – and chosen – by Eric Easton, and earned nods of approval from all but those compelled to button and tab themselves into it. The humiliation, though, was more than worthwhile. The Stones were booked to mime their single on Thank Your Lucky Stars on the day of its release, June 7.

The alterations did not stop there. Keith Richards, to his eternal mystification, was told to drop the ‘s’ from his surname to give it a ‘more pop sound’, like Cliff Richard. And Ian Stewart, the Stones’ piano player, chauffeur and provider of luncheon vouchers, was dropped from the stage line-up. Six in one group was too many, Andrew Loog Oldham had decided. And Stew, with his short hair, beefy arms and pugnaciously sensible face, looked ‘too normal’ for what Oldham’s mental movie camera was already starting to run.

‘It wasn’t done very nicely,’ Stewart remembered. ‘I just turned up one day to find the others had stage suits and there was no stage suit for me. None of them even mentioned it to me – apart from Brian. “You’re still a full member of the group, Stew,” he kept telling me. “You’ll still get a sixth share, I promise you.’”

The Stones, however, did not ditch Stew with the amnesiac finality with which the Beatles had ditched their first drummer, Pete Best, in favour of Ringo Starr. Oldham’s request was that Stew should stay on as their roadie, driver and packhorse and occasional back-up pianist. He agreed, though his pride was badly hurt. ‘I thought, “I can’t go back to ICI after this. I might as well stay with them and see the world.”’

Thank Your Lucky Stars on June 7, 1963, offered Britain’s teenagers the customary spectacle of records mimed by their artists, not always accurately, dwarfed by elaborate stage sets and half-drowned by pre-recorded female screams. Top of the bill was Helen Shapiro, a sixteen-year-old got up to look forty, in bouffant hair and flouncy petticoats. The Viscounts, an English close-harmony trio, sang their cover version of the American novelty hit Who Put the Bomp? Two disc jockeys, Pete Murray and Jimmy Henney, delivered judgement on new singles with all the fatuous disinterest of men in their late thirties, aided by a local girl named Janice Nicholls, whose invariable adjudication, ‘I’ll give it five’ – or, in Birmingham dialect, ‘Oi’ll give eet foive’ – had become a national catch phrase.

The Stones were bottom of the bill and, as such, merited only a simple, two-sided set, decorated with cut-out playing-card shapes. Mick stood on a low plinth, just to the rear of Brian and Bill. Keith, seated on a stool, and Charlie at his drums were seen in profile. Their spot in all lasted barely a minute and a half. As the cameras moved up and back, and pre-recorded screams raged around them, the houndstooth-checked, velvet-collared Rolling Stones tried as hard as they could, or ever would again, to be a conventional pop group.

A minute and a half proved enough for many viewers, when the recorded show was broadcast the following weekend. Afterwards, ABC-TV’s Birmingham switchboard was jammed with calls protesting that such a scruffy group had appeared on Lucky Stars, and hoping they would not be invited back.

First review of Come On in the trade press new release columns were not much better. Record Mirror, the most enthusiastic, commended ‘a bluesy, commercial group which could make the charts in a small way’. For the pop-oriented Disc and New Musical Express, Come On fell between two stools, being neither ‘Mersey Sound’ nor imported American ballad. What little radio play the single received made it sound thin and anaemic. A month after its release, the New Musical Express chart showed it at number twenty-six, only one place higher than the Beatles’ From Me to You, issued almost three months earlier.

The only significant piece of publicity, apart from Thank Your Lucky Stars, came about thanks to Giorgio Gomelsky’s good nature. Giorgio bore the Stones no ill will for his peremptory squeezing out, and had gone on plugging them enthusiastically to his friends in Fleet Street. Patrick Doncaster, the Daily Mirror’s rather elderly pop columnist, was at length persuaded to come to Richmond and write about the Crawdaddy Club, the Stones and a new young group, the Yardbirds, whom Giorgio now promoted.

Doncaster’s full-page Mirror piece on June 13 set the scene only too well. The Ind Coope brewery – which had not previously been aware of the frolics conducted on its property – summarily evicted Giorgio Gomelsky from the Station Hotel’s back room. Thereafter, the Crawdaddy Club convened in the open air at Richmond Athletic Ground. The Stones, the Yardbirds, Cyril Davies and Long John Baldry played on a rugby pitch in front of the main grandstand, to promenading audiences of up to a thousand.

Eric Easton, meanwhile, laboured to set the Stones on the path ordained for an aspiring beat group – the dreary round-Britain path of the pop package show. It was no mean achievement, after the poor chart performance of Come On, for Easton to book them into a nationwide tour beginning on September 29, headed by America’s famous Everly Brothers and featuring the Stones’ own r & b hero, Bo Diddley.

The prospect was one alluring enough to make up Mick Jagger’s mind, at last, about the direction he wanted his life to take. Even after the Stones had signed with Decca, he had continued to hover between music and the London School of Economics, keeping all options open to a point where the other Stones became irritated hardly less than Joe and Eva Jagger, and even threatened to drop him as vocalist if he were not available to go on tour. So Mick Jagger went to the LSE registrar and announced he would not be completing his economics course. To his surprise, and relief, no obstacle was put in his way. ‘The registrar said I could go back later if I wanted. It was all surprisingly easy.’

On August 12, the Stones made their last appearance on their Richmond home turf, playing at the Evening News-sponsored National Jazz and Blues Festival with Acker Bilk, Cyril Davies and Long John Baldry. It was to be almost their only London booking prior to leaving on tour with the Everly Brothers. The next step in Eric Easton’s strategy was to launch them into a practically non-stop schedule of one-nighters at ballrooms in remote East Anglian towns like Wisbech, Soham, Whittlesey and King’s Lynn.

For most of Britain throughout that unseasonably wet summer, interest had centred on the developing scandal of John Profumo, a Conservative cabinet minister, Christine Keeler, his twenty-two-year-old mistress, and the subsequent lurid press exposures which had revealed Britain’s High Tory establishment to be sexually linked with an underworld of call girls, Mayfair pimps, property racketeers and even – it was suggested – Russian spies. For once, Britain suspended disapproval of its renegade young to contemplate the possibility that senior government ministers indulged in public fellatio; that ‘up to eight’ High Court judges had been involved in a single sex orgy; that at a fashionable London dinner party, another eminent politician had waited at table naked and masked and wearing a placard which read ‘If my services don’t please you, whip me.’

By contrast with Profumo, Christine Keeler, Stephen Ward and Mandy Rice-Davies, the preoccupations of teenagers seemed positively wholesome. The exact nature of that preoccupation was earnestly sought by London’s commercial TV company, Associated-Rediffusion, in planning a new weekend pop music show to pre-empt Thank Your Lucky Stars. The A-R show was to be called Ready, Steady, Go and be introduced – unprecedentedly – by people the same age as its audience. The producer, Elkan Allan, auditioned each applicant for the job by asking one question: ‘What do you think young people in this country care about most?’ A girl named Cathy McGowan was hired for answering, simply, ‘Clothes.’

It was the clothes of its audience – not confined to seats as before in such shows, but thronging a large, high-ceilinged, multi-level studio – which established Ready, Steady, Go as the epitome of a new pop style, a fashion changing almost as quickly as did the Top Ten sounds. Hipster trousers, flared jeans, leather jackets, op-art dresses, the girls’ Quant crops, the boys’ Beatle cuts, seethed all around Cathy McGowan and the deliberately exposed TV hardware. The atmosphere was that of a King’s Road party where the performers themselves had just chanced to drop by. It was an atmosphere powerfully established by the show’s Friday-night slogan ‘The weekend starts here’; a feeling projected to millions that all belonged to the same quintessentially fashionable club whose only qualification was that you must be under twenty-one.

The Stones, to their great chagrin, spent those same Friday nights packed into Ian Stewart’s van, heading out through the East End to Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire or the Cambridgeshire Fens. It irked them particularly to think that the Beatles, mere northerners, were kings of the new London while they themselves suffered this provincial banishment. In Stew’s van, Bill Wyman always insisted on the front passenger seat as safeguard against the travel sickness from which he claimed to have suffered since childhood. Not for years did the others realize that was Bill’s way of securing the van’s most comfortable seat.

The town halls and ballrooms of Whittlesey, Soham and Wisbech were about as far as one could travel from Ready, Steady Go: big, draughty vaults, filled with boys in Fifties cowlicks and girls in twinsets and ballooned petticoats. The Stones’ r & b repertoire was greeted with puzzlement, if not downright hostility. Better things happened when they tried American songs in the pop-soul idiom – Lieber and Stoller’s Poison Ivy; Arthur Alexander’s You Better Move On. Even after Come On became a minor hit, the Stones were so ashamed of their performance on record, they refused to do the song on stage.

Somewhere between Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire, and the Everly Brothers tour, Eric Easton’s houndstooth-check jackets were cast off for good. It was a discreet rebellion, led – surprisingly – by Charlie Watts, the first to abandon his stage suit in some Fenland dressing room. Keith Richard made his unwearable by multilayered whisky and chocolate stains. The group photograph taken for the tour poster shows them restored to their corduroys and polo necks, standing on a jetty beside the Thames, not far from Edith Grove. A short pre-tour feature in New Musical Express began: ‘They are the group who prefer casual wear to stage suits and who sometimes don’t bother to change before going onstage …’

The tour that opened at the London New Victoria Cinema on September 29 was an odd mélange assembled by its promoter – the frightening Don Arden – to attract all possible levels of the pop listening public. The Everly Brothers were fading legends of the rock ’n’ roll Fifties. Bo Diddley was a cult r & b star. The Flintstones were a heavy saxophone combo. Julie Grant – another Eric Easton client – was a middle-of-the-road ballad singer. When, after barely a week, the mixture proved insufficiently powerful at the box office, Don Arden hastily flew in a second rock ’n’ roll legend Little Richard, to co-star with the Everlys.

For the Stones – given small-type billing equal to Julie Grant – what mattered most was the honour of appearing on the same programme as their idol, Bo Diddley. To show their respect, they dropped all Bo Diddley material from their tour act. Diddley was flattered by the homage of his five shaggy acolytes and was so impressed by Bill and Charlie’s playing he asked both to appear with him as session men on BBC Radio’s Saturday Club.

From its opening London date, the tour headed out into the dim, dark hemisphere beyond Watford which, in pre-motorway Britain, was referred to with vague foreboding as ‘the North’. ‘A few miles out, and it was all new to me,’ Keith says. ‘Up to then, I’d never been further north than north London.’

Derby, Nottingham, Sheffield, Birmingham, Manchester, Bradford, Newcastle and twenty other cities – ancient and important and even beautiful cities, as yet undespoiled by planners – all clotted indistinguishably into the Stones’ first experience of the road. Shows, twice nightly, in some huge old art deco circuit cinema, a Gaumont, a Regal or Odeon. Dark alleys, scratched stage doors and freezing backstairs passages. Dressing-rooms littered with beer bottles and old fish and chip wrappings. Hooks for coats, squalid lavatories, naked light bulbs. A peep through dusty plush curtains into the buzzing, twilit auditorium. Managers and under-managers, short-haired and nylon-shirted, hovering in anxious hostility. Sound systems as a rule no more elaborate than the same two stand microphones used in last Christmas’s pantomime. The curtains parting on shrieks as from damned souls, and plush darkness bejewelled with green Exit signs, smudged here and there by the white crossbelts of the St John Ambulance Brigade.

Cinema managers, fearful of riots and torn seats, had looked sufficiently askance at pop groups who invaded their backstage region in mock sharkskin suits and ruffle-fronted evening shirts. ‘When we used to walk in,’ Bill Wyman says, ‘some manager guy would look at us and say, “Go on, get down to your dressing room. You’ve only got ten minutes to get changed for the show.” We’d say, “We’re ready to go onstage now. We’re ten minutes early.’”

The initiation was also into cities still walled in Victorian darkness, where the only restaurants open late were Indian or Chinese; where hotels smelled of cabbage and beer slops, heat in the rooms was available only by coin meter, and bedclothes passed on a rich legacy of fleas, ticks and scabies. For most of the tour – thanks to another private deal he had done as self-styled leader of the group – Brian managed to stay in slightly more expensive hotels than the others.

On Sunday, October 13, at the Odeon Cinema, Liverpool, Little Richard, the Everly Brothers, Bo Diddley, Julie Grant and the Rolling Stones performed to a barely half-filled house. That same night, the Beatles topped the bill of ATV’s variety show Sunday Night at the London Palladium after a day in which their fans had kept the Palladium virtually under siege. An audience of fifteen million watched the four little figures in halter-neck suits, with wide grins and bouncing-clean hair, who in that moment ceased to be a teenage fad and became a national treasure.

It was with some nervousness, later on, that the Stones played the Cavern Club in Mathew Street, the Beatles’ now celebrated Liverpool home. They need not have worried. The Cavern crowd, urged on by Bob Wooler, the resident disc jockey, gave the visitors a tumultuous welcome. Later, they sampled the pleasures of an all-night city, first at Allan Williams’s Blue Angel Club, then with some local girls who concluded the entertainment by inviting them home to breakfast.

On October 16, it was announced that the Beatles would take part in the 1963 Royal Command Variety Show in the presence of the Queen Mother, Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon. Fleet Street had found the ideal antidote to Profumo, Keeler, that whole summer of upper-class sordidness. With the encouragement of the press, Britain gulped down the Beatles like a reviving tonic. Even those who found their music loud and their hair ludicrous could not help but be charmed by their freshness and cheekiness, the sharp-witted yet amiable back-answers – uttered mainly by John Lennon – which seemed to reassert the essential honesty and integrity of the working man.

The Rolling Stones, like everyone else on the Everly Brothers package tour, grew even more conscious that the centre of the world was far from the Gaumont Cinema, Bradford. Nor did a visit from their nineteen-year-old co-manager greatly bolster up their self-esteem. Andrew Loog Oldham, having breezed in, made perfunctory enquiries and looked aghast at the encircling grimness, wished them good luck and disappeared again.

Oldham went straight to Liverpool, and the more promising company of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, both simultaneously visiting what was still their home base. The three afterwards drove back down to London. ‘It was a very weird journey,’ Oldham remembers. ‘I don’t know if we were drunk or stoned, or both. John and Paul started talking about getting themselves disfigured so that the fans could never recognize them and chase them any more. They were talking about all the different ways their faces might be mutilated. “We could get caught in a fire,” Paul said. “We could have special rubber masks made, like skin …”’

Oldham’s main worry on the Stones’ behalf was finding them something to record as a follow-up to Come On. He had ransacked the entire catalogue of the American Chess and Checker r & b labels for something which was neither too well known in its original version or covered already by the proliferation of new British blues groups. It was an unsuccessful search which made Andrew Loog Oldham wish even more fervently, as he sat in John and Paul’s black-windowed limousine, that the Rolling Stones could knock off their own hit songs with the same nonchalant ease as the Beatles.

The final choice, agreed with Decca’s Dick Rowe, was a cover version of the Coasters’ semi-comical Poison Ivy and, for the B-side, Benny Spellman’s Fortune Teller. At Rowe’s suggestion, the session was entrusted to one of Decca’s younger staff producers, Michael Barclay. ‘It was a disaster,’ Dick Rowe remembered. ‘The Stones thought Mike was a fuddy-duddy; he thought they were mad.’ The result was a version of Poison Ivy which Decca and the Stones hated in almost equal measure. The single appeared on Decca’s schedule of new releases but was then cancelled.

A further long discussion-cum-rehearsal at the Studio 51 Club in Great Newport Street produced nothing else that Andrew Loog Oldham considered remotely promising. Exasperated, he left the Stones to their tinkering and arguing and started mooching round the Soho streets like Laurence Harvey in Expresso Bongo, hoping – as that inspirational film idol had hoped – that something or other might turn up.

Miraculously enough, something did. A London taxi stopped next to Oldham, and out jumped John Lennon and Paul McCartney. The Beatles, that day, had been at the Dorchester Hotel, receiving awards from the Variety Club of Great Britain. John and Paul were now on the loose together, looking for more excitement.

‘The dialogue,’ Oldham says, ‘really did go like this, “’Ello, Andy. You’re looking unhappy. What’s the matter?” “Oh, I’m fed up. The Stones can’t find a song to record.” “Oh – we’ve got a song we’ve almost written. The Stones can record that if yer like.”’

The song was I Wanna Be Your Man, one of a clutch of new Lennon-McCartney numbers written for their forthcoming second album With The Beatles. Susceptible to fashion as ever, and natural mimics, they had produced their own two-minute blast of rhythm and blues. As it was still not quite finished, John and Paul went back with Oldham to Studio 51 and put the final touches to it while the Stones waited.

This casual gift from pop music’s hottest songwriting team provided the lethargic Stones with a rush of adrenaline. It required only an hour or two at Kingsway Sound Studios, Holborn, to produce their own Chicago Blues interpretation of I Wanna Be Your Man, replacing winsome Beatles’ harmonics with the belligerent simplicity of Mick Jagger’s voice and Brian Jones’s slide guitar. For a B-side, it was enough to tape a twelve-bar blues instrumental, hastily ad-libbed, as was its title: Stoned. Plagiarism as it was (of Booker T’s Green Onions), this counted as an original composition. Andrew Loog Oldham set up a publishing company to handle such collective efforts, its proceeds to be divided between the five Stones and himself. The company was called Nanker Phelge Music, combining Brian Jones’s word for a grotesque facial contortion with the name of their Edith Grove flatmate, Jimmy Phelge, the youth who at unexpected moments used to wear his underpants on his head.

I Wanna Be Your Man was released on November 1. The Stones were still on tour with the Everly Brothers and Little Richard, playing two shows at the Odeon Cinema, Rochester. Two nights later, the tour finally wound itself up at the Odeon, Hammersmith. Here at last the Stones were on home territory. The show’s compere, Bob Bain, had to plead with the audience to stop shouting, ‘We want the Stones’ and instead shout, ‘We Want the Everlys.’

To the rest of Britain, however, even big-name groups like the Searchers and the Shadows hardly impinged on an obsession born in the trickery of Fleet Street but now rampant beyond any newspaper’s manipulation. On November 4, the Beatles captivated the Royal Command Variety Show by suggesting that a blue-blooded audience containing both the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret should either clap or ‘rattle yer jewellery’. On November 22, their second album, With the Beatles, launched them, looking like soulful art students, into the upper as well as lower social sphere, selling enough copies on advance orders to push the whole album into the Top Twenty singles chart. In early December, the New Musical Express chart showed yet another Lennon-McCartney song, I Wanna Be Your Man by the Rolling Stones, at number thirteen. For influential critics like Brian Matthew, more interest lay in the song’s composers than in the group which had been lucky enough to record it. ‘Do you realize,’ Brian Matthew repeatedly asked his BBC radio audience, ‘how many songs in the current Top Ten are written by, if not sung by, the Beatles?’


FOUR (#ud6910e98-c912-5b43-9cd1-8f861586d1bd)

‘BEATLE YOUR ROLLING STONE HAIR’ (#ud6910e98-c912-5b43-9cd1-8f861586d1bd)

We owe this intimate backstage visit to one of Britain’s last surviving cinema newsreels, in happier days devoted exclusively to sport and royalty but now, in 1964, bravely attempting to fathom an uproar more raucous, to its elderly editors, than the cry of their own screen emblem, the Pathé cockerel.

We follow as the camera tracks uncertainly down a dark passageway, round a corner and through a suddenly opened door into the Stones’ dressing room. It is, however clumsy, an attempt at cinéma vérité – a pop group on tour, caught between performances. The camera settles first on Keith Richard, leaning forward, a cigarette clamped between his lips, to fasten a shirt collar as high as a Regency beau’s hunting stock. Beyond Keith, Brian Jones, in black coat and snow-white jeans, holds up his lozenge-shaped guitar, the better to show the complex chord he is shaping. His hair is now peroxide blond, an aureole of metallic gold covering his eyes, almost encircling his face. The camera moves to Mick Jagger, in a matelot-striped jersey, then it moves on somewhat hastily. His face wears an expression not wholly welcoming; besides, he isn’t holding a guitar.

The stage sequence filmed by Pathé shows how undeveloped Jagger still was as a performer or personality. The song is the Stones’ old club standby, Chuck Berry’s Around and Around. Jagger sings it, hunched around the old-fashioned stand-mike, his face turned diffidently into one matelot-striped shoulder. His lips open just enough to moisten themselves. His eyes seem cloudily preoccupied. At intervals, he claps his hands flamenco-style above his head. Beside him, Keith Richard jigs around, wearing a happy, rather dizzy grin. Far on the other side, with heaped gold hair shutting out his eyes, Brian Jones stands, motionlessly provocative. The camera cuts away to girls with Beatle fringes, alternately screaming and stuffing handkerchiefs into their mouths. Now we see the full stage, empty but for the Stones, their vestigial equipment and a red-curtained backdrop. Jagger leaves the microphone and – the only word is – waddles like a duck shaking water from its tail.

On January 6, they were out on tour again, in the George Cooper Organization’s ‘Group Scene 1964’ show. By now they were big enough to merit equal top billing with the Ronettes, an American girl group, highly successful on Phil Spector’s Philles record label. Spector had already sent his acolyte Andrew Loog Oldham a telegram, sternly warning ‘Leave my girls alone.’ As both individual Stones and Ronettes have since corroborated, that warning was to no avail.

The combination of svelte, sinuous black girls and snarling, scruffy white boys attracted much interest in a music press jaded equally by Christmas indulgence and Beatle overkill. In New Musical Express under a heading ‘Girls Scream at Stones, Boys at Ronnettes’. Andy Gray praised the show’s ‘vocal volume and body action’. Gray’s review – which set the seal of box-office success on the tour – is revealing as a sample both of 1964 pop journalism and also the pitifully short performances given by even top-of-the-bill attractions:

Two packed houses greeted with cheers, screams and scarf-waving the local lads who have made good – the Rolling Stones. Fever-pitch excitement met compere Al Paige’s announcement of them, and they tore into their act with Girls, followed by Come On. This group certainly is different – members wear what they like, from shirts to leather jackets, but they have long hair in common.

Lead singer Mick Jagger whips out a harmonica occasionally and brews up more excitement while the three guitars and drums throb away in back. Hey Mona was another R & B compeller before a quiet number, very appealingly sung by Brian Jones [sic], You Better Move On. Back to the torrid stuff for the last two numbers, Roll Over, Beethoven and I Wanna Be Your Man, taking the act to encore applause …

Decca’s release of an EP – extended play – record on January 17 redoubled the nightly pandemonium. The EP, with its handful of tracks and cheap picture cover, was a well-tried device for getting additional mileage from a pop act whose success did not yet warrant a full twelve- or thirteen-track LP. The Stones’ first EP was in this catchpenny tradition, offering their cancelled A-side Poison Ivy, together with versions of Chuck Berry’s Bye Bye Johnny and Berry Gordy’s much imitated Money. The exception was an Arthur Alexander song, You Better Move On, sung by Mick Jagger with care and almost without affectation. You Better Move On proved popular enough to take the entire EP into the Top Ten singles chart barely a week after its release.

The Stones’ third single, it was already decided, would be a cover version of the Buddy Holly song Not Fade Away – which Mick Jagger had first heard with Dick Taylor at Woolwich Granada back in 1957 – but drastically rearranged by cross-breeding with an equally important stylistic source. On to the mild, reflective Holly song, Keith Richard had grafted guitar chords played in the shuffling, stop-start Bo Diddley beat. ‘To me,’ Andrew Loog Oldham says, ‘when Keith sat in the corner and came up with those chords, that was really the first song the Stones ever wrote.’ The result was played at twice the speed of the Holly original, flashed across, each second verse, by a whinny from Brian Jones’s harmonica.

The taping of Not Fade Away, at Regent Sound, towards the end of January 1964, was an occasion that would have horrified conventional A & R men like Dick Rowe. Oldham and the Stones had hit on the ideal way of escaping interference from Rowe or anyone else from Decca. They recorded by night, not even starting until long after all A & R men were safely back in their suburban mock-Georgian villas, tucked up between their nylon fitted sheets.

Not Fade Away was taped as the culmination of a drunken studio party at which the Stones and Oldham were joined by Phil Spector and two members of the Hollies, Alan Clarke and Graham Nash. Later on, the American singer Gene Pitney also dropped in, bringing with him an outsize bottle of brandy. The final Not Fade Away take featured the two Hollies, appropriately, on back-up vocals and Phil Spector shaking the maracas of which the rhythm track is mainly composed. Spector also cobbled up a B-side song called Little by Little, a pastiche of Jimmy Reed’s Shame, Shame, Shame, dashing it off in minutes, with Mick Jagger’s help, in the corridor. Little by Little was recorded as a simple jam session of guitar, harmonica, piano – played by Gene Pitney – and a Jagger vocal, like the maracas, audibly plastered. At frequent intervals, the session disintegrated into tomfoolery, with Jagger rudely mimicking Sir Edward Lewis, the Decca chairman, and Phil Spector ad-libbing an obscene recitative under the title Andrew’s Blues.

On February 4, at New York’s Kennedy airport, the Beatles emerged from their aircraft to behold a 5,000-strong crowd, keening and howling in the grip of that European virus which the New York Post had predicted would definitely not spread to America. Their appearance, four nights later, on NBC-TV’s Ed Sullivan Show – for a knockdown fee of $3,500 – was watched by an estimated 70 million, or 60 per cent of the American TV audience.

The Beatles’ conquest of America took them out of the orbit of mere pop. In Britain, those who had once damned and denounced them now commended them as an invaluable addition to the export drive. Their name took on almost a talismanic quality, securing newspaper headlines impartially for anyone who invoked it. Members of Parliament, peers of the realm, archbishops, even royalty itself, now talked and talked about the Beatles. To their teenage audience this was, of course, the most gratifying turnabout from last year’s parental ridicule. Just the same, to find one’s idols shared by one’s mother, and even one’s grandmother, made pop seem suddenly rather tame.

No one’s mother or grandmother liked the single, released on February 27 and now climbing up the Top Twenty, spurred on by alternate kicks of delight and hostility. The Stones’ late-night carousings with the Hollies and Phil Spector had produced a noise which sold itself, both as instant hit material and instant anti-heroism, from its first chaotic, maraca-shaking chord. Phil Spector’s presence is widely supposed to have brought about the Stones’ vastly improved cohesion in Not Fade Away – guitars sharper, harmonica more savage, the general onslaught resembling a miniature wall of sound.

The national press was quick to spot the new fad – or, in other words, to take up Andrew Loog Oldham’s suggested story angle. ‘They look,’ said the Daily Express, ‘like boys whom any self-respecting mum would lock in the bathroom. But the Rolling Stones – five tough young London-based music-makers with doorstep mouths, pallid cheeks and unkempt hair – are not worried what mums think … For now that the Beatles have registered with all age groups, the Rolling Stones have taken over as the voice of the teens.’

Last year’s Beatle crowds, it was becoming clear, had behaved moderately in comparison with those who followed the new voice of the teens. The Stones’ third tour, early in February, played each night to an uproar, not merely of screaming girls corralled in cinema seats, but also of spontaneous battles between Mods and their sartorial foes, the Rockers. Other groups to whom this happened would hug their precious guitars to them and hurry from the stage. But the Rolling Stones played on. Brian Jones in particular loved to see trouble starting and to encourage it subtly by brief, goading shakes of his hair and tambourine. It was largely from this trick of Brian’s that Mick Jagger learned how small, tantalizing body movements could tease up conventional screams to a banshee-like howl. He, too, began to experiment, slipping off his Cecil Gee Italian jacket and dangling it on his forefinger like a stripper’s G-string.

The Stones’ television appearances, on Lucky Stars and Ready, Steady, Go, had precipitated a blizzard of hate mail. ‘The whole lot of you,’ wrote a typical correspondent, ‘should be given a good bath, then all that hair should be cut off. I’m not against pop music when it’s sung by a nice clean boy like Cliff Richard, but you are a disgrace. Your filthy appearance is likely to corrupt teenagers all over the country …’

One feature of those TV appearances, above all, had caused adult Britain to recoil with almost speechless revulsion. The Beatles, for all their mop-top fringes, had always been assiduously barbered and groomed. The Stones’ hair, its length, its volume, its wild lack of shape, made the Beatles’ look decorously short by comparison. Not since the early Victorian age had young British men been seen with hair that hung down their necks and curled over their shirt collars, half obliterating their eyes and ears. To a nation whose collective memory of military life was still strong, the Stones’ hair signified almost rabid uncleanliness. And, indeed, the voice of adult Britain rang out like so many sergeant majors. The president of the National Federation of Hairdressers, offering to give the next number one pop group a free haircut – and, by implication, a disinfecting and de-lousing – added: ‘The Rolling Stones are the worst. One of them looks as though he has got a yellow feather duster on his head.’ Brian Jones was deeply offended, especially since he nowadays washed his newly golden hair on average twice each day and was known within the Stones as Mister Shampoo.

All who attacked the Stones fondly imagined themselves to be part of a process that must ultimately consign the ugly little upstarts to ear-burning oblivion. A great many worthy citizens might have held their peace if they had realized what Andrew Loog Oldham did by early 1964: that the more ferociously grown-ups attacked and derided the Stones, the more their teenage fans would love and support them.

Coverage of the Stones from spring 1964 onwards testifies to Oldham’s artful success in making their name synonymous with surliness, squalor, rebellion and menace. Newspaper reporters then were usually middle-aged, baffled by pop music and only too glad of the phrases which Oldham provided. Almost every story began in the same way: ‘They are called the Ugliest Group in Britain …’ Other stories described the Stones’ habit, when exasperated by pressmen’s questions, of sticking their fingers up their noses and dragging down their eyes in a collective version of Brian Jones’s ‘nanker’ grimace. Perhaps Oldham’s greatest thematic coup was a headline in Melody Maker: WOULD YOU LET YOUR DAUGHTER GO WITH A ROLLING STONE? The words mutated into what became almost a national catchphrase whenever the Stones appeared on television. ‘Would you let your daughter marry one?’ people said to each other, or, ‘Mothers turn pale …’

To the fans, they were presented in the mode of Elvis Presley a decade previously – as rebels who were nice boys when you got to know them. No less an authority than Jimmy Savile confided to his pop column audience in the People newspaper that ‘they’re a great team for having a laugh, and dress very clean and smart when they relax’. Oldham ensured that they did everything that pop fans expected, posing as lurid colour pin-ups for teen magazines like Rave and Fabulous 208, grouped in uniform leather waistcoats or jumping up together in zany Beatle style. Their clothes – Brian Jones’s especially – were discussed at inordinate length. Like every other group, they filled in their ‘Life Lines’ for New Musical Express, tempering sarcasm with what was usual, including the ritual white lie about their ages. Mick Jagger (‘born 1944’) gave his Favourite Colour as ‘red, blue, yellow, green, pink, black, white’, and his Favourite Clothes as ‘my father’s’. Keith Richard gave his Year of Birth as ‘1944’, his Parents’ Names as ‘Boris and Dirt’, his Favourite Actor as ‘Harold Wilson’, his Miscellaneous Dislikes as ‘headaches, corns, pimples, gangrene’. Brian Jones (‘born 1944’) gave his Sister’s Name as ‘Hashish’ and his Biggest Career Break as ‘break from parents’. Though Bill Wyman subtracted the largest amount from his age – five years – he admitted the existence of his wife, Diane, and his four-year-old son, Steven. Only Charlie Watts did not lie about his age or his Hobbies: ‘collecting antique firearms and modelling in plaster’.

The ‘voice of the teens’ no longer needed their manager to whip up notoriety for them. On March 27, under a headline BEATLE YOUR ROLLING STONE HAIR, the Daily Mirror reported that eleven pupils at a boys’ school in Coventry had been suspended for imitating the Stones’ hairstyle. The headmaster had refused to reinstate them until they returned to school with hair ‘cut neatly, like the Beatles’.’

By April 1964, they had spent so many consecutive weeks on tour that when Bill Wyman finally went home, his dog mistook him for a burglar and tried to bite him.

Bill had moved with his wife and son from their flat in Penge to a modest house in Farnborough. He was still conspicuously the older man of the group, weighing the pleasures of stardom against the need to support a family and pay off a mortgage. That was only just possible on the wage each of the Stones drew from Eric Easton, pending Decca’s first payout of royalties – which, their contract now revealed, might not be for up to a year after the actual record sales. When Bill drove home to Farnborough, he did so in the mood of an overworked commercial traveller, minus commission.

Mick, Keith and Brian had left the Edith Grove flat and gone separate ways which, at the time, seemed dictated by Brian’s eternally complicated love life. He now wanted nothing to do with Pat Andrews and baby Julian, being deeply involved with a pretty young model named Linda Lawrence. Within a matter of only months, the inevitable happened. Linda, too, discovered that she was pregnant.

Mick and Keith were now sharing a flat with Andrew Loog Oldham in Willesden, North London. ‘We had two rooms between us,’ Oldham says. ‘And we had to share a bathroom. It was rather a quiet place, really. Half a bottle of wine in that flat was a big deal. And anyway, all three of us were going steady.’

Mick Jagger was ‘going steady’, in almost every sense of that winsome Fifties phrase, with Chrissie Shrimpton, seventeen-year-old younger sister of Jean Shrimpton, the famous new face of Vogue and Sunday colour supplements. A year earlier, watching the Stones play at a basement club in Maidenhead, a friend of Chrissie’s dared her to go up to Jagger and ask him to kiss her. The encounter was symbolic of the new kind of Sixties girl Chrissie Shrimpton was no less than the kind of Sixties man Jagger would shortly become. He did kiss her and afterwards invited her out to a cinema in Windsor.

Chrissie’s father was a prosperous builder in the Buckinghamshire town of High Wycombe, with a substantial house and farm a few miles into the country. Mr Shrimpton did not at first care at all for the thin, spotty boy his younger daughter had been bringing home after excursions to music clubs in the neighbourhood. The fact that he was an LSE student, a cut above the usual pop-group type, somewhat mollified Chrissie’s parents. And Mr Shrimpton, self-made man that he was, perceived that, under the hair and spots and sullen lips, there was an acute and calculating intelligence.

Though Chrissie did not share her sister Jean’s cool, unfussed beauty, she was in every way an improvement on Mick’s Dartford girlfriends. She was also, despite her elfin appearance, strong-minded and forthright, with a temper that Mick soon provoked by his cool and careless attitude to the obligations of a steady boyfriend. Their romance from the beginning was punctuated by fights like the one Oldham had witnessed in the Crawdaddy Club passage.

They were, even so, genuinely and often happily in love, and had made plans to marry as soon as Mick earned enough money to support a wife. This was in the days when he still planned to finish his economics degree course and choose some respectable career in business, or – he once told Chrissie’s father – perhaps even politics.

The Shrimptons, with their substantial country house, gave Mick Jagger his first social step up from suburban Dartford. Still more attractive was the connection through Chrissie’s famous sister with the world of fashionable young London – David Bailey, Mary Quant, the Sunday Times, Whipp’s and the Ad Lib. Though Chrissie herself was at secretarial college, her name sometimes appeared in magazine stories about Jean. Mick, though hardly even semi-famous, liked to imagine their romance to be the stuff of newspaper gossip columns. So he would refer to it, in tour interviews with provincial journalists, sitting on the cold back stairs of some northern Gaumont of ABC, sniffing with the faint flu that plagued all the Stones and tilting a Pepsi bottle against his lips. ‘… there’s all those lies being written about me and Chrissie Shrimpton …’

He was now palpably a being apart from the other Stones, in his cable-stitched fisherman’s sweater, his languid eyes appraising his interviewer’s cheap suit as he dismissed this or that question as ‘too much of a drag to talk about’. Offstage, he seemed the most antisocial and isolated: a rebel against his home and background, more vehement even than was Brian Jones. For weeks on end, Joe and Eva Jagger down in Dartford would hear nothing from him. Keith, by contrast, kept in touch with Doris Richards and showered her with gifts to delight her eccentric heart. Charlie Watts was a model of filial affection who presented his mother with a coffee gateau religiously every Friday night. When buying a gateau for his girlfriend also, Charlie would take the walnut from the centre of the girlfriend’s cake and put it on his mother’s, so that she’d have two walnuts.

In those days, there were people who could talk to Mick about his apparent rejection of two very pleasant, if deeply ordinary, parents. Paul McCartney had a long talk with him about it one night when the Beatles and Stones were out together. McCartney got on well with his widower father, and all old people, and was depressed by Mick’s dogged insistence, against much evidence to the contrary, that parents were ‘a drag’. Everything was ‘a drag’, it seemed, which did not supply lustre to his still undecided image.

To so natural a mimic, those early road shows as supporting attraction to big American stars were like a series of lessons in pop idol behaviour and deportment. He had watched the Everly Brothers, singing to one another like blow-waved, cooing narcissists. He had seen Little Richard, a rock ’n’ roll master whose music had always been strangely ambiguous of gender, and who now took to the stage in full make-up, complete with nail varnish. It was on the Little Richard tour that Jagger asked a Liverpool musician, Lee Curtis, how he could find out about theatrical make-up. Curtis’s brother, Joe Flannery, sat him down backstage and showed him how to apply actors’ pancake and rouge.

Chrissie Shrimpton had watched Jagger’s growing awareness of himself as something more than merely a constituent of the Stones’ democracy. To Chrissie, he still pretended it was all for a laugh; that the normal, sensible part of him stood back and laughed when little girls screamed for him. But then, if they were out together and girls waylaid them, to Chrissie’s great irritation, Mick would pretend not to be with her – even ask her to make herself scarce. The Beatles might have lost followers after the revelation that John Lennon had a wife. It was better for Mick’s image – so Andrew Loog Oldham said – if he seemed to have no steady girlfriend.

Chrissie felt slighted by Mick’s apparent willingness to let Andrew Oldham rule and dominate him – accepting, for instance, Oldham’s firm rule that girlfriends were barred when the Stones travelled on tour. Mick’s closeness with Oldham was starting to cause comment among Chrissie’s friends who saw them together in pubs, deep in purported musical strategy. Chrissie Shrimpton, in no doubt about Mick’s virility, was nettled when a female acquaintance asked, ‘At that flat, do Mick and Andrew sleep in the same bed?’

Brian Jones was now living in considerably greater comfort than his former flatmates, having managed to billet himself with the parents of his girlfriend, Linda Lawrence, at their house in Windsor. The arrangement was, of course, based on the idea that Brian’s intentions towards Linda were honourable. Before the opposite proved to be the case, the Lawrences showed him every consideration. He was allowed to use Mr Lawrence’s car whenever he wished. The name of the house was even changed, in Brian’s honour, to ‘Rolling Stone’. And he did seem infatuated with Linda. On tour, he would shower her with postcards – to ‘darlin’ Linda’ – and on his return buy her expensive presents. These included a French poodle and a goat which Brian liked to take for walks through Windsor on a lead.

His passion for Linda seemed to fade in proportion to the progress of her pregnancy. He was soon on the move again, forsaking the Lawrences’ hospitality for a small flat in Chester Street, Belgravia. The birth of a son to Linda completed the alienation process. Brian was seldom other than indifferent to the baby, to whom, in a mood of mischievous malice, he gave the same name as his child by Pat Andrews – Julian Mark. ‘He was so rude about that poor little kid,’ Shirley Arnold, the Stones’ fan club secretary, remembers. ‘He used to call it Broad Bean Head.’

As Brian tired of Linda, his indifference curdled into physical cruelty. On her visits to him in Chester Street, he would sometimes knock her about so violently that his downstairs neighbours – another group, the Pretty Things – could hear bumps and crashes through the ceiling.

To Brian all that mattered was the living of his longed-for role as a pop star. He loved being famous, being recognized, pursued and mobbed by girls – for himself now, not as a counterfeit Beatle. He loved having money, having girls, having wine, having clothes. He loved the pop-star night life at clubs like the Ad Lib, the Establishment, Whipp’s and Scotch of St James’s. He loved the shopping raids on boutiques in corduroy, button-down blocks on either side of Carnaby Street. Brian was the Stone nominated as Rave magazine’s Best-Dressed Pop Star of the Week. He thought nothing of spending £30 on one French Jacket from Cecil Gee’s, £10 on a single silk shirt from Just Men. What he did not buy he would cheerfully steal. The striped jersey, copied by boys all over Britain after Brian wore it on Ready, Steady, Go, had in fact been stolen from the wardrobe of one of his Pretty Things neighbours.

The Pathé newsreel film, shot backstage at Hull ABC cinema, shows what a masterly performer Brian was offstage as well as on. In that film, he appears choirboy innocent, concerned only with tuning his guitar. He would sit down with pimply teenage provincial journalists, the soul of amiability, speaking in that voice so soft, it was almost effeminate, his gold-fringed eyes open wide with incredulity at the attitude of the latest hotel to refuse the Stones accommodation, though – as likely as not – it would have been Brian’s own behaviour that precipitated the ban. ‘The Scotch Corner Hotel … near Darlington … ooh, that’s a terrible place. So aggressive.’

Within the Stones, in their claustrophobic tour life, Brian was invariably the source of any disagreement or disruption. They were all waiting in the wings one night when Keith went for him with both fists, shouting, ‘Where’s my chicken, you bastard?’ Brian, before the show, had filched and eaten Keith’s portion of the only food they would be likely to get that night.

Brian continued to regard himself as leader of the Rolling Stones, and as such entitled to a higher pay-out and superior hotel rooms, all the time in blissful unawareness that his secret negotiations and subterfuges were well known to the other four. In those heady early days, the others were content to take out their resentment of ‘Mr Shampoo’ in comparatively harmless ways. Mick and Keith both developed impersonations of Brian based on his physical defects – the too short legs he attempted to hide on stacked-up Cuban heels; the foreshortened neck which made his chin rest, never quite comfortably, on the roll-top of his sweater. The subtle ragging of Brian increased on a trip with Oldham to Northern Ireland to make a documentary film, directed by Peter Whitehead and entitled – in honour of its least willing participant – Charlie Is My Darling. ‘Brian really went over the top whenever Peter Whitehead’s camera was on him,’ Oldham says. ‘He’d do these long soliloquies to camera. “Why am I a musician … and who am I?” He didn’t realize the others were sending him up rotten.’

What no one could deny was the strength and drive Brian gave to the Stones by sheer musicianship. His preposterous egotism, his amoral willingness to do anyone down and filch anything, were forgotten as soon as he picked up his slide guitar or played harmonica, his cheeks filling and hollowing with the quick, light, dancing breath that kept the whole sound together.

‘Brian was a power in the Stones as long as he could pick up any instrument in the studio and get a tune out of it,’ Oldham says. ‘As soon as he stopped trying, and just played rhythm guitar, he was finished.’

The process had already begun which was to define the power structure within the Stones, binding Mick and Keith together in their unstoppable alliance and leaving Brian irretrievably out in the cold. It began on the night that Andrew Loog Oldham locked his two flatmates in the kitchen of their Willesden basement and threatened not to let them out until they had written a song.

For Oldham, it was a matter of sheer convenience. He was tired of rummaging through Chappell’s r & b song catalogue in the perpetual search for material acceptable to the Stones’ purist conscience and to Decca’s A & R department. Their two Top Twenty singles seemed to confirm what Oldham told them with ever increasing frequency: ‘You can’t be a hit group just on rhythm and blues.’ Nor – it was implicitly added – could Oldham himself become the teenage Svengali of British pop just by sorting through sheet music and listening to song pluggers’ demo tapes.

The necessity of putting together a twelve-track LP, to capitalize on their singles’ success, intensified Oldham’s fear that the Stones were in imminent danger of running out of material. Yet again, he looked enviously towards the Beatles, whose own original songs had comprised a good 50 per cent of their second, million-selling album, With The Beatles. Mick and Keith, too, though far from convinced they could concoct a song together, had been deeply impressed by the exercise in instant Lennon–McCartney composition that had produced I Wanna Be Your Man. So, when their manager locked the kitchen door on them in Willesden, they agreed, for the moment, not to kick it down.

Their first attempts at songs were ballads of a glutinous sentimentality, quite unsuitable for the Stones’ repertoire, or for anyone else’s, despite all Oldham’s bullish attempts at syndication. The first ever Jagger-Richard composition, It Should Be You, was eventually recorded by an obscure white soul artist named George Bean. Slightly more success befell another early ballad, That Girl Belongs to Yesterday, when recorded by Gene Pitney, their erstwhile session pianist. Pitney had a minor hit with the song only after drastic rearrangement to suit a piercing voice which, it was said, hit notes that only record engineers and gods could hear.

Only one Jagger-Richard song, Tell Me, was considered good enough for the album released by Decca in April 1964 (although two more tracks bore the Stones’ collective songwriting name, Phelge). Tell Me has curio value as a heavy-handed attempt by Mick and Keith to imitate the Mersey Beat sound of the numerous post-Beatle groups from Liverpool. Strange it is to hear the Stones trying to sound Beatle-ish, with tolling bass drum, minor chords and chocked-up close harmony. Mick Jagger’s ‘Whoa yeah’ rings out in patent embarrassment. Keith Richard descants him, a McCartney made of cigarette ash and Brillo pads.

The other eleven tracks are a belligerently alive memento of the Stones as an r & b band, the way they used to sound at Ken Colyer’s or the Crawdaddy. Given the limitations of a tiny, primitive studio, and severely rationed time there, they could do little else but blast out the best of their club repertoire, imagining an audience in place of Regent Sound’s egg-box walls and Oldham’s agitated eye on the clock. ‘Andrew told us we couldn’t afford retakes,’ Bill Wyman says. ‘The only time we broke was for food, or to let Mick run out and get sheet music for the words of Can I Get a Witness?’

The tracks are a squirming medley from the soul and blues bag: Chuck Berry’s Carol, Bo Diddley’s Mona, Jimmy Reed’s Honest I Do, Willie Dixon’s I Just Wanna Make Love to You. Even then, they could not find quite enough songs, and were forced to throw in a lengthy instrumental sequence vamped around the chords of Can I Get a Witness? featuring Ian Stewart on electric organ, with instrumental breaks by Keith and Brian. There is even a comedy number, Walkin’ the Dog, with Mick Jagger skilfully mimicking Rufus Thomas’s pop-eyed jokiness. The Jagger of this first album is simply a singer with the band, stepping back to allow others their turn. But in every syllable he sings, there are signs of the Jagger to come. There are signs, most powerfully, in Slim Harpo’s I’m a King Bee, a slow blues, torrid with sexual warning – ‘I’m a king bee, baby, buzzin’ round your hive’ – intoned by Jagger in a somnolent drawl, his tongue and lips playing an audible, almost visible part.

The album sleeve was an Oldham tour de force. Borrowed unashamedly from the famous black and white portrait on the cover of With The Beatles, it had one big difference – the subject of prolonged battle between Oldham and Decca’s design department. Even the epoch-making Beatles sleeve bore a title and the artists’ name. Oldham, however, insisted that the Stones’ sleeve should make no statement other than its pictorial one. The five Stones stood sidelong, glowering from shadows so intense, one could barely see the buttons on their Carnaby Street clothes. It was left to the buyer to know who they were and to peer closer at their faces for evidence of animal sullenness or poetic sensitivity. Twenty years on, the look is still modern, the nerve still coolly audacious. On the back, convention returned with song titles, photographs and a sleeve note by Oldham that began: ‘The Rolling Stones are more than a group. They are a way of life …’

By the day of its release, the album had sold 100,000 copies in advance orders. The Beatles – as Oldham jubilantly pointed out – had sold only 6,000 advance copies of their debut album, Please Please Me. He had further cause for glee when the Rolling Stones, climbing up the trade press album charts, displaced With The Beatles on its way down. Oldham, naturally, dismissed the fact that the Beatles album had been in the charts since the previous November. Everywhere he went, to everyone he met, he uttered the same cry of triumph: ‘The Stones have knocked the Beatles off.’

London (AP) Americans – brace yourselves.

In the tracks of the Beatles, a second wave of sheepdog-looking, angry-acting, guitar-playing Britons is on the way.

They call themselves the Rolling Stones and they’re due in New York Tuesday.

Of the Rolling Stones, one detractor has said:

‘They are dirtier and are streakier and more dishevelled than the Beatles, and in some places they’re more popular than the Beatles.’

Says Mick Jagger:

‘I hate to get up in the morning. I’m not overfond of being hungry either.’

From Keith Richard:

‘People think we’re wild and unruly. But it isn’t true. I would say that the most important thing about us is that we’re our own best friends.’

More than the others perhaps, Brian Jones likes clothes. He puts his philosophy this way:

‘It depends on what I feel like really. Sometimes I’ll wear very flamboyant clothes like this frilly shirt. Other times I’ll wear very casual stuff. I spend a lot of my free time buying stuff.’

Then he adds:

‘There’s really not much else to do.’

Misgivings about this first trip to America were by no means all on America’s side. The Stones took off from Heathrow airport on June 6 almost as unhappy about the whole idea. They knew only too well that when the Beatles had reached America four months earlier, it was on the strength of a single lodged firmly at the top of Billboard magazine’s Hot Hundred. Their own first US single, Not Fade Away, coupled with I Wanna Be Your Man, had, since its mid-May release, barely scraped into the Billboard list. Only Andrew Loog Oldham remained unperturbed. The Beatles, he reminded them, had taken two years and three flop singles to ‘break’ in America. Oldham believed he had the contacts and the nerve to make things happen a lot faster than that.

The Rolling Stones were to be launched in America, not as r & b iconoclasts but – in the subtitle of their US debut album – as ‘England’s Newest Hitmakers’, overtly exploiting the craze for British pop which the Beatles had started and which was now too great for even the Beatles to satisfy alone. In this so-called British invasion, the Stones were following some of the groups they most despised – Herman’s Hermits, Billy J. Kramer, the Searchers. ‘Everyone we really hated seemed to be doing far better in the States than we were,’ Bill Wyman remembers. ‘They’d had a number one record, done a good tour, good TV. We’d got nothing like that to look forward to. No wonder we were depressed on the way over.’

What few newspaper reports of their coming had appeared in America all picked up from the line from Associated Press – that the Stones’ chief characteristic as a group was barely believable ‘dirtiness’. The only exception was Vogue, a magazine then under the inspired editorship of Diana Vreeland. Vogue devoted a full page to David Bailey’s portrait of Mick Jagger, looking upward from his penny-round collar with big-eyed, schoolboyish winsomeness. ‘To the inner group in London, the new spectacular is a solemn young man, Mick Jagger,’ Vogue reported. ‘For the British, the Stones have a perverse, unsettling sex appeal, with Jagger out in front of his team-mates … To women, he’s fascinating, to men a scare … quite different from the Beatles, and more terrifying.’

The scene at John F. Kennedy airport, when the Stones landed on June 2, was all too obviously an attempt to recreate the Beatles’ famous touchdown four months earlier. A crowd, numbering hundreds rather than thousands, screamed somewhat wanly as a bevy of girls came forward to greet the arrivals, accompanied by four symbolically shaggy Old English sheepdogs. The screams were over well before the Stones entered the terminal, watched by US Customs and Immigration officials whose thunderstruck revulsion suggested them to be irregular readers of Vogue. That first walk down the synthetic red carpet unloosed, on every side, a cry which would be repeated in scales of horror and derision throughout almost every state in the Union: ‘Why dontcha get ya goddamned hair cut?’

With no hit single to their credit, the Stones merited scant promotional help from their US record label, London. It was left to Andrew Loog Oldham to whip up a rather pallid semblance of the Beatles’ celebrated imprisonment inside the Plaza Hotel. The London Daily Mirror, next day, was persuaded to run a story that the Rolling Stones were barricaded inside their – much less grand – Manhattan hotel for fear of girls with nail scissors, threatening to cut off lumps of their hair. The tale was rather spoiled by an agency picture of Brian Jones strolling down Broadway in a loose silk shirt and sleeveless bolero but producing no more public reaction than any other freak encountered at noon in midtown Manhattan.

For the Stones’ American TV debut, Oldham could arrange nothing grander than the Les Crane programme, an obscure talk show transmitted in competition with the Late Late Movies, whose semi-somnabulistic host contrived such penetrating questions as ‘You guys all dress different – how come?’ ‘Because we are all different persons,’ Mick Jagger answered in the lisping public school accent he had adopted for transatlantic use.

Worse was to come in Los Angeles two nights later, when the Stones appeared on Dean Martin’s Hollywood Palace TV show, sharing the bill with circus elephants, acrobats and rhinestone-studded cowboys. As the show was pre-recorded in separate segments, the Stones could not know that Dean Martin’s script was full of ponderous attempts to be funny at their expense. ‘Their hair isn’t long,’ quipped the crooner. ‘It’s just smaller foreheads and higher eyebrows …’ ‘Now don’t go away, everyone,’ he pleaded humorously as the show broke for commercials. ‘You wouldn’t want to leave me with these Rolling Stones, would you?’ Later, introducing a trampolinist, Martin quipped, ‘That’s the father of the Rolling Stones. He’s been trying to kill himself ever since.’

The West Coast pop fraternity, by contrast, provided good friends and still better object lessons. As protégés of Phil Spector, the Stones were received as VIPs in what was, after New York, the world’s recording capital. Spector’s advice to Oldham at the Not Fade Away session had been to get the Stones with all speed into an American recording studio. In addition to touring, they were booked for a session at RCA’s Hollywood studio and, later in Chicago, at Chess Records, the self-same studios used by Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters and virtually every other blues master they had ever idolized.

A good friend on the West Coast was Sonny Bono, soon to find fame with his wife as Sonny and Cher, but at this time merely an energetic music PR and promotion man. ‘Sonny met us at the airport in these way-out clothes – striped trousers and scarves and bangles,’ Oldham says. ‘The Stones had never seen clothes like that before. When Sonny opened the boot of his car, there were stacks of records in there – about a thousand. That blew our minds as well. In England, you never saw the records like that, actually on their way to the punters.’

From the West Coast, the Stones embarked on what was not so much a tour as a series of random one-nighters, booked by Eric Easton in London, often with no knowledge of the event, the promoter or the venue. Their first American performance, at San Bernardino on July 5, was in an old-fashioned pop jamboree, sharing the bill with Bobby Goldsboro, Bobby Vee and the Chiffons. Here, the omens seemed promising. They easily outplayed their competition and finished their show fronted by kneeling, crash-helmeted police to fend off hundreds of entreating arms. ‘It was a straight gas that night,’ Keith remembers. ‘The kids knew all the songs and sang along with them. Especially when we got to Route 66 – they roared out ‘San Bernardino’ like a football crowd.’

That euphoria was to be short-lived. At the Stones’ next date – a ‘teen fair’ in San Antonio, Texas – they were required to play standing on the edge of a water tank full of trained seals. In a 20,000 capacity arena, only a few hundred seats were filled. The London Daily Mirror reported that the Stones had been booed – although an acrobatic act and a performing monkey on the same bill were both called back for encores. The Mirror quoted a local seventeen-year-old’s scornful remark about the ‘New Beatles’: ‘All they’ve got that our school groups haven’t got is hair.’

In Omaha, Nebraska, the arrival of the New Beatles was taken ludicrously in earnest. The Stones were met at the airport by a squad of twelve motorcycle cops and delivered, with wailing sirens, to a 15,000-seat auditorium where approximately 600 people awaited them. ‘We couldn’t see it at the time, but all that was really doing us some good,’ Keith says. ‘In England, we’d been used to coming onstage, blasting off four numbers and going. America, that first tour, really made us work. We had to fill up the spaces somehow.’

In New York and Los Angeles, the Stones had seemed wild enough. In the American Midwest in 1964, their effect was literally traumatizing. Incredulous revulsion, on the faces of policemen, town sheriffs, hotel clerks and coffee-shop waitresses, greeted them wherever they went. ‘I’ve never been hated by so many people I’ve never met as in Nebraska in the mid-Sixties,’ Keith says. ‘Everyone looked at you with a look that could kill. You could tell they just wanted to beat the shit out of you.’

* * *

The bright spot of their journey was to be their recording session at Chess Studios in Chicago. Oldham had been determined not to waste this precious opportunity on run-of-the-mill r & b material, and had succeeded in finding the Stones a first-class soul song to record at Chess as their next single. The song, It’s All Over Now, had already been a minor hit for its composer Bobby Womack and his group the Valentinos. The publishing rights, Oldham learned, were controlled for Womack by his business manager, a New York accountant named Allen Klein.

Chicago was all but poisoned for the Stones by the spectacle of themselves on the Hollywood Palace TV show, recorded a week previously. Even after doing the show, they had not realized the extent to which they had been just fodder for Dean Martin’s boozy jokes. Jagger was particularly outraged that they should have been set up as stooges, and at once telephoned Eric Easton in London to scream at Easton for having booked the spot. In fact, as Oldham said, the Stones probably gained fans as a result of Martin’s behaviour.

Next day, they arrived at Chess Studios, on South Michigan Boulevard. As they walked in, so did a black man with a chubby, kindly face and a small Oriental moustache. ‘It was Muddy Waters,’ says Bill Wyman. ‘He helped us carry our gear inside.’

Two formative days passed at Chess, under the supervision of Ron Malo, a house engineer responsible for some of the greatest work ever recorded by Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. What Malo had done in the Fifties for Berry and Diddley, he now did for the Rolling Stones, cutting back their native looseness and disorder, focusing tight on the essentials which they themselves still could not see. Under Malo, for the first time, they played, not as a scrabbly rhythm section but in the broken-up style developed by blues masters who had sung and played lead guitar simultaneously. The first few seconds of It’s All Over Now, with Keith Richard’s bass tremolo growling like the bark of a large dog against Brian Jones’s country pizzicato, represents the start of the Stones as, above all, an irresistible compulsion to dance.

No less formative was the mood of the song itself: a lyric about losing love, sung by Mick Jagger with a triumphant and delighted sneer, released at last from the tedious affair and its tiresome ‘half-assed games’. Perfectly in counterpoint with the fang-sharp sound, that callow voice grimaced its poison-pen phrases, uncertain – as it would ever be – whether it spoke as victor or victim. The mimic was becoming his own man at last.

Muddy Waters dropped in frequently to talk to the Stones during their session. So did two more of their great Chicago blues idols, Willie Dixon and Buddy Guy. The bluesmen were naturally full of benevolence towards the young Britishers who had given their songs a new lease of life. Later on, even the great Chuck Berry came in to inspect them. Rock ’n’ roll’s poet laureate, though not best known for charity towards young musicians, thawed considerably in the light of the composer’s royalties the Stones were earning him. He praised their version of Reelin’ and Rockin’, stayed to watch them work on an EP track, Down the Road Apiece, and invited them to visit his nearby estate, Berry Park.

The session concluded, the Stones euphorically called a press conference outside the Chess building on South Michigan Avenue. Several dozen screaming girls turned the occasion into a riot which ended only after a senior Chicago police officer strode up to the Stones and snarled, ‘Get outta here or I’ll lock up the whole goddamned bunch.’

They had been back on tour only a day or two when Phil Spector, in New York, picked up his office telephone to hear Mick Jagger’s voice, speaking from a hotel room in Hershey, Pennsylvania. ‘Everything here,’ Jagger moaned, ‘is fuckin’ brown!’ The Stones that night were performing in a town named, and largely decorated, in honour of its principal product, the Hershey chocolate bar. ‘The phones are brown,’ Jagger wailed, ‘the rooms are brown, even the fuckin’ streets are brown …’

The tour’s last weary leg through Pennsylvania and New York State was interrupted by some cheering news from home. In Record Mirror’s annual popularity poll, the Stones had pipped the Beatles as Top British Group. Mick Jagger had been named Top British Group Member. The Beatles held their lead only in the Year’s Best Single category, She Loves You winning narrowly from the Stones’ Not Fade Away.

With the release of another US single, Tell Me, and strategic plugging of their ‘England’s Newest Hitmakers’ album, the Stones, at long last, seemed to be penetrating the consciousness of teenage America. The tour ended in New York on a definite high note with two concerts at Carnegie Hall, scene of the Beatles’ triumph six months earlier. Both concerts were promoted by Murray ‘the K’ Kaufman, the influential New York disc jockey whom John Lennon had first introduced to the Stones (largely to get the egregious deejay off the Beatles long-suffering backs). Thanks to Murray the K’s promotion, the Carnegie Hall concerts were each an immediate sell-out. At the first, Stones fans started running wild before a note had been played. The police forbade the Stones to close the show as planned: instead they were forced to appear halfway and escape during the first interval.

Their return to London, just as America was waking up to them, struck converts like Murray the K as perversely ill-advised. The truth was that Oldham could not afford to keep them, or himself, in New York a minute longer. Oldham had already calculated that, for the whole tour, he and the Stones would receive earnings of approximately ten shillings (50p) each. The story for the British press was that the Stones were returning – £1,500 out of pocket in air fares – to honour a booking, made months earlier when they weren’t famous, to play at the annual commemoration ball of Magdalen College, Oxford.

At Heathrow, they were met by a hundred girls and a bevy of newspapermen whose interest was now something more than perfunctory. To one reporter, Keith ingenuously showed the handgun he had bought in America, he said ‘as easily as candy floss’. Mick Jagger was met by his girlfriend Chrissie Shrimpton and on enquiries about how he felt at having been placed sixth in Record Mirror’s Best Dressed Pop Star list. ‘It’s a joke,’ Jagger replied, speaking in a cockney accent once again.

It’s All Over Now was released in Britain on June 26. Advance orders of 150,000 copies put it instantly into every trade paper’s Top Ten. Within a week it had risen through the Merseybeat barrier, to challenge and then displace that summer’s big surprise hit single, the Animals’ House of the Rising Sun.

The organizers of the Magdalen College ball were therefore not a little astonished when, halfway through the night’s open-air junketings, it was reported that the Stones had turned up as arranged and were bringing in their equipment. Even the Beatles, generally honourable about bookings, had, the previous year, accepted £500 to play at Christ’s College May Ball and had then failed to appear. The Stones’ fee had likewise been settled months earlier when they were still only semi-famous. None the less – for reasons never fully apparent – they insisted they must keep their word. It doubtless weighed with them that a major blues artist, Howlin’ Wolf, was also due to appear at the Magdalen event, and that they ought not to give ground to its other main pop attraction, Freddie and the Dreamers.

The writer John Heilpern was one of Oxford University’s few dedicated Stones fans who purposely crossed the floodlit college lawns, uproarious with patrician cries and steel-band music, to the marquee where the Stones were setting up their equipment in a mood of evident disenchantment. ‘They were all deeply pissed off about having to play,’ Heilpern remembers. ‘They’d been booked to do an hour, so they managed to spend at least the first forty minutes tuning up. Brian Jones already looked zonked out of his mind. There was a sense of vague leadership from Mick Jagger. When he started, everyone did. At first, they didn’t try; they were hissed and booed, which obviously delighted them. Then, all of a sudden, they all snapped into it.’

It was a moment, for Heilpern and many others, signifying the start of what would one day be termed ‘the counterculture’ but what, that night at Oxford, seemed more a question of class turned upside down. The surly, middle-class boys, playing American r & b, were patently a new aristocracy, just as the dinner-jacketed throng, jigging up and down before them, would become part of a willing new proletariat. The noise spread, through the canvas walls, across grass strewn with debs and duckboards, drowning the steel band. More and more young men in tailcoats, clutching girlfriends and champagne bottles, came in to hear the Stones, and dance.


PART TWO (#ulink_b0ebf4dc-b19e-5f77-8163-3fcc12946163)


FIVE (#ud6910e98-c912-5b43-9cd1-8f861586d1bd)

‘MY CLIENT HAS NO FLEAS’ (#ud6910e98-c912-5b43-9cd1-8f861586d1bd)

Until the 1960s, the Berkshire industrial town of Reading was one of the quietest, most boring places to be found in the entire British Isles. Its only notable architectural feature was the grim Victorian prison where Oscar Wilde was incarcerated and wrote his famous Ballad of Reading Gaol




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