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All the male teachers could administer formal beatings in front of the whole class and most, in addition, practised a casual, even jocular physical violence that today would instantly land them in court for assault. Any who showed weakness (like the English teacher, ‘sweet, gentle Mr Brandon’) were mercilessly ragged and aped by Jagger, the class mimic, behind their backs or to their faces. ‘There were guerrilla skirmishes on all fronts, with civil disobedience and undeclared war; [the teachers] threw blackboard rubbers at us and we threw them back,’ he would recall. ‘There were some who’d just punch you out. They’d slap your face so hard, you’d go down. Others would twist your ear and drag you along until it was red and stinging.’ So that line from ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’, ‘I was schooled with a strap right across my back,’ may not be as fanciful as it has always seemed.
At number 23 The Close lived a boy named Alan Etherington, who was the same age as Mike and also went to Dartford Grammar. The two quickly chummed up, biking to school together each morning and going to tea at each other’s house. ‘There was a standing joke with us that if Mike appeared, he was trying to get out of chores his parents had given him, like washing up or mowing the lawn,’ Etherington remembers. House-proud Eva could be a little intimidating, but Joe, despite his ‘quiet authority’, created an atmosphere of healthy fun. When Etherington dropped by, there would usually be a pick-up game of cricket or rounders or an impromptu weight-training session on the lawn. Sometimes, as a special treat, Joe would produce a javelin, take the boys to the open green space at the top of The Close, and under his careful supervision allow them to practise a few throws.
Having a father so closely connected to the teaching world meant that Mike’s daily release from school was not as complete as other boys’. Joe knew several of the staff at Dartford Grammar, and so could keep close watch on both his academic performance and his conduct. There also could be no shirking of homework: he would later remember getting up at 6 A.M. to finish some essay or exercise, having fallen asleep over his books the night before. But in other ways Joe’s links with the school were an advantage. Arthur Page, the sports master – and a celebrated local cricketer – was a family friend who gave Mike special attention in batting practice at the school nets. Likewise as a favour to his father, one of the mathematics staff agreed to help him with his weakest subject even though he wasn’t in the teacher’s usual set.
Eventually, Joe himself became a part-time instructor at Dartford Grammar, coming in each Tuesday evening to give coaching in his beloved basketball. And there was one game, at least, where Mike’s enthusiasm, and application, fully matched his father’s. In basketball one could run and weave and catch and shoot with no risk of being pushed into mud; best of all, despite Joe’s patient exposition of its long British history, it felt glamorously and exotically American. Its most famous exponents were the all-black Harlem Globetrotters, whose displays of almost magical ball control, to the whistled strains of ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’, gave Mike Jagger and countless other British boys their earliest inklings of ‘cool’. He became secretary of the school basketball society that evolved from Joe’s visits, and never missed a session. While his friends played in ordinary gym shoes, he had proper black-and-white canvas basketball boots, which not only enhanced performance on the court but were stunningly chic juvenile footwear off it.
Otherwise, he was an inconspicuous member of the school community, winning neither special distinction nor special censure, offering no challenge to the status quo, using his considerable wits to avoid trouble with chalk-throwing, ear-twisting masters rather than provoke it. His school friend John Spinks remembers him as ‘an India-rubber character’ who could ‘bend every way to stay out of trouble’.
By mid-1950s standards, he was not considered good-looking. Sex appeal then was entirely dictated by film stars, of whom the male archetypes were tall, keen-jawed and muscular, with close-cut, glossy hair – American action heroes such as John Wayne and Rock Hudson; British ‘officer types’ such as Jack Hawkins and Richard Todd. Mike, like his father, was slightly built and skinny enough for his rib cage to protrude, though unlike Joe he showed no sign of incipient baldness. His hair, formerly a reddish colour, was now mousy brown and already floppily unmanageable.
His most noticeable feature was a mouth which, like certain breeds of bull-baiting terriers, seemed to occupy the entire lower half of his face, making a smile literally stretching from ear to ear, and Cupid’s-bow lips of unusual thickness and colour that seemed to need double the usual amount of moistening by his tongue. His mother also had markedly full lips – kept in top condition by the amount she talked – but Joe was convinced that Mike’s came from the Jagger side of the family and would sometimes apologise, not altogether jokingly, for having passed them on to him.
As the boys in his year reached puberty (yes, in 1950s Britain it really was this late) and all at once became agonisingly conscious of their clothes, grooming and appeal to the opposite sex, small, scrawny, loose-mouthed Mike Jagger seemed to have rather little going for him. Yet in encounters with the forbidden girls’ grammar school he somehow always provoked the most smiles, blushes, giggles and whispered discussions behind his back. ‘Almost from the time I met Mike, he always had girls flocking around him,’ Alan Etherington remembers. ‘A lot of our friends seemed to be much better looking, but they never had anything like the success that he did. Wherever he was, whatever he was doing, he knew he never needed to be alone.’
At the same time, his maturing looks, especially the lips, could arouse strange antagonism in males; teasing and taunting from classmates, sometimes even physical bullying by older boys. Not for being effeminate – his prowess on the sports field automatically discounted that – but for something far more damning. This was a time when unreformed nineteenth-century racism, the so-called colour bar, held sway in even Britain’s most civilised and liberal circles. To grammar school boys, as to their parents, thick lips suggested just one thing and there was just one term for it, repugnant now but back then quite normal.
Decades later, in a rare moment of self-revelation, he would admit that during his time at Dartford Grammar ‘the N-word’, for ‘nigger’, was thrown at him more than once. The time was still far off when he would find the comparison flattering.
THOUSANDS OF BRITISH men who grew up in the 1950s – and almost all who went on to dominate popular culture in the sixties – recall the arrival of rock ’n’ roll music from America as a life-changing moment. But such was not Mike Jagger’s experience. In rigidly class-bound postwar Britain, rock ’n’ roll’s impact was initially confined to young people of the lower social orders, the so-called Teddy Boys and Teddy Girls. During its earliest phase it made little impression on the bourgeoisie or the aristocracy, both of whose younger generations viewed it with almost as much distaste as did their parents. Likewise, in the hierarchical education system, it found its first enraptured audience in secondary modern and technical schools. At institutions like Dartford Grammar it was, rather, a subject for high-flown sixth-form debates: ‘Is rock ’n’ roll a symptom of declining morals in the twentieth century?’
Like Spanish influenza forty years previously, it struck in two stages, the second infinitely more virulent than the first. In 1955, a song called ‘Rock Around the Clock’ by Bill Haley and His Comets topped the sleepy British pop music charts and caused outbreaks of rioting in proletarian dance halls, but was plausibly written off by the national media as just another short-lived transatlantic novelty. A year later, Elvis Presley came along with a younger, more dangerous spin on Haley’s simple exuberance and the added ingredient of raw sex.
As a middle-class grammar school boy, Mike was just an onlooker in the media furore over Presley – the ‘suggestiveness’ of his onstage hip grinding and knee trembling, the length of his hair and sullen smoulder of his features, the (literally) incontinent hysteria to which he aroused his young female audiences. While adult America’s fear and loathing were almost on a par with the national Communist phobia, adult Britain reacted more with amusement and a dash of complacency. A figure like Presley, it was felt, could only emerge from the flashy, hyperactive land of Hollywood movies, Chicago gangsters and ballyhooing political conventions. Here in the immemorial home of understatement, irony and the stiff upper lip, a performer in any remotely similar mode was inconceivable.
The charge of blatant sexuality levelled against all rock ’n’ roll, not merely Presley, was manifestly absurd. Its direct ancestor was the blues – black America’s original pairing of voice with guitar – and the modern, electrified, up-tempo variant called rhythm and blues or R&B. The blues had never been inhibited about sex; rock and roll were separate synonyms for making love, employed in song lyrics and titles (‘Rock Me, Baby’, ‘Roll with Me, Henry’, etc.) for decades past, but heard only on segregated record labels and radio stations. Presley’s singing style and incendiary body movements were simply what he had observed on the stages and dance floors of black clubs in his native Memphis, Tennessee. Most rock ’n’ roll hits were cover versions of R&B standards by white vocalists, purged of their earthier sentiments or couched in slang so obscure (‘I’m like a one-eyed cat peepin’ in a seafood store’) that no one realised. Even this sanitised product took the smallest step out of line at its peril. When the white, God-fearing Pat Boone covered Fats Domino’s ‘Ain’t That a Shame’, he was criticised for disseminating what was seen as a contagiously vulgar ‘black’ speech idiom.
As a Dartford Grammar pupil, the appropriate music for Mike Jagger was jazz, in particular the modern kind with its melodic complexities, subdued volume and air of intellectualism. Even that played little part in daily school life, where the musical diet was limited to hymns at morning assembly and traditional airs like ‘Early One Morning’ or ‘Sweet Lass of Richmond Hill’ (the latter another pointer to Mike’s remarkable future). ‘There was a general feeling that music wasn’t important,’ he would recall. ‘Some of the masters rather begrudgingly enjoyed jazz, but they couldn’t own up to it . . . Jazz was intelligent and people who wore glasses played it, so we all had to make out that we dug Dave Brubeck. It was cool to like that, and it wasn’t cool to like rock ’n’ roll.’
This social barrier was breached by skiffle, a short-lived craze peculiar to Britain which nonetheless rivalled, even threatened to eclipse, rock ’n’ roll. Skiffle had originally been American folk (i.e., white) music, evolved in the Depression years of the 1930s; in this new form, however, it drew equally on blues giants of the same era, notably Huddie ‘Leadbelly’ Ledbetter. Leadbelly songs like ‘Rock Island Line’, ‘Midnight Special’ and ‘Bring Me Little Water, Sylvie’, set mostly around cotton fields and railroads, had rock ’n’ roll’s driving beat and hormone-jangling chord patterns, but not its sexual taint or its power to cause disturbances among the proles. Most crucially, skiffle was an offshoot of jazz, having been revived as an intermission novelty by historically minded bandleaders like Ken Colyer and Chris Barber. Its biggest star, Tony Donegan, formerly Barber’s banjo player, had changed his first name to Lonnie in honour of bluesman Lonnie Johnson.
British-made skiffle was to have an influence far beyond its barely two-year commercial life span. In its original American form, its poor white performers often could not afford conventional instruments, so would use kitchen utensils like washboards, spoons and dustbin lids, augmented by kazoos, combs-and-paper and the occasional guitar. The success of Lonnie Donegan’s ‘skiffle group’ inspired youthful facsimiles to spring up throughout the UK, rattling and plunking on homespun instruments (which actually never featured in Donegan’s line-up). The amateur music-making tradition, in long decline since its Victorian heyday, was superabundantly reborn. Buttoned-up British boys, never previously considered in the least musical, now boldly faced audiences of their families and friends to sing and play with abandon. Overnight, the guitar changed from obscure back-row rhythm instrument into an object of young-manly worship and desire surpassing even the soccer ball. Such were the queues outside musical-instrument shops that, evoking not-so-distant wartime austerities, the Daily Mirror reported a national guitar shortage.
Here Mike Jagger was ahead of the game. He already owned a guitar, a round-hole acoustic model bought for him by his parents on a family trip to Spain. The holiday snaps included one of him in a floppy straw hat, holding up the guitar neck flamenco-style and miming cod-Spanish words. It would have been his passport into any of the skiffle groups then germinating at Dartford Grammar and in the Wilmington neighbourhood. But mastering even the few simple chord shapes that covered most skiffle numbers was too much like hard work, nor could he be so uncool as to thump a single-string tea-chest ‘bass’ or scrabble at a washboard. Instead, with the organisational flair already given to programming basketball fixtures, he started a school record club. The meetings took place in a classroom during lunch hour and, he later recalled, had the atmosphere of an extra lesson. ‘We’d sit there . . . with a master behind the desk, frowning while we played Lonnie Donegan.’
As bland white vocalists grew famous with cleaned-up R&B songs, the original black performers mostly stayed in the obscurity to which they were long accustomed. One notable exception was Richard Penniman, aka Little Richard, a former dishwasher from Macon, Georgia, whose repertoire of window-shattering screams, whoops and falsetto trills affronted grown-up ears worse than a dozen Presleys. While obediently parroting rock ’n’ roll’s teenage gaucheries, Richard projected what none had yet learned to call high camp with his gold suits, flashy jewellery and exploding liquorice-whip hair. Indeed, his emblematic song, ‘Tutti Frutti’, ostensibly an anthem to ice cream, had started out as a graphic commentary on gay sex (its cry of ‘Awopbopaloobopalopbamboom!’ representing long-delayed ejaculation). He was the first rock ’n’ roller who made Mike Jagger forget all middle-class, grammar school sophistication and detachment, and surrender to the sheer mindless joy of the music.
The numerous media Cassandras who predicted rock ’n’ roll would be over in weeks rather than months found speedy corroboration in Little Richard. Touring Australia in 1958, he saw Russia’s Sputnik space satellite hurtle through the sky, interpreted it as a summons from the Almighty, threw a costly diamond ring into Sydney Harbour and announced he was giving up music to enter the ministry. When the story reached the British press, Mike asked his father for six shillings and eight pence (about thirty-eight pence) to buy ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’ because Richard was ‘retiring’ and this must be his farewell single. But Joe refused to stump up, adding, ‘I’m glad he’s retiring,’ as if it would be a formal ceremony complete with long-service gold watch.
In America, a coast-to-coast network of commercial radio stations, motivated solely by what their listeners demanded, had made rock ’n’ roll ubiquitous within a few months. But for its British constituency, to begin with, the problem was finding it. The BBC, which held a monopoly on domestic radio broadcasting, played few records of any kind, let alone this unsavoury one, in its huge daily output of live orchestral and dance-band music. To catch the hits now pouring across the Atlantic, Mike and his friends had to tune their families’ old-fashioned valve wireless sets to Radio Luxembourg, a tiny oasis of teen tolerance deep in continental Europe whose nighttime English language service consisted mainly of pop record shows. Serving the occupying forces braced for nuclear attack by Communist Russia, there were also AFN, the American Forces Network, and the US government’s ‘Voice of America’, both of which sweetened their propaganda output with generous dollops of rock and jazz.
Seeing American rock ’n’ rollers perform in person was even more problematic. Bill Haley visited Britain only once (by ocean liner) and was greeted by cheering multitudes not seen since the coronation three years earlier. Elvis Presley was expected to follow hard on his heels but, inexplicably, failed to do so. For the overwhelming majority of UK rock ’n’ roll fans, the only way to experience it was on the cinema screen. ‘Rock Around the Clock’ had originally been a soundtrack (to a film about juvenile delinquency, naturally). No sooner was Presley launched than he, too, began making movies, further evidence to his detractors that his music alone had no staying power. While most such ‘exploitation’ flicks were simply vehicles for the songs, a few were fresh and witty dramas in their own right, notably Presley’s King Creole, and The Girl Can’t Help It, featuring Little Richard with new white heartthrobs Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent. For Mike, the epiphany came in the companionable darkness of Dartford’s State cinema, with its fuzzy-faced luminous clock and cigarette smoke drifting across the projector beam: ‘I saw Elvis and Gene Vincent, and thought, “Well, I can do this.”’
Such American acts as did make it across the Atlantic often proved woefully unable to re-create the spellbinding sound of their records in the cavernous British variety theatres and cinemas where they appeared. The shining exception was Buddy Holly and his backing group, the Crickets, whose ‘That’ll Be the Day’ topped the UK singles charts in the summer of 1957. As well as singing in a unique stuttery, hiccupy style, Holly played lead guitar and wrote or co-wrote songs that were rock ’n’ roll at its most moodily exciting, yet constructed from the same simple chord sequences as skiffle. Bespectacled and dapper, more bank clerk than idol, he was a vital factor in raising rock ’n’ roll from its blue-collar status in Britain. Middle-class boys who could never hope or dare to be Elvis now used Holly’s songbook to transform their fading-from-fashion skiffle groups into tyro rock bands.
His one and only British tour, in 1958, brought him to the Granada cinema in Woolwich, a few miles north of Dartford, on the evening of 14 March. Mike Jagger – already skilled at aping Holly’s vocal tics for comic effect – was in the audience with a group of school friends, all attending their very first rock concert. Holly’s set with the Crickets lasted barely half an hour, and was powered by just one twenty-watt guitar amplifier, yet reproduced all his record hits with near-perfect fidelity. Disdaining musical apartheid despite hailing from segregated west Texas, he freely acknowledged his indebtedness to black artists like Little Richard and Bo Diddley. He was also an extrovert showman, able to keep the beat as well as play complex solos on his solid-body Fender Stratocaster while flinging himself across the stage on his knees, even lying flat on his back. Mike’s favourite number was the B-side of ‘Oh Boy!’, Holly’s second British hit fronting the Crickets: a song in blues call-and-response style called ‘Not Fade Away’, whose quirky stop-start tempo was beaten with drumsticks on a cardboard box. The lyrics had a humour previously unknown in rock ’n’ roll (‘My love is bigger than a Cadillac / I try to show it but you drive me back . . .’). This, Mike realised, was not just someone to copy, but to be.
Yet still he made no attempt to acquire the electric guitar needed to turn him into a rock singer like Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran or Britain’s first home-grown rock ’n’ roller, the chirpily unsexy Tommy Steele. And though attracted by the idea, along with countless other British boys, he did not seem exactly on fire with ambition. Dartford Grammar, it so happened, had produced a skiffle group named the Southerners who were something of a local legend. They had appeared on a nationwide TV talent show, Carroll Levis Junior Discoveries, and then been offered a recording test by the EMI label (which lost interest when they decided to wait until the school holidays before auditioning). Easily managing the transition from skiffle to rock, they were now a washboard-free, fully electrified combo renamed Danny Rogers and the Realms.
The Realms’ drummer, Alan Dow, was a year senior to Mike, and in the science rather than arts stream, but met him on equal terms at the weekly basketball sessions run by Mike’s father. One night when Danny and the Realms played a gig at the school, Mike sidled up to Dow backstage and asked if he could sing a number with them. ‘I was specially nervous that night, because of appearing in front of all our school mates,’ Dow recalls. ‘I said I’d rather he didn’t.’
He had no better luck when two old classmates from Wentworth Primary, David Spinks and Mike Turner, started putting together a band intended to be more faithful to rock ’n’ roll’s black originators than its white echoes. Mike suggested himself as a possible vocalist, and auditioned at David’s home in Wentworth Drive. Much as the other two liked him, they felt he neither looked nor sounded right – and, anyway, lack of a guitar was an automatic disqualification.
His first taste of celebrity did not have a singing or even a speaking part. Joe Jagger’s liaison duties for the Central Council of Physical Recreation included advising television companies about programmes to encourage sports among children and teenagers – implicitly to counter the unhealthy effects of rock ’n’ roll. In 1957, Joe became a consultant to one of the new commercial networks, ATV, on a weekly series called Seeing Sport. Over the next couple of years, Mike appeared regularly on the programme with his brother Chris and other hand-picked young outdoor types, demonstrating skills like tent erecting or canoeing.
A clip has survived of an item on rock climbing, filmed in grainy black-and-white at a beauty spot named High Rocks, near Tunbridge Wells. Fourteen-year-old Mike, in jeans and striped T-shirt, reclines in a gully with some other boys while an elderly instructor soliloquises droningly about equipment. Rather than studded mountaineering boots, which could damage these particular rock faces, the instructor recommends ‘ordinary gym shoes . . . like the kind Mike is wearing’. Mike allows one of his legs to be raised, displaying his virtuous rubber sole. For his father’s sake, he can’t show what he really thinks of this fussy, ragged-sweatered little man treating him like a dummy. But the deliberately blank stare – and the tongue, flicking out once too often to moisten the outsize lips – say it all.
At school he continued to coast along, doing just enough to get by in class and on the games field. To his teachers and classmates alike he gave the impression he was there only under sufferance and that his thoughts were somewhere infinitely more glamorous and amusing. ‘Too easily distracted’, ‘attitude rather unsatisfactory’ and other such faint damnations recurred through his end-of-term reports. In the summer of 1959 he took his GCE O-level exams, which in those days were assessed by marks out of 100 rather than grades. He passed in seven subjects, just scraping through English literature (48), geography (51), history (56), Latin (49) and pure mathematics (53), doing moderately well in French (61) and English language (66). Further education being still for the fortunate minority, this was when most pupils left, aged sixteen, to start jobs in banks or solicitors’ offices. Mike, however, went into the sixth form for two more years to take A-level English, history and French. His headmaster, Lofty Hudson, predicted that he was ‘unlikely to do brilliantly in any of them’.
He was also made a school prefect, in theory an auxiliary to Lofty and the staff in maintaining order and discipline. But it was an appointment that the head soon came to regret. Though Elvis Presley had originally cast his disruptive spell over girls, he had left a more lasting mark on boys, especially British ones, turning their former upright posture to a rebellious slouch and their former sunny smiles to sullen pouts, replacing their short-back-and-sides haircuts with toppling greasy quiffs, ‘ducks’ arses’ and sideburns. The Teddy Boy (i.e., Edwardian) style, too, was no longer peculiar to lawless young artisans but had introduced middle- and upper-class youths to ankle-hugging trousers, two-button ‘drape’ jackets and Slim Jim ties.
Mike was not one to go too far – his mother would never have allowed it – but he broke Dartford Grammar’s strict dress code in subtle ways that were no less provocative to Lofty’s enforcers, sporting slip-on moccasin shoes instead of clumpy black lace-ups; a pale ‘shorty’ raincoat instead of the dark, belted kind; a low-fastening black jacket with a subtle gold fleck instead of his school blazer. Among his fiercest sartorial critics was Dr Wilfred Bennett, the senior languages tutor, whom he had already displeased by consistently performing below his abilities in French. Matters came to a head at the school’s annual Founder’s Day ceremony, attended by bigwigs from Dartford Council and other local dignitaries, when his gold-flecked jacket marred the otherwise faultless rows of regulation blazers. There was a heated confrontation with Dr Bennett afterwards, which ended with the teacher lashing out – as teachers then could with impunity – and Mike sprawled out on the ground.
Perhaps more than any other pastime, music forges friendships between individuals who otherwise have nothing whatsoever in common. Never was it truer than in late 1950s Britain, when for the first time young people found a music of their own, only to have it derided by adult society in general. A few months from now, this feeling of persecuted brotherhood would initiate, or rather revive, the most important relationship of Mike’s life. The prologue, as it were, took place in his last two years at school when, somewhat surprisingly, the genteel kid from Wilmington chummed up with a plumber’s son from Bexleyheath named Dick Taylor.
Dick’s consuming passion was not rock ’n’ roll but blues, the black music that had preceded it by something like half a century and provided its structure, its chords and its rebellious soul. For this esoteric taste he had to thank his older sister Robin, a hard-core blues fan while her friends swooned over white crooners like Frankie Vaughan and Russ Hamilton. Robin knew all its greatest exponents and, more important, knew where to find it on AFN or Voice of America, where the occasional blues record was played for the benefit of black GIs helping to defend Europe from communism. Dick, in turn, passed on the revelation to a small coterie at Dartford Grammar that included Mike Jagger.
This was unconventionality on an altogether more epic scale than shorty raincoats. Liking rock ’n’ roll with its concealed black subtext was one thing – but this was music wholly reflecting the experience of black people, which few musicians but black ones had ever authentically created. In late-fifties Britain one still very seldom saw a black face outside London, least of all in the bucolic Home Counties: hence the unimpaired popularity of Helen Bannerman’s children’s story Little Black Sambo, Agatha Christie’s stage play Ten Little Niggers and BBC TV’s Black and White Minstrels, to say nothing of ‘nigger brown’ shoe polish and dogs routinely named ‘Blackie’, ‘Sambo’ and ‘Nigger’. Nor was there any but the most marginal, patronising awareness of black culture. Mass immigration until now had come mainly from former colonies in the Caribbean, furnishing a new menial class to staff public transport and the National Health Service. The only generic black music most Britons ever heard was West Indian calypsos, full of careful deference to the host nation and usually employed as a soundtrack to first-class cricket matches.
There might seem no possible meeting point between suburban Kent with its privet hedges and slow green buses, and the Mississippi Delta with its tar-and-paper cabins, shanty towns and prison farms; still less between a genteelly raised white British boy and the dusty black troubadours whose chants of pain or anger or defiance had lightened the load and lifted the spirits of untold fellow sufferers under twentieth-century servitude. For Mike, the initial attraction of the blues was simply that of being different – standing out from his coevals as he already did through basketball. To some extent, too, it had a political element. This was the era of English literature’s so-called angry young men and their well-publicised contempt for the cosiness and insularity of life under Harold Macmillan’s Tory government. One of their numerous complaints, voiced in John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger, was that ‘there are no good, brave causes left’. To a would-be rebel in 1959, the oppression of black musicians in pre-war rural America was more than cause enough.
But Mike’s love of the blues was as passionate and sincere as he’d ever been about anything in his life, or perhaps ever would be. In crackly recordings, mostly made long before his birth, he found an excitement – an empathy – he never had in the wildest moments of rock ’n’ roll. Indeed, he could see now just what an impostor rock was in so many ways; how puny were its wealthy young white stars in comparison with the bluesmen who’d written the book and, mostly, died in poverty; how those long-dead voices, wailing to the beat of a lone guitar, had a ferocity and humour and eloquence and elegance to which nothing on the rock ’n’ roll jukebox even came close. The parental furore over Elvis Presley’s sexual content, for instance, seemed laughable if one compared the pubescent hot flushes of ‘Teddy Bear’ and ‘All Shook Up’ with Lonnie Johnson’s syphilis-crazed ‘Careless Love’ or Blind Lemon Jefferson’s nakedly priapic ‘Black Snake Moan’. And what press-pilloried rock ’n’ roll reprobate, Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis, could hold a candle to Robert Johnson, the boy genius of the blues who lived almost the whole of his short life among drug addicts and prostitutes and was said to have made a pact with the devil in exchange for his peerless talent?
Though skiffle had brought some blues songs into general consciousness, the music still had only a tiny British following – mostly ‘intellectual’ types who read leftish weeklies, wore maroon socks with sandals and carried their change in leather purses. Like skiffle, it was seen as a branch of jazz: the few American blues performers who ever performed live in Britain did so through the sponsorship – charity, some might say – of traditional jazz bandleaders like Humphrey Lyttelton, Ken Colyer and Chris Barber. ‘Humph’ had been bringing Big Bill Broonzy over as a support attraction since 1950, while every year or so the duo of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee attracted small but ardent crowds to Colyer’s Soho club, Studio 51. After helping give birth to skiffle, Barber had become a stalwart of the National Jazz League, which strove to put this most lackadaisical of the arts on an organised footing and had its own club, the Marquee in Oxford Street. Here, too, from time to time, some famous old blues survivor would appear onstage, still bewildered by his sudden transition from Chicago or Memphis.
Finding the blues on record was almost as difficult. It was not available on six-shilling and fourpenny singles, like rock and pop, but only on what were still known as ‘LPs’ (long-players) rather than albums, priced at a daunting thirty shillings (£1.50) and up. To add to the expense, these were usually not released on British record labels but imported from America in their original packaging with the price in dollars and cents crossed out and a new one in pounds, shillings and pence substituted. Such exotica was, of course, not stocked by record shops in Dartford or even in large neighbouring towns such as Chatham or Rochester. To find it, Mike and Dick had to go to up to London and trawl through the racks at specialist dealers like Dobell’s on Charing Cross Road.
Their circle at Dartford Grammar School included two other boys with the same recondite passion. One was a rather quiet, bookish type from the arts stream named Bob Beckwith; the other was Mike’s Wilmington neighbour, the science student Alan Etherington. In late 1959, during Mike’s first term in the sixth form, the four decided to form a blues band. Bob and Dick played guitar, Alan (a drummer and bugler in the school cadet force) played percussion on a drum kit donated by Dick’s grandfather, and Mike was the vocalist.
Their aim was not to earn money or win local fame, like Danny Rogers and the Realms, nor even to pull girls. Mike in particular – as Alan Etherington recalls – already had all the ardent female followers he could wish for. The idea was simply to celebrate the blues and keep it alive amid the suffocating tides of commercial rock and pop. From first to last, they never had a single paid gig or performed to any audience larger than about half a dozen. Dartford Grammar gave them no opportunities to play or encouragement of any kind, even though they were effectively studying a byway of modern American history; Alan Etherington recalls ‘a stand-up row’ with the school librarian after requesting a book by blues chronicler Paul Oliver as background reading for the quartet. They existed in a self-created vacuum, making no effort to contact kindred spirits in Kent or the wider world – hardly even aware that there were any. In Dick Taylor’s words, ‘We thought we were the only people in Britain who’d ever heard of the blues.’
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_6cddda4e-4cbd-52e1-8a60-3a2fcf210dec)
The Kid in the Cardigan (#ulink_6cddda4e-4cbd-52e1-8a60-3a2fcf210dec)
Mike Jagger seemed living proof of the unnamed band’s determination to go nowhere. He remained firm in his refusal to play a guitar, instead just standing there in front of the other three, as incomplete and exposed without that instantly glamorising, dignifying prop as if he’d forgotten to put on his trousers. The singing voice unveiled by his prodigious lips and flicking tongue was likewise an almost perverse departure from the norm. White British vocalists usually sang jazz or blues in a gravelly, cigarette-smoky style modelled – vainly – on Louis ‘Satchmo’ Armstrong. Mike’s voice, higher and lighter in tone, borrowed from a larger, more eclectic cast; it was a distillation of every Deep Southern accent he’d ever heard, white as much as black, feminine as much as masculine; Scarlett O’Hara, plus a touch of Mammy from Gone with the Wind and Blanche DuBois from A Streetcar Named Desire as much as Blind Lemon Jefferson or Sonny Boy Williamson.
Unencumbered by a guitar – mostly even by a microphone – he had to do something while he sang. But the three friends, accustomed to his cool, non-committal school persona, were amazed by what he did do. Blues vocalists traditionally stood or, more often, sat in an anguished trance, cupping one ear with a hand to amplify the sonic self-flagellation. When Mike sang the blues, however, his loose-limbed, athletic body rebutted the music’s melancholic inertia word by word: he shuffled to and fro on his moccasins, ground his hips, rippled his arms and euphorically shook his shaggy head. Like his singing, it had an element of parody and self-parody, but an underlying total conviction. A song from his early repertoire, John Lee Hooker’s ‘Boogie Chillen’, summed up this metamorphosis: ‘The blues is in him . . . and it’s got to come out . . .’
Practice sessions for the non-existent gigs were mostly held at Dick Taylor’s house in Bexleyheath or at Alan Etherington’s, a few doors along from the Jaggers. Alan owned a reel-to-reel tape recorder, a Philips ‘Joystick’ (so named for its aeronautical-looking volume control) on which the four could preserve and review their first efforts together. The Etherington home boasted the further luxury of a Grundig ‘radiogram’, a cabinet radio-cum-record-player with surround sound, an early form of stereo. Dick and Bob Beckwith did not have custom-built electric guitars, only acoustic ones with metal pickups screwed to the bodies. Beckwith, the more accomplished player of the two, would plug his guitar into the radiogram, increasing its volume about thirtyfold.
At Dick’s, if the weather was fine, they would rehearse in the back garden – the future lord of giant alfresco spaces and horizonless crowds surveying a narrow vista of creosoted wood fences, washing lines and potting sheds. Dick’s mum, who sometimes interrupted her housework to watch, told Mike from the start that he had ‘something special’. However small or accidental the audience, he gave them his all. ‘If I could get a show, I would do it,’ he would remember. ‘I used to do mad things . . . Get on my knees and roll on the floor . . . I didn’t have inhibitions. It’s a real buzz, even in front of twenty people, to make a complete fool of yourself.’
Though Joe and Eva Jagger had no comprehension of the blues or its transfiguring effect on their elder son, they were quite happy for his group to practise at ‘Newlands’, in either his bedroom or the garden. Eva found his singing hilarious and would later describe ‘creasing up’ with laughter at the sound of his voice through the wall. His father’s only concern was that it shouldn’t interfere with his physical training programme. Once, when he and Dick Taylor were leaving for a practise session elsewhere, Joe called out, ‘Michael . . . don’t forget your weight training.’ Mike dutifully turned back and spent half an hour in the garden with his weights and barbells. Another time, he arrived for band practice distraught because he’d fallen from one of the tree ropes at home and bitten his tongue. What if it had permanently damaged his singing voice? ‘We all told him it made no difference,’ Dick Taylor remembers. ‘But he did seem to lisp a bit and sound a bit more bluesy after that.’
Building up a repertoire was a laborious process. The usual way was for Mike and Dick to bring a record back from London, and the four to listen to it over and over until Bob had mastered the guitar fills and Mike learned the words. They did not restrict themselves to blues, but also experimented with white rock and pop songs, like Buddy Holly’s, which had some kinship with it. One of the better performances committed to the Philips Joystick was of ‘La Bamba’, whose sixteen-year-old singer–composer Ritchie Valens had died in the same plane crash that killed Holly in February 1959. Its Latino nonsense words being impossible to decipher, no matter how often one replayed the record, Mike simply invented his own.
The Joystick’s inventory dramatically improved with their discovery of harder-edged electric blues, as played by John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Memphis Slim and Howlin’ Wolf. A discovery of almost equal momentousness was that many of these alluring names could be traced to the same source, the Chess record label of Chicago. Founded in the 1940s by two Polish immigrant brothers, Leonard and Phil Chess, the label had started out with jazz but become increasingly dominated by what was then called ‘race’ music – i.e., for exclusively black consumption. Its most notable early acquisition had been McKinley Morganfield, aka Muddy Waters, born in 1913 (the same year as Joe Jagger) and known as ‘the father of the Chicago Blues’ for tracks like ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’, ‘I Just Want to Make Love to You’ and his theme song, ‘Rollin’ Stone’. His album At Newport 1960, capturing his performance at the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival, was the first album Mike Jagger ever bought.
In 1955, Chess signed St. Louis-born Charles Edward Anderson – aka Chuck – Berry, a singer-songwriter-guitarist who combined the sexiness and cockiness of R&B with the social commentary of country and western, the lucid diction of black balladeers like Nat ‘King’ Cole and Billy Eckstine, and a lyrical and instrumental nimbleness all his own. Soon afterwards Berry made an effortless crossover from ‘race’ music to white rock ’n’ roll with compositions such as ‘Johnny B. Goode’, ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’ and ‘Memphis, Tennessee’ that were to become its defining anthems. Long before he ever heard a Chuck Berry song, Mike’s voice had some of the same character.
After a long and fruitless search for Chess LPs up and down Charing Cross Road, he discovered they could be obtained by mail order directly from the company’s Chicago headquarters. It was a gamble, since prepayment had to be enclosed and he had no idea whether he’d like the titles he ordered – if they ever materialised at all. But, after a lengthy wait, flat brown cardboard packages with American stamps began arriving at ‘Newlands’. Some of the covers had been badly chewed up in transit and not all the music lived up to his expectations. But the albums in themselves were splendiferous status symbols. He took to carrying around three or four at once tucked under one arm, a fashion accessory as much as his gold-flecked jacket and moccasins. Alan Dow, who’d rejected him as a vocalist for Danny Rogers and the Realms, witnessed one such almost regal progress across the school playground.
In summer 1961, he sat his A-level exams, passing in English and history but, surprisingly, failing in French. He considered becoming a schoolteacher in his father’s – and grandfather’s – footsteps, and toyed with the idea of journalism and (unmentionably to his parents) disc-jockeying on Radio Luxembourg. Leafing through the pop music papers one week, he spotted an advertisement by a London record producer named Joe Meek, inviting would-be deejays to submit audition tapes. He clipped the ad and kept it, but – perhaps fortunately – didn’t follow it up. Meek later produced several British pop classics, all from his small north London flat, but was notorious for trying to seduce the prettier young men who crossed his path.
Instead, somewhat against expectations, Mike Jagger joined the 2 per cent of Britain’s school leavers in that era who went on to university. Despite those clashes over uniform, his headmaster, Lofty Hudson, decided he was worthy of the privilege and, in December 1960, well before he had sat his A-levels, supplied a character reference putting the best possible gloss on his academic record. ‘Jagger is a lad of good general character,’ it read in part, ‘although he has been rather slow to mature. The pleasing quality which is now emerging is that of persistence when he makes up his mind to tackle something. His interests are wide. He has been a member of several School Societies and is prominent in Games, being Secretary of our Basketball Club, a member of our First Cricket Eleven and he plays Rugby Football for his House. Out of school he is interested in Camping, Climbing, Canoeing, Music and is a member of the Local Historical Association . . . Jagger’s development now fully justifies me in recommending him for a Degree course and I hope you will be able to accept him.’
Though in no sense hyperbolic, the head’s letter did the trick. Conditional on two A-level passes, Mike was offered a place at the London School of Economics to begin reading for a BSc degree in the autumn of 1961. He accepted it, albeit without great enthusiasm. ‘I wanted to do arts, but thought I ought to do science,’ he would remember. ‘Economics seemed about halfway in between.’
At that time, Britain’s university entrants were not forced to run themselves into debt to the government to pay for their tuition, but received virtually automatic grants from local education authorities. Kent County Council gave Mike £350 per annum, which at a time of almost zero inflation was more than enough to cover three years of study, especially as he would continue living at home and travel up each day by train to the LSE’s small campus in Houghton Street, off Kings-way. Even so, it was clearly advisable to earn some money during the long summer holiday between leaving school and starting there. His choice of job sheds interesting light on a character always thought to have been consumed by selfishness, revealing that until his late teens at least he had a caring and altruistic side that made him very much his father’s son.
For several weeks that summer, he worked as a porter at a local psychiatric institution. Not Stone House – that would have been too perfect – but Bexley Hospital, a similarly grim and sprawling Victorian edifice locally nicknamed ‘the Village on the Heath’ because until recently, in the interests of total segregation, its grounds had included a fully functioning farm. He earned £4.50 per week, not at all a bad wage for the time, though he clearly could have chosen an easier job, both physically and emotionally. He was to be remembered by patients and staff alike as unfailingly kind and cheerful. He himself believed the experience taught him lessons about human psychology that were to prove invaluable throughout his life.
It was at Bexley Hospital, too, by his own account, that he lost his virginity to a nurse, huddled in a store cupboard during a brief respite from pushing trolleys and taking round meals: the furthest possible extreme from all those luxury hotel suites of the future.
A STUDENT AT the London School of Economics in 1961 enjoyed a prestige only slightly below that of Oxford or Cambridge. Founded by George Bernard Shaw and the Fabians Beatrice and Sidney Webb, it was an autonomous unit of London University whose past lecturers had included the philosopher and pacifist Bertrand Russell and the economist John Maynard Keynes. Among its many celebrated alumni were the Labour chancellor of the exchequer Hugh Dalton, the polemical journalist Bernard Levin, the newly elected president of the United States, John F. Kennedy, and his brother (and attorney general) Robert.
It was also by long tradition Britain’s most highly politicised seat of learning, governed largely by old-school right-wingers but with an increasingly radical student population and junior staff. Though its heyday as a cauldron of youthful dissent was still half a dozen years in the future, LSE demonstrators already took to the streets on a regular basis, protesting against foreign atrocities like the Sharpeville Massacre in South Africa and supporting their elder statesman Bertrand Russell’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. One of Mike’s fellow students, the future publisher and peer Matthew Evans, had won his place despite passing only one A-level and with a far more modest cache of O-levels, including woodwork. More important was that he’d taken part in the famous CND protest march to the nuclear weapons research establishment at Aldermaston, Berkshire.
On the same BSc degree course was Laurence Isaacson, in later life a highly successful restaurant tycoon who would quip that if he’d sung or played an instrument his future might have been very different. Born in Liverpool, he had attended Dovedale Primary School like John Lennon and George Harrison and then, like Lennon, gone on to Quarry Bank High School; now here he was actually sitting next to another future legend of rock. The two were doing the same specialist subject, industry and trade, for the second paper in their finals. ‘That meant that if Jagger missed a lecture, he’d copy out my notes, and if I missed one, I’d copy out his,’ Isaacson says. ‘I seem to recall he used to do most of the copying.’
Like Evans, Isaacson remembers him as ‘obviously extremely bright’ and easily capable of achieving a 2:1 degree. At lectures, he was always quiet and well mannered and spoke ‘like a nice middle-class boy . . . The trouble was that it still all felt a bit too much like school. You had to be very respectful to the tutors and, of course, never answer back. And the classes were so small that they always had their eye on you. I remember one shouting out, “Jagger . . . if you don’t concentrate, you’re never going to get anywhere!”’
Barely two years into a new decade, London had already taken huge strides away from the stuffy, sleepy fifties – though the changes were only just beginning. A feeling of excitement and expectation pulsed through the crusty old Victorian metropolis at every level: from its towering new office blocks and swirling new traffic overpasses and underpasses to its impudent new minicars, minivans and minicabs and ever-lengthening rows of parking meters; from its new wine bars, ‘bistros’ and Italian trattorias to its sophisticated new advertisements and brand identities and newly launched, or revivified, glossy magazines like Town, Queen and Tatler; from its young men in modish narrower trousers, thick-striped shirts and square-toed shoes to its young women in masculine-looking V-necked Shetland sweaters, 1920s-style ropes of beads, black stockings and radically short skirts.
Innovation and experimentation (once again the merest amuse-bouche from the banquet to come) flourished at new theatres like Bernard Miles’s Mermaid and Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Royal, Stratford East; in the plays of Arnold Wesker and Harold Pinter; in mould-shattering productions like Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller’s Beyond the Fringe and Lionel Bart’s Oliver! The middle-aged metropolitan sophisticates whose posh accents always ruled London’s arts and media now began to seem laughably old-fashioned. An emergent school of young painters from humble families and provincial backgrounds – including Yorkshire’s David Hockney, Essex’s Allen Jones and Dartford’s Peter Blake – were being more talked and written about than any since the French Impressionists. Vogue magazine, the supreme arbiter of style and sophistication, ceased employing bow-tied society figures to photograph its model girls, instead hiring a brash young East End Cockney named David Bailey.
Only in popular music did excitement seem to be dwindling rather than growing. The ructions that rock ’n’ roll had caused among mid-fifties teenagers were a distant, almost embarrassing memory. Elvis Presley had disappeared into the US army for two years, and then emerged shorn of his sideburns, singing ballads and hymns. The American music industry had been convulsed by scandals over payola and the misadventures of individual stars. Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran were dead; Little Richard had found God; Jerry Lee Lewis had been engulfed in controversy after bigamously marrying his thirteen-year-old cousin; Chuck Berry had been convicted on an immorality charge involving a teenage girl. The new teenage icons were throwbacks to the crooner era, with names like Frankie and Bobby, chosen for prettiness rather than vocal talent, and their manifest inability to hurt a fly (or unbutton one). The only creative sparks came from young white songwriters working out of New York’s Brill Building, largely supplying black singers and groups, and from the black-owned Motown record label in Detroit: all conclusive proof that ‘race’ music was dead and buried.
Such rock idols as Britain had produced – Tommy Steele, Adam Faith, Cliff Richard – had all heeded the dire warnings that it couldn’t possibly last and crossed over as soon as possible into mainstream show business. The current craze was ‘Trad’, a homogenised version of traditional jazz whose bands dressed in faux-Victorian bowler hats and waistcoats and played mainstream show tunes like Cole Porter’s ‘I Love You, Samantha’ and even Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘March of the Siamese Children’. The wild, skirt-twirling rock ’n’ roll jive had given way to the slower, more formal Stomp, which involved minimal bodily contact between the dancers and tended to come to a respectful halt during drum solos.
In short, the danger seemed to have passed.
BARELY A MONTH into Mike’s first term at LSE, he met up with Keith Richards again and they resumed the conversation that had broken off in the Wentworth County Primary playground eleven years earlier.
The second most important partnership in rock music history might never have happened if either of them had got out of bed five minutes later, missed a bus, or lingered to buy a pack of cigarettes or a Mars bar. It took place early one weekday on the ‘up’ platform at Dartford railway station as they waited for the same train, Mike to get to Charing Cross in London and Keith to Sidcup, four stops away, where he was now at art college.
Since their discussion about cowboys and guitars as seven-year-olds, they had remained vaguely in each other’s orbit without being friends. When the Jaggers lived on Denver Road in the centre of Dartford, Keith’s home had been on Chastillian Road, literally one street away. Their mothers were on casually friendly terms, and would exchange family news if ever they chanced to meet around town. But after Wentworth their only further encounter had been one summer day outside Dartford Library when Mike had a holiday job selling ice cream and Keith, recognising him, stopped and bought one. That time, their conversation had been even briefer, albeit punctuated by a prophetic lapping tongue.
As eighteen-year-olds, waiting among the diurnal wage slaves at Dartford Station, they could not have looked more different. Mike was a typical middle-class student with his beige wool cardigan and black-, purple- and yellow-striped LSE scarf. Keith, though also technically a student, did his utmost not to resemble one with his faded blue denim jeans and jerkin and lilac-coloured shirt. To 1961 eyes, that made an unpleasing cross between a Teddy Boy and a beatnik.
Keith instantly recognised Mike by the lips, as Mike did Keith by the almost skull-bony face and protruding ears that had barely changed since he was in short trousers. It also happened that Mike was carrying two albums he had just received from the Chess label in Chicago, The Best of Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry’s Rockin’ at the Hops. ‘To me,’ Keith would recall, ‘that was Captain Morgan’s treasure. I thought, “I know you. And what you got under your arm’s worth robbing.”’
The upshot was that when their train pulled in, they decided to travel together. Rattling through the Kentish suburbs, they found they had other idols in common, a crowd almost as dense as the newspaper-reading, strap-hanging one around them: Sonny Boy Williamson . . . John Lee Hooker . . . Howlin’ Wolf . . . Willie Dixon . . . Jimmy Reed . . . Jimmy Witherspoon . . . T-Bone Walker . . . Little Walter . . . Never one to stint on melodrama, Keith would afterwards equate the moment with the blues’ darkest fable – young Robert Johnson keeping a tryst with the devil and, Faust-like, bartering his soul to be able to play like an angel. ‘Just sitting on that train . . . it was almost like we made a deal without knowing it, like Robert did.’ When the train pulled into Sidcup, he was so absorbed in copying down the serial numbers on Mike’s albums that he almost forgot to get off.
Keith not only had music in his blood (where it was destined to be severely jostled by other, more questionable additives) but guitar wood almost in his bones. Once again, Kent could claim little of the credit. On his mother’s side, he was descended from French Huguenots, Protestants who had fled Catholic persecution in their own country and found asylum in the Channel Isles. The music was infused largely through his maternal grandfather, Theodore Augustus Dupree, who led a succession of semi-professional dance bands and played numerous instruments, including piano, saxophone, violin and guitar. One of Keith’s great childhood treats – all in all somewhat fewer than Mike Jagger enjoyed – was to accompany his ‘Grandfather Gus’ to the Ivor Mairants music store in London’s West End, where guitars were custom-built on the premises. Sometimes he would be allowed into the workshops to watch the fascinating silhouettes take shape and inhale the aromas of raw rosewood, resin and varnish; despite stiff competition, the headiest narcotic he would ever know.
An only child, he had been raised by parents who in every way were the opposite of Mike’s. His father, Bert Richards, a dour, introverted character, worked punishingly long shifts as a supervisor in a lightbulb factory and so had little energy left over to be an authority figure and role model like Joe Jagger. In equal contrast with Eva Jagger, Keith’s mother, Doris, was a sunny-natured, down-to-earth woman who spoiled him rotten, loved music, and had an eclectic taste ranging from Sarah Vaughan to Mozart. As she washed up his dirty dishes with the radio blaring, she’d call out to him to ‘listen to that blue note!’
Doris’s refusal ever to make Keith toe the line had withstood every sanction of mid-fifties state schooling and resulted in an intelligent, perceptive boy being branded an irredeemable dunce. By the age of thirteen, he was regarded as an academic no-hoper and had been consigned to Dartford Technical School, hopefully to acquire some honest artisan trade. The school was in Wilmington, which meant he unknowingly crossed paths with Mike every morning and evening as Mike went to and from Dartford Grammar. At Dartford Tech, he was as inattentive and disruptive as at school, and was expelled after two years without a single plumbing or bricklaying certificate to his name.
Sidcup Art College was the bottom of the heap. In this era, even the smallest British town usually had its own college or school of art built in Victorian mock-Gothic style, a civic amenity as familiar as the library or the swimming baths. All were open to school leavers with the faintest artistic bent, which as a rule meant misfits who had not reached university standard but lacked the drive to go out and find a job. Since the fifties, a secondary role of art schools had been giving shelter to young men whose obsession with rock ’n’ roll music seemed destined to take them nowhere. Keith had joined an unwitting brotherhood that also included, or would include, John Lennon, Peter Townshend, Eric Clapton, Ronnie Wood, Ray Davies, Syd Barrett and David Jones, later Bowie.
As a working-class teenager, he felt the full impact of rock ’n’ roll’s first wave, rather than waiting around like bourgeois Mike for it to clean up its act. The national guitar fever unleashed by Elvis Presley had infected him long ago, thanks to Grandfather Gus and the craftsmen at Ivor Mairants’s. His adoring mum bought him his first guitar for seven pounds, out of her wages from working in a Dartford baker’s shop. Though he could sing – in fact, had sung soprano in the massed choirs at the Queen’s coronation – his ambition was to be like Scotty Moore, the solo guitarist in Presley’s backing trio, whose light and jaunty rockabilly riffs somehow perfectly set off the King’s brooding sexual menace.
At Sidcup Art College he did little on a creative level, apart from developing what would become a near genius for vandalism. Musically speaking, however, the college provided an education which he devoured like none before. Among its students was a clique of hard-core blues enthusiasts, as usual acting like a resistance cell in an occupied country. Their moving spirit, Dick Taylor, had lately arrived from Dartford Grammar School, where he had belonged to an identical underground movement with Mike Jagger. Dick converted Keith to the blues just as he’d converted Mike a year earlier. In the process, he sometimes mentioned playing in a band, but so vaguely that Keith never realised his old primary schoolmate was also a member. He had in fact been longing to join but, says Taylor, was ‘too shy to ask’.
After their chance reunion on that morning commuter train, Mike and Keith met up again at Dartford’s only cool place, the Carousel coffee bar, and were soon regularly hanging out together. Keith brought along his guitar, an acoustic Hofner cello model with F-holes, and Mike revealed that, despite his college scarf and well-bred accent, he sang blues. They began making music together immediately, finding their tastes identical – blues, with some pop if it was good – and their empathy almost telepathic. ‘We’d hear something, we’d both look at each other at once,’ Keith would later write in his autobiography, Life. ‘We’d hear a record and go “That’s wrong. That’s faking it. That’s real.”’ As with two other total opposites, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who had met in Liverpool four years earlier, their character differences only seemed to cement the friendship. ‘[Mike] liked Keith’s laid-back quality, his tough stance, his obsession with the guitar,’ says Taylor, ‘and Keith was attracted to Mike’s intelligence, his dramatic flair.’
Mike was all for bringing Keith into the unnamed blues band that still somehow struggled along. But aside from Taylor, there were two other members to convince. Although Bob Beckwith and Alan Etherington had also now left Dartford Grammar School, both still lived at home, in circumstances as irreproachably middle class as the Jaggers’. Keith was not simply their social inferior, but hailed from very much the wrong side of the tracks: he lived in a council house on the definitely rough Temple Hill estate in east Dartford, and was known to hang out with the town’s most disreputable ‘Teds’. However, one band practice session was enough for Beckwith and Etherington to agree with Taylor’s estimate of Mike’s mate as ‘an absolute lout . . . but a really nice lout’. The line-up obligingly rearranged itself so that Keith could alternate on lead guitar with Beckwith.
Chuck Berry was Keith’s real passport into their ranks. For Berry had done what no schoolteacher or college lecturer could – made him pay attention and apply himself. The gymnastic electric riffs with which Berry punctuated his vocals were still way beyond most of his young British admirers. But Keith, by listening to the records over and over, had nailed every last note and half chord in ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’, ‘Memphis, Tennessee’, even the complex intro and solo to ‘Johnny B. Goode’, where Berry somehow single-handedly sounded like two lead guitarists trying to outpick each other. Mike’s voice, if it resembled anyone’s, had always sounded a bit like Berry’s; in this authentic instrumental setting, he now became Chuck almost to the life.
With Keith’s arrival, the band finally acquired a name, Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys. His guitar had the name ‘Blue Boy’ inside it, and ‘Little Boy Blue’ was a pseudonym of the blues giant Sonny Boy Williamson. There was also a hint of giggle-making double entendre (‘Little Boy Blue, come blow up your horn’) and an ironic nod to The Blue Boy, Thomas Gainsborough’s eighteenth-century portrait of an angelic youth in sky-coloured satin. In other words, they could not have dreamed up anything much worse.
Away from the band, not all Mike’s friends were quite so accepting of Keith. Alan Etherington recalls that in their wider ex-Dartford Grammar School circle, there would sometimes be parties to which Mike’s Teddy Boy friend was pointedly not invited. That used to upset Mike, showing his bandmates a more sensitive, caring person than they previously had taken him for. He adopted a protective attitude towards Keith – who was not nearly as tough as he pretended, and in many ways a rather sensitive, vulnerable soul – while Keith, in return, followed him with almost dog-like devotion.
Mike, for his part, crossed over to Keith’s side of the tracks without any problem. The Richardses’ cosy, untidy council house on Spielman Road was the pleasantest possible contrast to the spotless and regimented Jagger home in The Close. Keith had no vigorous dad around to insist on weight training or team washing up, and Doris was motherly and easygoing in a way that Eva Jagger, for all her sterling qualities, had never been. When the Richardses went away for the weekend to Beesands in Devon that summer, Mike accompanied them in their battered old Vauxhall car. Keith took his guitar, and the two friends entertained customers at the local pub by playing Everly Brothers songs. Otherwise, Doris Richards remembered Mike being ‘bored to tears’ and repeatedly moaning, ‘No women . . . no women.’ On their marathon return journey, the car battery failed and they had to drive without lights. When finally they drew up outside the Jagger house four or five hours late, a tight-lipped Eva showed little sympathy.
Mike had always soaked up other people’s accents and mannerisms, usually in a mocking spirit, sometimes in an admiring one. Now, outside of college – and home – he abandoned his rather goody-goody, stripe-scarfed student persona and began to dress and carry himself more like Keith, no longer speaking in the quiet, accentless tone of a nicely brought-up middle-class boy, but in brash Kentish Cockney. Around Keith, he ceased to be known as ‘Mike’, that name so redolent of sports cars, Harris-tweed jackets, and beer in pewter mugs at smart roadhouses on Sunday mornings. Now, instead, he became ‘Mick’, its defiantly proletarian butt end, redolent only of reeking public bars and mad-drunk Irishmen. It was the tough-nut prefix for which ‘Jagger’ seemed to have been waiting all these years; joined together, the three syllables were already practically smashing windows.
While Keith’s arrival in the band widened their repertoire and gave their sound an extra bite, it did not make them any more ambitious or purposeful. They continued to practise together in a vacuum, still not trying to find live playing gigs or acquire a manager who might do so for them. Early in 1962, at Alan Etherington’s house, they used the Philips ‘Joystick’ recorder to tape Mike’s – or Mick’s – better Chuck Berry take-offs with Keith on lead guitar: two versions apiece of ‘Beautiful Delilah’, ‘Little Queenie’ and ‘Around and Around’, and one each of ‘Johnny B. Goode’ and ‘Down the Road Apiece’, plus Billy Boy Arnold’s ‘I Ain’t Got You’ and Ritchie Valens’s ‘La Bamba’. The tape was not submitted to a record company or talent agent, however, but simply analysed for instrumental and vocal faults, then forgotten – until thirty years later, when it was put up for auction as a unique glimpse of a superstar and supergroup in embryo, and sold for a fortune.
*
ON 15 MARCH 1962 Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys discovered they were not alone after all. Scanning that Thursday’s edition of Melody Maker, they lit on an advertisement for what was described – wholly justifiably, in their view – as ‘The Most Exciting Event of This Year’. In two evenings’ time, a club dedicated to blues music would open in the west London suburb of Ealing.
The club’s founder, Alexis Korner, was the first in a succession of characters from exotic regions far outside Kent who would assist Mike’s transfiguration into Mick. Born in Paris of an Austro-Russian father and a Greco-Turkish mother, Korner spent his infancy in Switzerland and North Africa before growing up in London and attending one of its most exclusive schools, St Paul’s. He became addicted to the blues as a schoolboy, rejecting all his various heritages to learn boogie-woogie piano, banjo and guitar, and feeling – much like our Dartford schoolboy in later years – an almost sacred mission to keep the music alive.
As a result, thirty-three-year-old Korner, a genial man with a shock of Afro hair before its time and an uneroded public school accent, now led Britain’s only full-time blues band, Blues Incorporated. The name had no twenty-first-century big-business associations, but had been inspired by Murder Inc., a Humphrey Bogart film about American gangsters – which, indeed, was very much how Korner’s musical contemporaries viewed him.
In 1962, any popular musician who wanted to make it in Britain had first to make it in Soho. The maze of narrow Georgian streets at the heart of London’s West End contained what little music industry the capital could yet boast, harbouring song publishers, pluggers, talent scouts, agents and recording studios – plus almost all the live venues that mattered – among its French restaurants, Italian groceries, cigar shops and seedy strip clubs. Rock ’n’ roll and skiffle had each been launched on the nation from Soho, and anyone in search of pop stardom, as well as of a flash of naked breasts, an espresso or coq au vin, instinctively headed there.
Since the Trad jazz boom, however, Soho was no longer a centre of musical pioneering but of entrenchment and prejudice. It was now where ‘pure’ jazz enthusiasts gathered – nowhere more fervently than at the National Jazz League’s own Marquee Club, a cellar designed (by the surrealist photographer Angus McBean) to resemble the interior of a tent. In this siege atmosphere, the blues was no longer recognised as a first cousin to jazz, but looked down on as disdainfully as was Trad, or even rock. Alexis Korner had formerly played banjo with the Barber band, which made his decision to put syncopated music behind him, and form a band essentially playing only twelve bars and three chords, all the more reprehensible.
Despite repeated rejections from Soho club managements – the brusquest from the Marquee’s manager, Harold Pendleton – Korner remained convinced there was an audience for blues who were at present totally excluded from London’s live music scene and would beat a path to Blues Incorporated’s door, if he could just provide them with one. Hence his decision to open his own club in the hopefully friendlier environs of the suburb where he’d grown up.
Like Dartford, Ealing had never previously been regarded as a crucible for the blues. It was an affluent, sedate and almost wholly ‘white’ residential area, best known for its eponymous film studios – maker of British screen classics like Kind Hearts and Coronets and Passport to Pimlico – and for having a ‘Broadway’ rather than just an ordinary High Street. Korner’s Ealing Club (a name more suggestive of golf or bridge than visceral music) was situated almost directly opposite Ealing Broadway tube station, underneath an ABC bakery and tea shop. Local matrons being served afternoon tea by frilly-aproned waitresses little suspected what was brewing beneath their feet.
Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys’ excitement over the new club was somewhat dampened by the inaccessibility of its location, twenty-odd miles to the north west of Dartford and a tricky journey, whether by road or public transport. Owing to prior commitments, they were not present at Korner’s opening night on 17 March. But the following Saturday the five of them set off for Ealing, packed into Alan Etherington’s father’s car, an appropriately named Riley Pathfinder.
First impressions were hardly promising. The club premises consisted of a shabby staircase and a single room, smelling dankly of the adjacent River Thames, with a central bar and a makeshift stage at one end. The kindred spirits waiting for showtime, no more than a couple of dozen strong, were equally uninspiring. Mick of the future would remember them as ‘trainspotters who needed somewhere to go . . . just a bunch of anoraks . . . and the girls were very thin on the ground’.
Excitement barely quickened when Blues Incorporated took the stage. The three main figures in the line-up, all men in their early thirties (advanced middle age by 1962 standards), were attired conventionally in white shirts with sober ties, baggy grey flannel trousers and black lace-up shoes, and had a serious, preoccupied air better suited to some chamber orchestra. But when they started playing, none of that mattered. The music was Chicago-style instrumental blues, a leisurely tag match between guitar, saxophone and harmonica that by rights should only have worked on a Roy Brown or Champion Jack Dupree live album soaked in the rotgut gin and cheap neon of the Windy City’s South Side. Yet astonishingly here it was, conjured up with near-perfect fidelity by a clump of square-looking Englishmen under a cake shop on Ealing Broadway.
The band was jointly fronted by Korner on guitar – usually seated on a chair – and his long-time playing partner, Cyril Davies, a burly metalworker from Harrow (the suburb, not the illustrious school) who had somehow turned himself into a virtuoso on blues piano, harmonica and twelve-string guitar. Their only other regular sideman was the tenor-sax player Dick Heckstall-Smith, a black-bearded agriculture graduate from Cambridge University. Otherwise, Korner used a roster of much younger musicians, mostly not yet even semi-pro, who looked up to him as a teacher and mentor and so required mercifully little payment. Among this floating population were nineteen-year-old classically trained double bassist Jack Bruce, one day to play bass guitar with the supergroup Cream, and a twenty-one-year-old drummer and erstwhile art student from Wembley named Charlie Watts.
It was Korner’s reputation for giving newcomers a break that awoke the first definite glimmer of ambition in Mick. He found out Korner’s address and, a few days later, posted him a tape of Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys performing Chuck Berry’s ‘Reelin’ and Rockin’ ’ and ‘Around and Around’, Jimmy Reed’s ‘Bright Lights, Big City’ and ‘Go on to School’ and Bobby Bland’s ‘Don’t Want No Woman’. Korner heard nothing of compelling interest on the tape (then lost it, to his eventual huge regret) but, as ever, was willing to give a chance on the bandstand to anyone. Without prior audition, Mick was offered a spot the next Saturday, backed by Keith and Korner himself on guitars and Jack Bruce on double bass.
