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Mick took the stage looking the picture of respectability in his chunky student cardigan, white shirt and Slim Jim tie. As an opener, he and Keith picked what they thought was their best Chuck Berry impersonation, ‘Around and Around’, one of Berry’s several hymns of praise to music itself (‘Well, the joint was rockin’ . . . goin’ round and round . . .’). Even for the broad-minded Korner, it was a bit too perilously close to rock ’n’ roll: after the first jarring chords, he conveniently broke a guitar string and remained preoccupied with changing it until the song was safely over. He later recalled being struck less by Mick’s singing than by ‘the way he threw his hair around . . . For a kid in a cardigan, that was moving quite excessively.’
It was not in any way what the club was supposed to be about, and the performance met with frigid silence from the men of Korner’s age whom he had previously regarded as his target audience. ‘We’d obviously stepped over the limit,’ Mick would remember. ‘You couldn’t include Chuck Berry in the pantheon of traddy-blues-ists.’ But Korner, glancing up at last from that troublesome guitar string, saw a different reaction from the younger men present – and a very different one from their girlfriends, wives and sisters. Until now, women had never been considered a significant factor in blues appreciation. The kid in the cardigan, with his flying hair, had suddenly changed that.
When Mick came offstage, certain he had blown his big chance, Korner was waiting for him. To his astonishment, he was offered another spot next week, this time with Blues Incorporated’s full heavyweight line-up of Korner, Cyril Davies and Dick Heckstall-Smith. Blues Incorporated remained predominantly an instrumental band and to start with Mick was only a brief, walk-on feature, rather like megaphone-toting crooners in 1920s orchestras. ‘It was a bit of a scramble to get onstage with Alexis,’ he would recall. ‘For anyone who fancied themselves as a blues vocalist, that was the only showcase, that one band. I wouldn’t ever get in tune, that was my problem, and I was often very drunk, ’cause I was really nervous.’ As Korner recalled, he seldom sang more than three songs in a night. ‘He learned more, but was only really sure of three, one of which was Billy Boy Arnold’s “Poor Boy” – and he used to sing one of Chuck’s songs and a Muddy Waters.’
Some time before the Ealing revelation, he had accepted that an authentic bluesman couldn’t just stand there but had better play some kind of instrument. Feeling it too late to start learning guitar or piano, he had settled for harmonica – what musicians call a ‘harp’ – and had been struggling to teach himself from records by American virtuosi like Jimmy Reed, Little Walter and Sonny Boy Williamson.
Fortuitously, Blues Incorporated had Britain’s finest blues harp player in Cyril – aka ‘Squirrel’ – Davies, who carried his collection of harmonicas around in a bag like a plumber’s tools. When the band played sans Jagger, Mick would haunt the stage front as avidly as any future Mick worshipper, watching the big, ungainly man coax the most delicate melodies as well as the most wickedly rousing rhythms from his tiny silver mouthpiece. However, the prickly, insecure and fiercely anti-rock ’n’ roll ‘Squirrel’ felt none of Korner’s zeal to help younger musicians. ‘He was very gruff, almost to the point of rudeness,’ his would-be pupil would recall. ‘He told me to fuck off, basically. I’d ask, “How do you bend a note?” and Cyril would say, “Well, you get a pair of pliers . . .”’
Nor was Alexis Korner’s hospitality limited to the Ealing Club stage. At his London flat, in Moscow Road, Bayswater, he and his wife, Bobbie, kept open house for his young protégés as well as for the occasional blues maestro visiting from America. Mick and the other Blue Boys would go back there after closing time to sit in the kitchen – where Big Bill Broonzy had once slept on the floor – drinking instant coffee and talking until dawn came up over the cupolas of nearby Whiteley’s department store. The Korners found Mick always quiet and polite, though by now more than a little influenced by the LSE’s in-house radicalism. On one occasion, he described the blues as ‘our working-class music’ and expressed surprise that a former public schoolboy like Korner should be involved with it. Keith always seemed consumed by shyness, never pushing himself forward as a musician or a person, just happy to be around Mick.
On the club’s second night, yet another Korner find had made his début there. He was a short, stocky twenty-year-old, dressed at the height of fashion in a grey herringbone jacket, a shirt with one of the new faux-Victorian rounded collars and elastic-sided Chelsea boots. He had a mop of fair hair almost as ungovernable as Mick’s, and even more silkily clean, and a smile of shining choirboy innocence. His name was Brian Jones.
Two evenings later, the Dartford boys walked in to find him onstage, playing Robert Johnson’s ‘Dust My Broom’ on ‘bottleneck’ or ‘slide’ guitar – not holding down individual strings but sliding a steel-jacketed finger back and forth along all six at once in extravagant sweeps to produce quivering metallic mayhem. It was a style, and song, identified with one of the Blue Boys’ greatest Chicago idols, Elmore James; the newcomer did not merely sound like James but was billed under a pseudonym, ‘Elmo Lewis’, clearly designed to put him on the same level. This hubris excited Keith, in particular, almost more than the music. ‘It’s Elmore James, man,’ he kept whispering to Mick as they watched. ‘It’s fuckin’ Elmore James . . .’
Brian was a blues pilgrim from even farther afield than Dartford. He had been raised in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, a bastion of stuffy propriety rivalling Kent’s Tunbridge Wells. His background was as solidly middle class as Mick’s and his educational background almost identical. The son of a civil engineer, he had attended Cheltenham Grammar School, distinguishing himself both in class and at games, though hampered in the latter by chronic asthma. Both his parents being Welsh, and his mother a piano teacher to boot, he was instinctively musical, easily mastering the piano, recorder, clarinet and saxophone before he had left short trousers. He could pick up almost any instrument and, in a minute or two, coax some kind of tune from it.
Like Mick, he turned into a rebel against middle-class convention, but in his case the process was considerably more spectacular. At the age of sixteen, while still at Cheltenham Grammar, he fathered a child with a schoolgirl two years his junior. The episode devastated his upright Welsh parents, scandalised Cheltenham (especially sensitive to such issues because of its world-renowned ‘Ladies’ College’), and even reached Britain’s main Sunday scandal sheet, the News of the World. After matters with the girl’s family had been resolved and the baby given up for adoption, most young men would have learned an unforgettable lesson – but not this one. By the age of twenty he had sired two further children with different young women, each time failing to do the decent thing by marrying the mother and accepting responsibility for the child. Long before there were rock stars as we have come to know them – motivated only by music and self-gratification, oblivious to the trail of ruined lives in their wake – there was Brian Jones.
Leaving school with two more A-levels than Mick, he could easily have gone on to university, but instead drifted from one tedious office job to another while playing alto sax with a rock ’n’ roll group (aptly named the Ramrods). He had met Alexis Korner in Cheltenham while Korner was still in the Chris Barber band; with Korner’s encouragement he’d migrated to London soon afterwards, hotly pursued by the latest young woman he had got ‘up the duff’ with their baby son. In the meantime, he taught himself to play slide guitar well – brilliantly – enough for Korner to put him into the Blues Incorporated line-up at the Ealing Club.
He was only a little older than Mick and Keith, but seemed vastly more mature and sophisticated when they talked to him following his Elmore James imposture. As a guitarist, his rapport was initially with Keith. But Mick was equally impressed by his soft, lisping voice with no trace of West Country bumpkin; his super-chic clothes and hair; his knowledge of music across the whole spectrum from pop to jazz; his surprising articulateness and literacy and wicked sense of humour; above all, his determination not to let his chaotic private life hinder him from, somehow or other, becoming a star.
Thereafter, when the Dartford boys drove to Ealing, they would make a lengthy detour to pick up Brian from his flat in Notting Hill Gate. He was supporting himself – and, to a minor extent, his girlfriend and third child – with day jobs in shops and department stores that usually ended when he was caught stealing from the cash register. Despite a seeming total lack of scruples, he had a knack of endearing himself to honest people with what Alexis Korner termed ‘a beautiful mixture of politeness and rudeness’. Whereas Mick was merely a visitor to the Korners’ flat – not always appreciated for his left-wing stridency and his patronising way of calling thirty-something Bobbie Korner ‘Auntie Bobbie’ – Brian treated the place virtually as a second home.
By now, the Ealing Club’s open-mic policy had produced other young blues singers, all similarly white and bourgeois, to challenge the kid in the cardigan. Brian – who, despite his Welsh antecedents, did not possess a singing voice – worked as a guitar/vocal duo with a sometime Oxford University student named Paul Pond (later to find fame as Paul Jones with the Manfred Mann band and, still later, as an actor, musical comedy star and radio presenter). On some nights the vocal spot with Blues Incorporated would be given to ‘Long’ John Baldry, a hugely tall, sandy-haired former street busker whose father was a police officer in Colindale; on others it went to a long-faced Middlesex boy named Art Wood whose kid brother Ronnie was among the club’s most devoted members, though not yet old enough to be served alcohol.
Occasionally, two or more vocalists at once took the stage in an implied talent contest that did not always seem to come out in the kid’s favour. Both Paul Pond and Long John Baldry had more recognisably ‘soulful’ voices, while Long John, towering over him in a shared rendition of Muddy Waters’s ‘Got My Mojo Workin’’, brought his lack of inches into uncomfortable relief. Yet Mick was the vocalist Korner always preferred. The waspish Long John – openly gay at a time when few young Britons dared to be – dismissed him as ‘all lips and ears . . . like a ventriloquist’s dummy’.
Korner also began using Mick on Blues Incorporated gigs outside the club, paying him ‘a pound or ten bob [fifty pence]’ per show. Some of these were for débutante balls at posh London hotels or country houses, in Buckinghamshire or Essex, whose front gates had porters’ lodges almost as big as the Jagger family home and front drives that seemed to go on forever. As far as Mick – or anyone in his social bracket – knew, the aristocracy had never taken the slightest interest in blues or R&B. But these young men in dinner jackets, Guards mess tunics or even kilts, proved as susceptible to Muddy, Elmore, T-Bone and Chuck as any back in proletarian Ealing; the girls might have double-barrelled surnames and horsey accents, but were no less putty in his hands when he threw his hair around. Despite the wealth all around, the gigs seldom earned him more than a few shillings – but at least he always got fed well.
The most memorable was a grand ball given by the youthful marquess of Londonderry at his ancestral home, Londonderry House in Park Lane, shortly before its demolition to make way for the new London Hilton Hotel. Among the guests was the future interior designer and super-socialite Nicky Haslam, then still a pupil at Eton. Though America’s legendary Benny Goodman Orchestra was the main musical attraction, Blues Incorporated had an early-evening spot fronted, as Haslam’s memoirs recall, ‘by a hired-in singer . . . a skinny kid named Mick something’. Haslam’s companion, the future magazine editor Min Hogg, later reported the skinny kid had been sure enough of himself to make overtures and even ‘paw’ at her strapless pink satin evening gown. From the ABC bakery to the upper crust: he had found the milieu where from now on he would be happiest.
THE EALING CLUB had started with just one hundred members; now, only two months later, it boasted more than eight hundred. When it was crowded to capacity, and beyond, the heat rivalled that of a similar subterranean space called the Cavern in far-off Liverpool. So much condensation dripped from the walls and ceiling that Korner had to hang a tarpaulin sheet over the stage canopy to stop the already precarious electrical connections from shorting out.
Korner’s real triumph was a phone call from Harold Pendleton, manager of Soho’s Marquee Club, who had so loftily banned the blues from his stage at the beginning of the year. Worried by the numbers who were defecting from the Marquee to Ealing Broadway – and by an upsurge of younger blues musicians in rival Soho clubs – Pendleton had undergone a rapid change of heart. It happened that in his weekly programme, the Thursday-night spot had fallen vacant. This he offered to Blues Incorporated, starting on 19 May.
There was, of course, no question of the band appearing without a regular vocalist as it had mostly done in Ealing. Korner wanted Mick but – atypically nice man that he was – hesitated to split up the band Mick still had with Keith. However, Keith was happy for his friend to jump at this big chance. ‘I’ll always remember how nice he was about it,’ Bobbie Korner recalls. ‘He said, “Mick really deserves this and I’m not going to stand in his way.”’
Disc magazine made the announcement, a first droplet of newsprint oceans to come: ‘Nineteen-year-old Dartford rhythm and blues singer Mick Jagger has joined the Alexis Korner group Blues Incorporated and will sing with them regularly on their Saturday dates in Ealing and at their Thursday sessions at the Marquee.’
Brian Jones was also heading for the West End. His stage partner Paul Pond, the vocalist he needed to set off his slide guitar riffs, had decided to resume studying at Oxford (and would do so until being recruited into Manfred Mann as Paul Jones). Korner’s move back to Soho, taking Mick along, spurred Brian into forming a blues band of his own whose centre of gravity would be there rather than provincial Ealing. The fact that he was unknown in Soho did not deter him. He placed an ad in Jazz News, the most serious of all London’s music trades, inviting prospective sidemen to audition in the upstairs function room of a pub called the White Bear, just off Leicester Square. When its management caught him pilfering from the bar, he was forced to relocate to another pub, the Bricklayers Arms on Broadwick Street.
His original plan had been to poach the two most talented members of a well-regarded band called Blues by Six, lead guitarist Geoff Bradford and vocalist Brian Knight. Soon after the move to the Bricklayers Arms, however, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards turned up, accompanied by the other most serious musician from the Blue Boys, Dick Taylor. There was nothing to stop Mick singing with Brian’s band as well as Blues Incorporated if he chose, but that spot already seemed to have been taken by Brian Knight. Fortunately for him, the instrumental mix as it stood simply did not work. Geoff Bradford wished only to play the authentic blues of Muddy Waters and his ilk and was offended by Keith’s Chuck Berry licks – as well as nervous of Brian’s kleptomania. After a couple of practice sessions, Bradford bowed out, loyally accompanied by his friend Knight, so leaving the way open for Mick and Keith.
The only other worthwhile recruit was a burly, pugnacious-looking youth named Ian Stewart, a shipping clerk with the Imperial Chemical Industries corporation who arrived unpromisingly wearing too-brief leather cycling shorts and munching a pork pie, but who could play stride and barrelhouse piano as if he’d grown up around the New Orleans bordellos rather than in Ewell, Surrey. Just as appealing were his plain-spoken manner, dry wit and refusal to show his prospective bandmates the slightest reverence. ‘Stu’ was not only welcomed into the line-up but recognised as a natural friend and ally even by the cautious Mick – in his case, perhaps the only one who would always talk to him as an equal, refuse to flatter him and be unafraid to tell him the truth.
Brian had now filled every spot in his blues band except that of drummer. It was the vital ingredient for any kind of ‘beat’ music, marking out the serious from the strum-along amateur. Drummers tended to be slightly older men with daytime jobs well paid enough for them to afford the £60 which a new professional kit could cost. Even mediocre players were as sought after as plumbers during burst pipe season and could take their pick from among the best Trad or rock ’n’ roll bands. Although Soho had a whole street of drummers for hire (Archer Street, where pro and semi-pro musicians congregated seeking work), none was likely to be tempted by a gaggle of young blues apostles without money, management or prospects. The Bricklayers Arms auditions did produce one promising candidate in Mick Avory, who sat in with the line-up a couple of times and seemed to fit in well enough. But he could see no future in playing behind this other Mick, and refused to commit himself permanently.
There was also the question of what to name the band. Brian, whose prerogative it was, had endlessly agonised about it, rejecting all suggestions from Mick and Keith while thinking of nothing suitable himself. The problem was only resolved when he decided to advertise for gigs in Jazz News and had to come up with a name while dictating the small ad over the telephone. His impromptu choice of ‘the Rolling Stones’ was a further debt to Muddy Waters – not only Waters’s 1950 song ‘Rollin’ Stone’ but a lesser-known EP track, ‘Mannish Boy’, which includes the line ‘Oh, I’m a rollin’ stone.’
To British ears it was an odd choice, less evocative of a blues master’s raunchy potted autobiography than of the sententious proverb recommending stagnation over adventure: ‘A rolling stone gathers no moss.’ Mick, Keith, Stu and Dick all protested that it made them sound halfway between a classical string quartet and an Irish show band, but the die was cast – and, after all, it was Brian’s group.
Their big break was the end result of a rather brutal slap in the face for Mick. Alexis Korner’s success at the Marquee Club had by now not only galvanised Soho but come to the notice of the British Broadcasting Corporation in Portland Place, three-quarters of a mile to the north. As a result, completing Korner’s sense of vindication, Blues Incorporated were offered a live appearance on BBC radio’s Thursday night Jazz Club programme on 12 July. It was an opportunity not to be missed, even though it clashed with the band’s regular weekly show at the Marquee. So as not to disappoint their club audience, Long John Baldry, the Ealing Club’s queenly blond giant, was lined up to deputise for them.
For this hugely important exposure on national radio, Korner did not want Mick to be his band’s sole vocalist but to perform in alternation with Art Wood, elder brother of the still-unknown schoolboy Ronnie. However, the parsimonious BBC would not pay for two singers on top of five instrumentalists. So Korner, figuring that Mick’s appeal was more visual than vocal, and thus of doubtful impact on radio, decided to drop him in favour of Art Wood. (In the end Art did not appear either, and the vocals were left to Cyril Davis.)
As a consolation prize for Mick, Korner arranged that the band in which he’d been moonlighting should play their first-ever gig on the same night as the broadcast, filling the Marquee’s intermission spot between Long John Baldry’s sets for a £20 fee. They even received a mention in Jazz News’s preview section, on equal terms with all Soho’s most illustrious jazz names, Chris Barber, Ken Colyer and the like.
By rights, the paper should have sought details from the loquacious and articulate Brian, but instead, because of the Korner connection, it contacted Mick. Consequently, he rather than Brian seemed like the leader of the band as he listed its personnel and showed a twinge of unease lest its new name should offend the Marquee’s purist blues audience. Brian, for some reason, had decided to revert to his slide-guitar alter ego for the occasion, so was not even identified: ‘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 ’n’ roll outfit,” said Mick], the line-up is: Jagger (vocals), Keith Richards, Elmo Lewis (guitars), Dick Taylor (bass), “Stu” (piano) and Mick Avory (drums).’
So that night of 12 July 1962, under the pink-and-white canvas awning of the Marquee stage, Mick sang with the Rolling Stones for the very first time. To set off his cord trousers, he wore a horizontally striped matelot jersey, common enough among young men in the South of France but in London chiefly identified with girls or sexually ambiguous ‘chorus boys’ in West End musicals. As blues-singing attire, it was as daring as the white frilly dress he would select for an open-air show at the other end of Oxford Street seven years later.
The hour-long set consisted mostly of irreproachable blues and R&B standards by Jimmy Reed, Elmore James and Billy Boy Arnold, with the odd Chuck Berry like ‘Down the Road Apiece’ and ‘Back in the USA’ (‘New York, Los Angeles, oh, how I yearn for you . . .’). As Mick Avory did not, after all, play drums that night, the sound had considerably less attack than usual. Even so, many hard-core blues Marqueesards could not dissociate the word stones from rock; the applause was muted and at times almost drowned by whistles and boos.
Among the crowd that night was Charlie Watts, the drummer who occasionally played for Blues Incorporated but more regularly for Blues by Six, the band that was supposed to have given the Rolling Stones both a lead guitarist and a vocalist. Charlie was the epitome of the superior drummer class, immaculately dressed and barbered, with the almost tragically serious face of a latter-day Buster Keaton. True to form, he showed no outward emotion as the stripe-jerseyed figure onstage blew the ‘harp’ passages in Jimmy Reed’s ‘Bright Lights, Big City’ as if it were an erotic rite rather than a religious one. But, as he would recall, the highly esteemed blues and jazz musicians of his acquaintanceship all suddenly seemed like ‘eccentric old men’ compared with Mick.
Afterwards, collecting their £4 apiece (enough in these days to buy three LPs, dinner for two at an Angus Steakhouse or a pair of boots from the modish Regent Shoe store), Brian, Mick, Keith, Dick and Stu felt they had connected with the Marquee crowd at least enough to be offered further regular work there. But Harold Pendleton still considered them to be infected with rock ’n’ roll virus, if not in their repertoire then in the energy of their sound and the body language and flying hair of their front man. He would use them only as an interval band and with the worst possible grace, muttering that they were ‘bloody rockers’ and their R&B idols were ‘rubbish’.
Brian’s adverts in Jazz News and ceaseless touting for work brought a few gigs at other Soho clubs in transition from jazz to blues: the Piccadilly, Ken Colyer’s Studio 51 and the Flamingo in Wardour Street – the latter attracting a mainly black clientele, made up of West Indian immigrants and American servicemen. Here, it took real nerve for a white teenager to walk in and buy a drink, let alone get onstage and sing a Muddy Waters song, especially the way Mick did it.
Whereas Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys used to shrink away from gigs, the Rolling Stones under Brian were positive gluttons for work. When Soho could not provide enough, they lit out for the suburbs once again, travelling in an old van that belonged to Ian Stewart – and trimming their name of its g to make the roll sound smoother. Following Ealing’s example, quiet Thames-side boroughs like Twickenham and Sutton also now had thriving blues clubs, in local church halls or bucolic pubs whose loudest sound had once been ducks on the river. In places where no club yet existed, the band would create their own ad hoc one, renting the hall or pub back room for a Saturday or Sunday night, putting up posters and handing out flyers: ‘Rhythm ’n’ blues with the Rollin’ Stones, four shillings [20p]’.
At this stage, Mick’s organisational talents were not much to the fore: Stu acted as driver and roadie and Brian was the self-appointed leader and manager (in which capacities he would secretly negotiate an extra payment from promoters or just take it when they were handling the money themselves).
While rehearsing at the Bricklayers Arms, they had taken an informal oath to keep their music pure and never ‘sell out’ to any commercial agent or record label should the possibility arise. But this resolution did not last long. Early in October, once again chivvied on by Brian, they went to Curly Clayton’s recording studios in Highbury, close to the Arsenal football ground, and recorded a three-track demo consisting of Jimmy Reed’s ‘Close Together’, Bo Diddley’s ‘You Can’t Judge a Book by Its Cover’ and (despite its fate-tempting potential) Muddy Waters’s ‘Soon Forgotten’.
The demo was sent first to the huge EMI organisation, owner of prestigious labels such as Columbia and HMV, which returned it without comment. Undaunted, Brian tried Britain’s other main label, Decca, and this time at least received some feedback with the rejection: ‘A great band,’ Decca’s letter said, ‘but you’ll never get anywhere with that singer.’
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_3391c66d-f213-5b5f-beaa-cdd24b99d778)
‘Very Bright, Highly Motivated Layabouts’ (#ulink_3391c66d-f213-5b5f-beaa-cdd24b99d778)
The Rollin’ Stones’ far-flung work schedule was making it increasingly hard for Mick to get back to his own bed in Dartford each night. Besides, at nineteen he was too old to be ordered to do washing up or weight training any longer. So in the autumn of 1962 he left his spotless, well-regulated home and moved up to London to share a flat with Brian Jones at number 102 Edith Grove in the World’s End district of Chelsea. Originally, the ménage also included Brian’s girlfriend, Pat Andrews, and their toddler son, Julian, but after a few days Pat and Julian departed without explanation, and Keith Richards moved in instead.
Chelsea at this time was a backwater whose days as a resort of hard-drinking, drug-taking artists and bohemians seemed long gone. Situated at the western extremity of King’s Road, on the frontier with romance-free Fulham, World’s End was a sleepy area of still mainly working-class homes, shops, cafés and pubs. Edith Grove ranked as perhaps its least attractive thoroughfare, terraced by shabby mid-Victorian houses with pilastered front porches, and shaken by traffic to and from Knightsbridge and the West End.
The flat, which came already furnished, was on the first floor of number 102. The rent was £16 per week excluding electricity, which had to be paid for as it was used by inserting one-shilling coins into a battleship-grey iron meter. Mick shared the only designated bedroom with Keith, while Brian slept on a divan in the living room. There was an antiquated bathroom with a chipped and discoloured tub and basin and taps that yielded a reluctant, rusty dribble. The only toilet was a communal one on the floor below.
Deeply unattractive to begin with, the place quickly descended into epic squalor that would later be unwittingly re-created in the classic British film Withnail and I. Beds stayed permanently unmade; the kitchen sink overflowed with dirty dishes and empty milk bottles encrusted with mould. The ceilings were blackened by candle smoke and covered with drawings and graffiti, while the windows were so thick with grime that casual visitors thought they had heavy curtains, permanently closed. When an extra flatmate materialised in a young printer named James Phelge, his surname proved curiously anagrammatic: he won the others’ approval by his skill at ‘gobbing’, or spitting gobbets of phlegm up the wall to form a horrible pattern in lieu of wallpaper.
It might be wondered how the famously fastidious Mick could ever have endured such conditions. But in most nineteen-year-olds, the urge to react against parental values tends to be overwhelming. There was also the sense of roughing it like a real bluesman, even though few of these might have been spotted in the vicinity of Chelsea’s Kings Road. Besides, while enthusiastically joining in the trashing of the flat, he was never personally squalid but – like Brian – remained conspicuously neat and well groomed, just as young officers in the Great War kept their buttons bright amid Flanders mud. Brian somehow managed to wash and dry his fair hair every single day, while Mick (so Keith would later recall in one of their recurrent periods of mutual bitchiness) went through ‘his first camp period . . . wandering around in a blue linen housecoat . . . He was on that kick for about six months.’
All of them were in a state of dire poverty which the few pounds from Rollin’ Stones gigs barely alleviated. Brian had just lost yet another job, as a sales assistant at Whiteley’s department store, for thievery, while Keith’s only known shot at conventional employment, as a pre-Christmas relief postal worker, lasted just one day. The sole regular income among them was Mick’s student grant from Kent County Council; as the only one with a bank account, he paid the rent by cheque and the others gave him their share in cash. Once, he jokingly wrote on a blank cheque: ‘Pay the Rolling [sic] Stones £1 million.’
He and Keith survived mainly by adopting Brian’s little ways – stealing the pints of milk that were left on other people’s doorsteps each morning, shoplifting potatoes and eggs from the little local stores, sneaking into parties being given elsewhere in the house or in neighbouring ones, and making off with French loaves, hunks of cheese, bottles of wine or beer in the new outsize cans known as ‘pins’. Brian doctored the electric meter (a criminal offence) so that it would work without shillings and the power would remain on indefinitely, rather than plunging them into darkness at the end of the usual costly brief span. A serious source of income was collecting empty beer bottles, the sale price of which included a two-penny deposit repaid when they were returned to the vendor.
Ian Stewart also played a part in supporting the trio he regarded as ‘very bright, highly motivated layabouts’. In Stu’s day job at ICI the perks included luncheon vouchers: certificates exchangeable for basic restaurant meals. These he would buy up cheap from dieting co-workers and pass on gratis to the layabouts. However, Mick, who had always been notably fond of his stomach (as if those large lips needed stoking with food twice as often as normal-size ones) would frequently eat alone and at a slightly higher level than his flatmates. There was, for instance, a Wardour Street café, felicitously named the Star, which offered a superior set lunch for five shillings (twenty-five pence). Mick was a regular customer, known to staff only as ‘the rhythm-and-blues singer’.
Each morning, he would go off to LSE, and the non-musician flatmate James Phelge to a printing works in Fulham, leaving Keith and Brian to sleep late between their foetid sheets. Their afternoons were spent mainly in guitar practice, with Brian coaching Keith. Often after a gig, the teacher would tell the pupil his playing had been ‘bloody awful’ and, back at the flat, would make him go over his fretboard fluffs again and again until they were cured. Many was the night when the pair fell asleep where they sat, cigarettes still smouldering in their mouths or wedged in the top of their guitar fretboards. Brian also taught himself to play blues harp, taking only about a day to reach a level that had taken Mick months, then forging on ahead.
It clearly could only benefit the band, and Brian was equally willing to help bring on Mick’s instrumental skills, showing him new harmonica riffs, even persuading him finally to take a few cautious steps on guitar. But Mick felt uneasy about the bond being forged between Brian and Keith during the day. In the evening when he returned he would sulk or pointedly not speak to Keith while showing overweening friendliness to Brian.
As well as immeasurably raising the others’ musical game, Brian kept them laughing when there might not seem much to laugh about. Like Jim Dixon in Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, his response to moments of stress was to pull a grotesque face he called a Nanker. The flat’s walls being now spattered with the marks of Phelge’s ‘gobbing’, Brian gave each a name according to its colour – ‘Yellow Humphrey’, ‘Green Gilbert’, ‘Scarlet Jenkins’, ‘Polka-Dot Perkins’. He and Mick competed in coining supercilious nicknames for their fellow World’s Enders. Their flat was owned by a Welshman who operated a small grocery shop, so a Lyons Individual Fruit Pie bought (or filched) from him was known as a ‘Morgan Morgan’. Any male conspicuously devoid of their own cool and savoir faire was an ‘Ernie’. The local greasy-spoon café – whose clientele marked them down at once as gays, or ‘nancy boys’ – was The Ernie. The flat above theirs belonged to a hostile elderly couple known as ‘the Offers’ after Mick described them as ‘a bit off’. Brian discovered where the Offers kept a spare latchkey and, one day while they were out, led a raiding party into their flat to ransack the fridge.
Despite their poverty, Mick, Brian and Keith managed to make the two-hundred-mile journey north to Manchester that October for what was billed as ‘the First American Folk-Blues Festival’, featuring Memphis Slim, John Lee Hooker, T-Bone Walker, Willie Dixon, and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. The trio made the long trip north in a beaten-up van with a group of fellow fanatics from Ealing and Eel Pie Island (including a boy guitarist named Jimmy Page, one day to become the co-godhead of Led Zeppelin). Mick took along a copy of Howlin’ Wolf’s Rocking Chair album, hoping that Wolf’s songwriter Willie Dixon would autograph it. One track in particular obsessed him: a flagrant piece of sexual imagery entitled ‘Little Red Rooster’.
Amid the Victorian splendour of Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, he saw all his greatest idols finally made flesh: tall, austere John Lee Hooker singing ‘Boogie Chillen’’, the song that could have been describing that former well-spoken Dartford schoolboy (‘The blues is in him . . . and it’s got to come out’); dapper Memphis Slim with a skunk’s-tail streak of white through his hair; Willie Dixon, the blues’ great backroom boy, almost as big and bulky as his stand-up bass; jokey T-Bone Walker, playing his guitar behind his head in the way Jimi Hendrix would ‘invent’ a few years later. There was no security in the modern sense, and afterwards the bluesmen were freely accessible to their fans, onstage below the hall’s massive pipe organ. One of the lesser names, ‘Shaky Jake’ Harris, presented the London boys with a harmonica, which became the proud centrepiece of a blues singsong on the long drive home. Mick, Keith and Brian were supposed to reimburse the van’s owner, Graham Ackers, for petrol and other incidental costs – amounting to 10s 6d, or about 52p each – but never did.
If the Rollin’ Stones’ gigs still paid only peanuts, there was another reward which their blues masters in Manchester had never known. Increasingly, after the night’s performance, they found themselves being mobbed by teenage girls, whose excitement their faithful interpretation of John Lee or T-Bone only partially explained. Most sought only autographs and flirtation, but a good few made it clear – clearer than young British women had done since the bawdy eighteenth century – that a deeper level of musical appreciation was on offer. Though Mick and Brian were the main objectives, Keith, Stu, Dick Taylor, even Phelge, as their occasional assistant roadie, shared in the unexpected dividends. Most nights, a bevy of these proto-groupies would accompany them back to 102 Edith Grove for what, due to space restrictions, was a largely open-plan sex session. Some were deemed worthy of a second invitation, for example a pair of identical twins named Sandy and Sarah partial to Mick and Phelge – neither of whom could tell one from the other, or bothered to try.
He would later become legendary for his apparent callousness towards females – yet among the Edith Grove flatmates it was Mick who showed the most awareness of how young and often vulnerable many of their visitors were to be with older men so late at night. One girl, after having had sex with two of his flatmates in succession, broke the news that she’d run away from home and the police were looking for her. The others were all for getting rid of her as soon as possible, before police officers came knocking at the door. But Mick, showing himself his father’s son once again, took the trouble to talk to the runaway at length about her problems at home, finally persuading her to telephone her parents and arrange for them to come and collect her.
THE WINTER OF 1962–3 turned into Britain’s worst for one hundred years, with arctic temperatures setting in long before Christmas and London hit as heavily by snow as the remotest Scottish Highlands. At 102 Edith Grove, it was almost as cold inside as out. Mick could escape to centrally heated lecture theatres and libraries at LSE, but Brian and Keith had to spend all day huddled over one feeble electric fire in skimpy ‘shorty’ overcoats, rubbing their hands and blowing their fingernails like penurious Dickensian clerks. The household was further enlarged by a Cheltenham friend of Brian’s named Richard Hattrell, a simple soul who did everything Brian told him and believed everything he said. One night when the Stones were out on a gig, Hattrell crept into Brian’s bed to snatch a little warmth and rest. Brian awoke him, brandishing two amplifier leads and threatening to electrocute him. The credulous Hattrell fled into the snow wearing only underpants. Not until he started to turn blue from exposure would the others let him back inside.
At the end of each week, Mick, Brian and Keith bought, borrowed or stole the music trades and scanned the pop charts, never thinking for one second they might ever figure there. America’s immemorial dominance was maintained by white solo singers like Neil Sedaka, Roy Orbison and Del Shannon. Black artists scored mainly by pandering to the white audience, as in novelty dance numbers like Chubby Checker’s ‘Let’s Twist Again’ and Little Eva’s ‘The Locomotion’. Britain seemed capable of producing only limp cover versions and wildly uncool Trad jazz. The one exception was an oddball minor hit called ‘Love Me Do’ by a Liverpool group with funny, fringed haircuts and the almost suicidally bizarre name of the Beatles. Rather than the usual slick studio arrangement, it had a rough R&B feel, with harmonica riffs very much like those Brian and Mick played in the clubs every night. They felt like their pockets had been picked by these insectoid upstarts from the unknown far north.
In October, Dick Taylor, the last of Mick’s old school friends still playing with him, had won a place at the Royal College of Art and decided to leave the band. There was some idea that Richard Hattrell might take over on bass guitar, but a course of lessons with their Ealing Club colleague Jack Bruce showed Hattrell to be totally unmusical. He returned to Tewkesbury and, worn down by his life with the Stones (a syndrome to be oft-repeated in the future) suffered a burst appendix and almost died. At the same time, their latest temporary drummer, Carlo Little, moved on to a better gig with Screaming Lord Sutch’s backing band, the Savages. There were thus two vacancies to be filled, this time with Mick and Keith as Brian’s co-judges. Auditions took place on a cold, slushy December day at a Chelsea pub called the Wetherby Arms.
The first spot was quickly filled by Tony Chapman, an experienced drummer with a successful semi-pro band called the Cliftons, who’d become bored by their conventional rock repertoire. Having got the gig, Chapman suggested that the Cliftons’ bass guitarist should also come and audition at the Wetherby Arms. He was a hollow-cheeked, unsmiling Londoner, even shorter and bonier than Mick, who held his instrument at an odd near-vertical angle. He had been born William Perks but used the stage name Bill Wyman.
Here, the fit seemed more problematic. At twenty-six, Bill was seven years older than Mick and Keith, a married man with a small son and steady day job on the maintenance staff of a department store. Furthermore, he lived in Penge, a name which British sophisticates find eternally amusing, along with Neasden, Wigan and Scunthorpe. Added to his seeming advanced age, archaic backswept hairstyle and south London accent, it instantly condemned him in Mick and Brian’s eyes as an Offer and an Ernie. He possessed one major saving grace, however, in the form of a spare amplifier, roughly twice as powerful as the band’s existing ones, which he told them they were free to use. So, notwithstanding the satirical nudges and Nanker grimaces of the ex-grammar school duo behind his back, working-class Wyman was in.
He for his part had serious misgivings about joining a group of scruffy arty types so much his junior – especially after seeing their domestic arrangements. ‘[The flat] was an absolute pit which I shall never forget – it looked like it was bomb-damaged,’ he would recall. ‘The front room overlooking the street had a double bed with rubbish piled all round it [and] I’ve never seen a kitchen like it . . . permanently piled high with dirty dishes and filth everywhere . . . I could never understand why they carried on like this . . . It could not just have been the lack of money. Bohemian angst most likely.’
Despite having left school at the age of sixteen, Bill was just as intelligent and articulate as Mick or Brian. He soon realised that although the Rollin’ Stones might not be going anywhere in particular, their singer definitely was – if not necessarily in music. While Keith merely seemed like ‘a Teddy Boy who’d spit in his beer to ensure nobody drank it’ and had ‘no plans to work’, and Brian regarded music as an irreplaceable vocation, Mick talked often of becoming a lawyer or perhaps a journalist, as the LSE graduate Bernard Levin had done with spectacular success. At times, he did not even seem quite comfortable with his new first name. ‘He hated being called Mick,’ Bill remembers. ‘In his own eyes he was still Mike.’
He was keeping up his LSE studies despite the late nights and distractions, and that previous June had sat part one of his BSc degree, achieving just-respectable C grades in the compulsory subjects of economics, economic history and British government and the optional ones of political history and English legal institutions. Behind the mask of coolness and indifference, he worried that he was not making the most of his opportunities or justifying the investment that Kent County Council had made in him. His vague hankering for some kind of literary career was sharpened, that autumn, when his father became the Jagger family’s first published author. As the country’s leading authority on the sport, Joe edited and partially wrote a manual entitled Basketball Coaching and Playing in a series of how-to books issued by the prestigious house of Faber & Faber (which Mick’s fellow economics student Matthew Evans would one day run). B. Jagger’s opening chapter, ‘The Basketball Coach’, written in simple but forceful prose, set out principles his son would later employ in a somewhat different context. The successful coach, wrote B. Jagger, ‘must definitely possess . . . a sense of vocation, a dedication to the game, faith in his own ability, knowledge and enthusiasm’. Without these qualities, the team would be ‘an ordinary run-of-the-mill affair, rising to no great heights and probably keeping warm the lower half of some league table . . .’ The coach must train himself to develop ‘a keen analytical sense’ and view each game as ‘an endless succession of tactics’ dictated solely by him. ‘The players are for the whole time examples of [his] skill and ability . . . He must quickly eradicate weaknesses and use to the full the strong points of his players . . .’
The greatest pressure on Mick, as always, came from his mother. Eva Jagger still could not take his singing seriously, and protested with all her considerable might at its deleterious effect on his studies – and the high-level professional career that was supposed to follow. The Edith Grove flat so appalled her that she couldn’t bear to set foot inside it (unlike Keith’s down-to-earth mum, who came in regularly to give it a good clean-up). When Mick remained obdurate about continuing with the Stones, Eva telephoned Alexis Korner and in her forthright way demanded whether ‘Michael’, as she firmly continued to call him, really was anything special as a singer. Korner replied that he most definitely was. The unexpectedly public-school voice at the other end of the line pacified Eva but still did not convince her.
At LSE, Mick’s absences from lectures and tutorials were becoming more frequent, his need to copy fellow student Laurence Isaacson’s notes more urgent. Though only dimly aware of his other life with the Rollin’ Stones, Isaacson could not but notice the changes coming over that once-typical middle-class student. ‘He was still very quiet and unobtrusive when he did appear at college. But one day when he turned up, he’d had his hair streaked. He was the first bloke I ever knew who did that.’
WHEN CLEOPATRA SYLVESTRE caught Mick’s eye at the Marquee Club, she was seventeen and still attending Camden School for Girls. The paradox of these clubs dedicated to black music was that very few actual black people frequented them – and those who did tended to be predominantly male. More often than not, Cleo would find herself the only young black woman in the Marquee’s audience. Anyway, she was an eye-catcher: tall and lovely in an American rather than British or Caribbean way, and always wearing something outrageous like a pink leather miniskirt she had made for herself, or a bright orange wig.
Though she lived in a council flat in Euston, Cleo’s background was richly cosmopolitan. Her mother, Laureen Goodare, a well-known West End cabaret dancer during the Second World War, had had a long-time affair with the composer Constant Lambert. Her godfathers were Lambert and the MP, journalist and notorious homosexual Tom Driberg. Her close friend and frequent companion around the blues clubs was Judith Bronowski, daughter of the mathematician, biologist and television pundit Dr Jacob Bronowski.
Cleo had first seen Mick when he was still with Blues Incorporated; he would smile and say hello, but it wasn’t until after the Rollin’ Stones started that he came over and spoke to her. Still experimenting with their sound and look, the band had thought of using black female back-up singers like Ray Charles’s Raelettes and Ike and Tina Turner’s Ikettes. Mick asked Cleo if she could find two black friends and audition as a backing trio, to be known as the Honeybees.
The audition, at the Wetherby Arms pub in Chelsea, was a disaster. Cleo could find only one other candidate for the trio, a clubbing companion named Jean who proved to be tone-deaf. Though Cleo herself had a good voice, the idea of a nine-strong, mixed-race-and-gender Rollin’ Stones progressed no further. But from then on she became a special friend to the band and, increasingly, a very special one to Mick.
She and Jean were their most faithful followers – groupies would be too crude – trailing them from places they now easily packed, like the Ealing Club, to those where they still struggled against anti-rock ’n’ roll prejudice, like Ken Colyer’s Studio 51 Club in Great Newport Street. ‘Sometimes when they played to only about nine people, Brian would literally be in tears,’ Cleo recalls. ‘But Mick was always the optimistic one, who said they had to keep going and they’d win everyone over in the end.’
She and Mick began dating with all the conventionality – and chasteness – that word used to imply, during the brief intervals between his college hours, her school ones and the Stones’ nightlife. ‘We’d go to the cinema,’ Cleo remembers. ‘Once, Mick got tickets for the theatre, but for some reason we never made it there. He rang me up one day and asked me to join Keith and him in a boat on the lake in Regent’s Park. A few times, I met him at LSE, where he used to work in the library.’ Unluckily, she already had a boyfriend, who could not but know what was going on since he shared a flat with Mick’s sometime stage colleague, Long John Baldry. Their break-up was an early example of the threat Mick would later pose to so many men’s masculinity. When Cleo went to her ex’s flat to collect some records she’d left there, he was pressing clothes on an ironing board. He thrust the hot iron into her face so it burned her forehead, and hissed, ‘When you next see Mick, give him that for me.’
Cleo was formidably bright as well as beautiful, and remembers ‘quite heavy’ discussions with Mick about politics and current affairs. He even suggested that when she left school, as she was soon to do, she should try to get into LSE so that they could see more of each other. She remembers his sense of humour and love of mimicking people, like the West Indian staff on the Underground shouting ‘Mind the doors!’ ‘Bill Wyman had just joined the band, and Mick used to laugh about him coming from Penge.’ The later stories of his stinginess are baffling to Cleo. ‘He was always so generous to me. Once, he bought me a huge box of chocolates that he’d spent all his money on, even his bus fare, so he had to walk all the way home to Chelsea.’
He was also welcomed into the Euston council flat where Cleo lived with her mother, Laureen, the Blitz-era cabaret dancer, and their fluffy black-and-white cat. ‘My mum thought he was great, even though the neighbours used to mutter about his long hair. I’d come home to find the two of them nattering away together. Mick used to practise his stage moves in front of our mirror.’ Cleo, on the other hand, paid only fleeting visits to 102 Edith Grove – and never stayed overnight. Her main memory of his domicile is ‘trying to scrape the laboratory cultures out of the milk bottles’.
Cleo’s home became a refuge for the whole band, with Brian making himself at home in his usual way and competing with Mick for the fascinating Laureen’s attention. ‘Brian used to love having our cat on his knees and stroking it,’ Cleo recalls. ‘When he left, his velvet suit used to be covered in white hairs, so my mum would run the Hoover over him as he stood there. One morning after an all-nighter, I took Mick and Brian back to our place for breakfast and my friend took Keith to hers. But my friend’s dad was a Nigerian and a bit militant. He said, “Get outa my house, white man,” took a spear down from the wall, and chased Keith with it.’
Chronically hard up as they were, the Rollin’ Stones never turned down any job, however low-paying and hard to reach through the snow and slush. One night their Marquee audience included a Hornsey School of Art student named Gillian Wilson (in later life to become curator of the Getty Museum in California). ‘At the interval,’ she recalls, ‘I went up to this character with outsize lips and asked if they’d play at our Christmas dance. “’Ow much?” he said. I offered fifteen bob [seventy-five pence] each and Mick – though I didn’t know his name then – said “Okay.”’
The Stones’ performance at Hornsey School of Art – which Gillian Wilson remembers lasting ‘something like four hours’ – featured yet another drummer. Tony Chapman had gone and Charlie Watts, the dapper jazz buff with the Buster Keaton face, had yielded to Brian and Mick’s pleas and joined what he still regarded as just an ‘interval band’ (leaving a vacancy in Blues Incorporated that was filled by a carroty-haired wild man named Ginger Baker). Despite his large wardrobe and impressive day job with a West End advertising agency, Charlie still lived at home with his parents in a ‘prefab’ rented from the local council in Wembley, Middlesex. With Bill Wyman on bass, this made the rhythm section solidly working class, in contrast with the middle-class, upwardly mobile tendency of the two main front men. At the time such things seemed of small importance compared with scoring an extra amp and a drum kit.
From that grim British winter, too, emerged another of the exotic non- or half-Britishers to whom the Stones – Mick especially – would owe so much. In January 1963, the suppliers of blues music to unwary outer London suburbs were joined by Giorgio Gomelsky, a black-bearded twenty-nine-year-old of mixed Russian and Monegasque parentage, brought up in Syria, Italy and Egypt and educated in Switzerland. By vocation a filmmaker, blues-addicted Gomelsky had managed various Soho music clubs as a sideline but, like Alexis Korner before him, had wearied of the jazz lobby’s hostility and decided to seek a new public farther up the Thames. With Ealing already taken, Gomelsky targeted Richmond, where a pub called the Station Hotel had a large, mirror-lined back room for dinners and Masonic functions. This he rented for a Sunday-night blues club named (after a Bo Diddley song) the Crawdaddy.
Gomelsky never intended to give a home to the Rollin’ Stones, whom he had seen die the death in front of about eighteen people when he ran the Piccadilly Jazz Club back in central London. The Crawdaddy’s original resident attraction were the, to his mind, far more competent and reliable Dave Hunt Rhythm & Blues Band (featuring Ray Davies, later of the Kinks). But one Sunday, Hunt’s musicians could not make it through the snow and Gomelsky, yielding to Brian Jones’s entreaties, gave the Stones a shot instead. Their fee was £1 each, plus a share of the gate. So few people turned up that Gomelsky had to go into the adjacent pub and recruit extra heads by offering free admission.
In the event, they astounded Gomelsky, who was expecting the same ‘abominable’ performance he had witnessed at the Piccadilly. Their saturnine new drummer and chilly-looking new bass player seemed to have had a transforming effect; while still evangelising for Jimmy Reed and Muddy Waters, their style was no longer reverential but brash, aggressive, even provocative. Indeed, their two principal members now offered contrasting studies in how simultaneously to delight and goad an audience – Brian, barely moving but staring fixedly from under his fringe as if ogling every female and challenging every male in the room; Mick, mincing and head tossing in his off-the-shoulder matelot-striped sweater and new white Anello & Davide boots.
Gomelsky did not make them give back the spot to the Dave Hunt band. And from then on, Richmond on Sunday nights ceased to be a silent zone of shuttered shops and winking traffic lights. Early-sixties teenagers were desperately short of Sabbath amusements; consequently, the hundreds that descended on the Station Hotel were not just blues enthusiasts but of every musical and stylistic allegiance: ‘Rockers’ in black leather and motorcycle boots; ‘Mods’ in striped Italian jackets and rakish trilby hats; jazzers in chunky knits; beatniks in polo necks; rich kids from opulent riverside villas and mansion blocks; poor kids from back streets and council estates; and always girls, girls and more girls, with hairstyles across the board, from bob to beehive. As they streamed through the nondescript pub into its red-spotlit rear annexe, they shed factionalism with their winter coats and simply became Stones fans.
The club closed at ten-thirty, the same time as the pub, but by then the glasses in the nearby bars would literally be shaking. From the start, Gomelsky encouraged his members to forget the usual restraint of blues worship and to express themselves as uninhibitedly as Mick did onstage. A special Crawdaddy dance evolved, based on the Twist and Hully Gully, where partners were not needed (in fact were superfluous) and males rather than females competed for attention, wagging their heads and hips Jaggerishly or leaping up and down on the spot in a punk-rock Pogo fourteen years too early. The finale, in which everyone joined, was two Bo Diddley songs, ‘Do the Crawdaddy’ and ‘Pretty Thing’, spun out to twenty minutes or more and floor-stompingly loud enough to wake the Tudor ghosts at Hampton Court Palace across the river. Yet, for now at least, excitement never turned into violence or destruction. The Stones in this glass house left it completely unscathed, the multi-mirrored walls suffering not even a crack.
Returning to his first love, Gomelsky began shooting a 35mm film of the Stones onstage at the Crawdaddy and, partly as a source of extra footage, arranged for them to cut further demos at a recording studio in Morden. During this era, according to rock folklore, a demo tape was sent to Saturday Club, BBC radio’s main pop music programme, which responded that the band was acceptable but not the singer, as he sounded ‘too coloured’. However, the show’s host, Brian Matthew – still broadcasting in the twenty-first-century – denies ever having been party to such a judgement; in any case, the whole point about Mick’s voice was that it didn’t sound ‘coloured’.
Their only other contact with the recording industry was a friend of Ian Stewart’s named Glyn Johns, who worked for a small independent studio called IBC in Portland Place, owned by the BBC orchestra leader Eric Robinson. Johns was allowed to record any musicians he thought promising, and at his invitation the Stones taped five numbers from their stage act at IBC. In return, he received a six-month option to try to sell the demo tape to a major label.
Giorgio Gomelsky became the band’s de facto manager yet, with extraordinary selflessness, never tried to put them under contract or even keep them all to himself. Continuing the fishy theme (‘crawdaddy’ is Deep Southern slang for crayfish or langoustine), they also began playing regularly on Eel Pie Island, situated on a broad stretch of the Thames at Twickenham. The island’s main feature was a dilapidated grand hotel with a ballroom whose sprung wooden floor had been famous in the Charleston and Black Bottom era. Here, a local antiques dealer now put on weekend blues marathons, featuring the Stones in rotation with other superstars of the future, then unrecognisable as such. They included a Kingston Art College reject named Eric Clapton – at this stage so nervous that he could only play guitar sitting down – and a raspy-voiced trainee gravedigger from north London named Rod Stewart.
Gomelsky, besides, had other fish to fry. One of early 1963’s few talking points outside of the weather was that eccentrically barbered Liverpool band the Beatles, who had followed their mediocre début single with a smash hit, ‘Please Please Me’, and were whipping up teenage hysteria unknown since the early days of Elvis Presley. Gomelsky had first seen them playing seedy clubs in Hamburg a couple of years previously, and even then had thought them something way out of the ordinary. When ‘Please Please Me’ became a hit, he approached their manager, Brian Epstein, with the idea of making a documentary film about them.
Though the film proposal fell through, Gomelsky grew friendly enough with the Beatles to get them out to the Crawdaddy one Sunday night when the Rollin’ Stones were playing. Despite the enormous difference in their status, the Liverpudlians and the southern boys immediately hit it off – and, surprisingly, discovered musical roots in common. The Beatles had played American R&B cover versions for years before John Lennon and Paul McCartney began writing original songs; they had also been just as edgy and aggressive as the Stones onstage before Epstein put them into matching shiny suits and made them bow and smile. Lennon, never comfortable about paying this price for success, appeared positively envious of the freedom Mick, Brian and Keith enjoyed as nobodies.
Later, the Beatles visited 102 Edith Grove, pronouncing it almost palatial compared with their own former living conditions behind the screen of a porno cinema in Hamburg’s red-light district. The rock ’n’ roll-obsessed Lennon turned out to know almost nothing about the Stones’ blues heroes, and had never heard a Jimmy Reed record until Mick played him Reed’s ‘I’ll Change My Style’. When, a few days later, the Beatles appeared in a BBC-sponsored ‘Pop Prom’ at the Royal Albert Hall, they invited Mick, Keith and Brian to come along and visit them backstage. To avoid having to pay for tickets, the three borrowed guitars from the Beatles’ equipment and passed themselves off as roadies. For the only time in his life, Mick found himself in a crowd of screaming fans who were completely unaware of his presence.
MOST YOUNG MEN of this era, whatever their calling, expected to be engaged by their late teens and married by the age of twenty-one. And in the beautiful, bright and fascinatingly connected Cleo Sylvestre nineteen-year-old Mick thought he had already found the woman for him. There would, of course, be huge problems in taking their presently casual (and still platonic) relationship to a more permanent level. Interracial matches were still exceedingly rare in Britain, particularly among the middle class, and heavy opposition could be expected from both his family and Cleo’s. However, he was prepared to face down any amount of disapproval and prejudice. As a first step, he wanted Cleo to come to Dartford and meet his family, certain that even his mother would be instantly captivated by her.
But Cleo did not feel nearly ready for such a commitment. She had only just left school and was about to begin studying at a teacher-training college near Richmond. She also had an inbuilt nervousness about marriage – and men – having witnessed stormy and at times violent rows between her own parents before their separation. ‘I told Mick it had nothing to do with how I felt about him,’ she recalls. ‘It was just that the time wasn’t right. I wanted us still to be friends, but he said he couldn’t bear for it to be just on that level.’
The heartbreak, though real enough, was not to be of long duration. One night in early 1963, the Rollin’ Stones were playing yet another Thames-side blues club, the Ricky-Tick, hard by the battlements of the royal castle at Windsor. When Mick launched into Bo Diddley’s ‘Pretty Thing’ (‘let me buy you a wedding ring / let me hear the choir sing . . .’), his bandmates knew exactly whom it was aimed at.
Her name was Christine – aka Chrissie – Shrimpton; she was seventeen years old, but very different from the usual schoolgirl blues fan. Her older sister, the fashion model Jean Shrimpton, was growing increasingly famous through appearances in once-stuffy Vogue magazine, photographed by the young East Ender David Bailey. While Jean’s looks were coolly patrician – more fifties, in fact, than sixties – Chrissie was a quintessential young woman of now with her Alice-banded hair, ethereally pale face and thick black bush-baby eyes. The impassive pout essential to this look was enhanced by unusually wide and full lips, albeit not quite on the same scale as Mick’s.
Despite a noticeably posh accent and aura, Chrissie Shrimpton was less upper class than she appeared – and also more of a natural rebel than Mick had ever been. Her father was a self-made Buckinghamshire builder who had used his wealth to realise his dream of owning a farm in the high-priced countryside near Burnham. Though brought up with every luxury and given an expensive private education, Chrissie was an unruly spirit, constitutionally unable to submit to rules or authority. When she was fourteen, her convent school gave up the unequal struggle and asked her parents to remove her.
While fashion modelling took her sister Jean steadily up the social ladder, Chrissie consciously went the other way, dressing down like a beatnik and seeking out the raucous, proletarian R&B set. By day, she followed the only course open to young women without educational qualifications, training to be a shorthand typist at a secretarial college – her third – on London’s Oxford Street. At night, she roamed far from the Shrimptons’ Buckinghamshire farmhouse, becoming a regular at Eel Pie Island and the Crawdaddy, where she got to know both Rod Stewart and Eric Clapton well before first setting eyes on Mick and the Stones.
The various printed accounts of their first meeting are always set at the Windsor Ricky-Tick, with seventeen-year-old Chrissie – who sometimes cleared away glasses there in exchange for free admission – brazenly taking the initiative. In one version, she accepts a dare from a girlfriend to go up to Mick on the bandstand and ask him to kiss her; in another, the place is so packed that she can reach him only by crawling across the decorative fishing nets above the dance floor, helped along by people below in an early instance of crowd surfing.
Chrissie herself is unsure now whether the two of them first seriously locked eyes at the Ricky-Tick, at a nearby pub where the Stones sometimes played upstairs on Sunday afternoons, or at a place called the International Club, frequented by foreign au pair girls in nearby Maidenhead. ‘I was attracted to Mick originally because he looked like an actor named Doug Gibbons,’ she remembers. ‘At least, Doug was a prettier version of Mick. And I remember that when we first spoke his Cockney accent was so thick I could hardly understand him.’
After serenading her with Bo Diddley’s ‘Pretty Thing’ a few times, he asked her for a date, naming an afternoon the following week and suggesting Windsor, with its castle and fluttering Royal Standard, as their most convenient common ground. ‘It was the day of my grandmother’s silver wedding party, and I explained I’d have to go to that first. I remember meeting Mick on the street in Windsor because that was when I first saw him in daylight and realised one of his eyes was two colours – the left one was brown and green.’
For their next date, he took her down to Dartford by train, as she thought, to meet his family. After her father’s substantial Buckinghamshire farm, the Jagger family home struck her as ‘very ordinary’. Neither Mick’s parents nor his brother turned out to be there, and Chrissie realised he was hoping – or, rather, expecting – to have sex with her. But the seeming wild child was not the pushover he expected. ‘I was very worried about it and I wouldn’t stay,’ she recalls. ‘So I had to come back again on the train on my own.’
Mick forgave the rebuff, however, and a week or so later, after an early-ending gig, Chrissie took him home to Burnham by train to meet her parents, Ted and Peggy, also inviting Charlie Watts and her friend Liz Gribben, to whom Charlie had taken a shine. ‘My parents were slightly appalled by the way Mick looked, but they were impressed by the fact that he went to LSE, and my dad liked him because he was so bright and into money. I don’t think my mother ever really liked him – even before everything that happened – but Dad could always see how sharp he was and what a success he was going to be, whatever he ended up doing.’
