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Keith, by contrast, was instantly sociable and engaging. ‘He’d sit at the kitchen table and talk to Bobbie for hours. I remember how he loved words. I didn’t really know him as a musician then – only that he played guitar in that group of theirs in Dartford. He never pushed himself forward as a musician. He just seemed happy to be around Mick.’
By this time, the hospitable Korners had another young visitor regularly sleeping on their kitchenette floor. It was the boy Alexis had talked to in Cheltenham, little realizing how that morsel of encouragement had ignited the boy’s fierce desire to be in London, playing blues. So, late at night in Moscow Road, the kitchenette window would slide up. A dim figure would roll sideways across the table, down to the floor. Like Muddy Waters and Big Bill Broonzy before him, Brian Jones would fall asleep somewhere between the cats’ bowls and the legs of the electric cooker.
Hatherley Road, Cheltenham, lies just outside that smugly elegant Gloucestershire spa town which will be ever associated in the English mind with retired army colonels and colleges for genteel young ladies. Hatherley Road is a long suburban avenue of identical 1930s houses, each with a single bay window, a neat front lawn and a wrought-iron ‘sunrise’ gate. Here and there, beyond a uniform creosote-covered garage, one can see the terraces of Cheltenham’s exclusive district and beyond, the soft green Cotswolds, striding away towards Wales.
That Lewis Jones was a Welshman could not be doubted by his colleagues at Dowty and Co., Cheltenham’s aeronautical engineering works. Short, straight-backed, severe in manner, he possessed the inflexible virtues of Welshness in exact measure with its irreproachable faults. He was, in other words, respectable, decent, hard-working, religious, conventional, puritanically intolerant of those less strong-minded than himself. Like many of his countrymen, he regretted the advance of the twentieth century almost on principle. ‘Times change but I don’t,’ he would say, adding a heartfelt ‘Thank God!’
The Welsh have almost an obligation to be musical. Lewis Jones played the organ at his local parish church for some years, until his dislike of petty ecclesiastical politics led him to resign. His wife Louisa – also Welsh – possessed a more pronounced talent, and supplemented Lewis’s income from Dowty’s by giving piano lessons to local schoolchildren.
Their first child, Brian Lewis Hopkin Jones, was born on February 28, 1942. Of the two daughters who followed, only one – Barbara, born in 1946 – survived. The other, Pauline, died of leukaemia when Brian was three. Brian thought his parents had given her away and, for a long time afterwards, lived in terror that the same would be done to him.
He was, his father said, a thoroughly normal and happy small boy, healthy but for childhood ailments and an attack of croup which left him prone to bronchitis and chronic asthma. At his first school, Dean Close, he worked well, enjoyed sport – particularly cricket and badminton – and became an excellent swimmer and diver. Sea air aggravated his asthma, however; after a single day at the beach, he would be confined to bed, wheezing and croaking piteously.
Like his parents, and the race from which he sprang, Brian Jones was instinctively musical. Louisa started giving him piano lessons from the age of six; he afterwards took up the recorder and clarinet. Though able to read music, he mastered the reed instruments by ear and intuition, stumbling on melody by means he himself did not fully understand. So marked was his talent as a small boy that Lewis Jones thought he might be destined for a career as a classical musician.
He passed the eleven-plus exam without effort and went on, as his parents had hoped, to Cheltenham Grammar School, down in the exclusive district of ‘The Promenade’, the retired generals and the Ladies’ College. This exclusive seminary, in fact, stood immediately adjacent to Cheltenham Grammar School and daily provided its senior boys with an unreachable fantasy as the young ladies ran forth, squealing, for their mid-morning break.
Brian began well at Cheltenham Grammar, getting good marks for work, especially science and languages, excelling at cricket and swimming and winning a place as a clarinettist in the school orchestra. ‘Then, all of a sudden,’ Lewis Jones said bleakly, ‘he became very difficult. He started to rebel against everything – mainly me.’
The trouble began when Brian ceased practising classical pieces on piano and clarinet, and began listening to a kind of music that Lewis Jones abhorred. At thirteen, he discovered jazz and, at fourteen, the saxophone-playing of Charlie Parker. He sold the clarinet his parents had bought him and used the proceeds to buy a second-hand alto sax. Within a few days, to his parents’ horror, the sound of a first, shaky solo brayed through the quiet house in Hatherley Road.
He was soon good enough to sit in with local bands playing the trad jazz of Chris Barber and Humphrey Lyttelton. Even Cheltenham had its bohemian quarter, centred on the art college, on coffee bars like the Aztec, the Patio and the Waikiki, or pubs like the Wheatsheaf Inn, Leckhampton, where the 66 Jazz Club convened, with Brian Jones as membership secretary.
At Cheltenham Grammar, meanwhile, he became known as a troublemaker, able to disrupt a whole class by his blandly outrageous behaviour. A classmate, Peter Watson, remembers how Brian would sit in class in football boots, claiming they were more comfortable than shoes. ‘Brian said it was boring to drink the regulation milk at break time, so he started the fashion of drinking brown ale instead. It became a whole fashion to drink brown ale at break time instead of milk.’
At break, according to immemorial custom, the whole class would crowd at the window and gaze longingly down on the Cheltenham young ladies as they frolicked on the grass below. Brian Jones, it was well known, belonged to the select few Grammar School boys whose sexual adventures had gone beyond mere kissing and ‘petting’. It was known, too, that he scorned the Durex contraceptives that other boys carried symbolically in their wallets. ‘Bareback’ was the best way, he would insist, smiling a smile so lascivious, yet so mischievous, no one knew whether to believe him.
They believed him when, in 1958, a fourteen-year-old pupil at the girls’ Grammar School became pregnant and named Brian Jones as the father. The news caused a scandal in Cheltenham and even got into a Sunday newspaper, the News of the World, where Brian was destined to feature many times more. The baby was born but put out to adoption. All that could be hoped, after bringing such disgrace on his family and himself, was that Brian had well and truly learned his lesson.
The scandal brought about his premature exit from Cheltenham Grammar School, despite nine passes at GCE O-Level and Advanced-Level passes in Physics and Chemistry. For the next eighteen months, he worked variously as a shop assistant, a coalman and a trainee in the Borough Architect’s office of Cheltenham Council. A boyhood passion for buses led him to a brief career on Cheltenham municipal transport, as conductor and driver. He continued to play alto sax in various trad bands, then in a rock ’n’ roll combo called the Ramrods, which enjoyed some local fame until its lead singer went away on honeymoon and choked to death while eating a chip.
In 1961, Brian made a second girl pregnant. Her name was Pat Andrews: she had met Brian at the Aztec coffee bar during one of his spells of unemployment. He had left home by now and was living with a friend named Dick Hattrell at a flat in Cheltenham’s art college district. This time, he seemed resigned to marrying the girl he had put ‘in the club’. After the baby was born, he visited her in hospital, bringing a vast bouquet of flowers he had bought by selling some of his precious LPs. On his insistence, the baby was named Julian, after the jazz musician Julian ‘Cannonball’ Adderley.
Brian did not marry Pat Andrews. Instead, shortly after his conversation with Alexis Korner, he took off for London suddenly, accompanied by Dick Hattrell, to start a job his father had found for him with a firm of opticians. Lewis and Louisa Jones heard no more from him until he had become nationally notorious.
He continued to write to Pat Andrews, assuring her he still loved her and would be sending for her and the baby soon. Pat grew increasingly restive after learning he had several girlfriends in London. Finally, one day in 1962, she bundled Julian Mark in her arms and, with just one pound note in her purse, set off from Cheltenham by long-distance bus to track the baby’s father down.
He had left even his name behind in Cheltenham. It was not Brian Jones but ‘Elmo Lewis’ who made his first guest appearance with Blues Incorporated at the Ealing club. He had changed instruments, too, from alto sax to electric guitar, a brand-new, shiny Gibson, bought with money half saved, half stolen, and mastered by his usual blend of intuition, willpower and desire.
No greater contrast could have been imagined between the middle-aged, rather beery-looking blues sidesman and the boy who stepped up beside Alexis in his neat Italian suit, holding the shiny new Gibson with one finger pointed stiff across its pearled fretboard. His debut was the Elmore James classic Dust My Blues. In his West London bedsitter, he had taught himself to play it exactly as James did, with a metal ‘slide’, swooping the metal bar along the guitar neck to lengthen each note into almost a second angry, sarcastic voice. The sudden appearance of Pat Andrews and baby Julian had only temporarily interrupted the transfiguration of Elmore into Elmo.
Even then, Alexis remembered, his stage presence was subtly but unmistakably flavoured with aggression. The fact that he stood absolutely still somehow intensified an air of challenge to all comers, even as his eyes remained studiously downcast, his wide mouth pursed in virginal tranquillity. ‘He’d learned how to bait an audience, long before anything like that occurred to Mick. You should have seen those kids’ reaction when Brian picked up a tambourine and gave it one tiny little shake in their faces.’
Even the Korners, his best London friends, knew almost nothing of Brian beyond what he inadvertently betrayed. He told them nothing of his home or family, and only under gravest sufferance mentioned the detested word ‘Cheltenham’. Alexis and Bobbie, as surrogate parents, came to realize in time that frustration and unhappiness of an abnormal depth lay beneath Brian’s driving wish to become famous by any means whatever.
He had abandoned his traineeship as an optician by now, and had a job as an electrical-appliance salesman at Whiteley’s department store in Queensway, just a block away from the Korners’ flat in Moscow Road. Alexis would sometimes see him after work, crossing the road to meet a girl waiting reproachfully for him in the doorway to the MacFisheries shop. Though Pat Andrews and the baby had moved into Brian’s tiny Notting Hill bedsitter, she saw little more of him now than she had in Cheltenham. Eventually, she was forced to take a part-time job to support the child Brian now scarcely acknowledged as his.
To the Korners and the Ealing club crowd, he presented the aspect of a young bachelor, interested only in clothes and in forming a blues band that would take the world by storm. Each time he arrived at the Ealing club he seemed to have a new suit, a new tab-collar shirt, a new bouffant-haired girlfriend admiringly in tow. The money for both, more often than not, would have come from Pat Andrews’s minuscule pay packet or from robbing the till in Whiteley’s electrical department.
He stayed always one jump ahead of retribution, buoyed up by belief in his destiny and by that way he had of looking as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. When Brian fixed anyone with his big baby eyes and spoke in his soft, lisping, well-brought-up voice, it was impossible to imagine such chaos accumulating behind him. ‘He had a way of talking that was all his own,’ Alexis Korner said. ‘It was a most beautiful mixture of good manners and rudeness.’
Ostensibly still living with Pat, Julian and Dick Hattrell, he contrived to lead a semi-nomadic life in London and outside, travelling from town to town, reconnoitring the music clubs, sitting in with local groups in the hope of finding musicians for a band of his own. One of his regular haunts was Guildford, where he would play at the Wooden Bridge Hotel with a scratch band called Rhode Island Red and the Roosters, featuring a pale and – it then seemed – deeply unpromising guitarist named Eric Clapton.
In Oxford, a city catacombed with student-run jazz and blues clubs, he became friends with an English undergraduate named Paul Pond who led a blues group called Thunder Odin’s Big Secret. Paul Pond subsequently became Paul Jones, singer with the Manfred Mann group, ‘Brian was terribly smart in those days,’ Jones says. ‘Italian box jacket, winklepicker shoes, never a hair out of place. Whenever he passed through Oxford, he’d sleep on my couch. I remember waking up one morning to hear this awful wheezing and snorting from the next room. Brian was lying on the couch, hardly able to breathe. He gasped out that he’d got asthma and had left his inhaler at the party we’d both been to the night before. I had to jump on my bike and go dashing off to get it back for him.’
After sitting in with Thunder Odin’s Big Secret a few times, Brian decided that ‘P. P. Pond’ was the blues partner he needed. The two made a tape which impressed Alexis Korner so much he gave them the job of interval band at the Ealing club. It happened that P. P. Pond was singing Dust My Blues, accompanied by Elmo Lewis on slide guitar, when Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Dick Taylor walked through the door together.
On Keith especially, the effect was instant hero worship, heightened by Keith’s tendency to mix up one name with another. ‘It’s Elmore James,’ he kept whispering to the others. ‘It is, man – really! It’s fuckin’ Elmore James!’
They met up with Brian, afterwards and, over half pints of beer, talked blues for the rest of the night. To the Dartford boys, he seemed a raffish figure, only a year older than Mick and Keith but already a ‘semi-pro’ and – it emerged – the father of a baby. Keith remembers how, at close quarters, Brian’s slight body seemed to thicken on his short and powerful legs. ‘He was like a little Welsh bull,’ Keith says. ‘He was broad, and he looked very tough.’
That first conversation produced only an exchange of views. Brian, interested mainly in jazz-influenced blues, had not yet discovered Chuck Berry. He listened intently to what Keith told him about Berry and Jimmy Reed. He made it clear, though, that his ambitions went somewhat higher than Alexis Korner’s part-time student vocalist and a red-nosed, pimply guitarist whose only public appearance to date had been in the garden of a Bexleyheath council house.
The partnership between Elmo Lewis and P. P. Pond lasted only for that one engagement. Paul Pond returned to Oxford to resume his studies and await his destiny with Manfred Mann. Elmo Lewis, on the lookout for partners again, placed an advertisement in Jazz News, Soho’s club information sheet, grandly inviting prospective sidesmen to audition with him in the back room of a Berwick Street pub, the Bricklayer’s Arms.
The first recruit, Ian Stewart, arrived by racing cycle, looking anything but the part of the blues pianist he claimed to be. Thick-set and muscular, with a long, pugnacious jaw, he entered the rehearsal room in leather shorts, carrying a pork pie he had bought for his lunch. When he sat at the piano, however, all such visual reservations vanished. Pumping with one burly leg, he could make even those nicotine-yellowed keys give out the hectic, tinny airs of ragtime and barrel-house. He then sat back, took out his pork pie and began to eat it nonchalantly.
‘Stew’ became the nucleus of Brian’s group, together with an accomplished solo guitarist, Geoff Bradford. Over the next few days, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Dick Taylor also drifted in and auditioned to Brian’s satisfaction. Stew recognized them from the Ealing club, but rated none of them as musicians in his or Bradford’s class. Tough and short-spoken as he was, there was something about Keith, especially, that put him on his guard. ‘I think Keith was very shy in those days. Mick had got very friendly with Brian, and that seemed to make Keith edgy and uncomfortable.’
Soon there were arguments between Geoff Bradford, a pure blues guitarist in the Muddy Waters style, and Keith, the Chuck Berry acolyte. Bradford refused to have anything to do with ‘rock ’n’ roll rubbish’ like Roll Over Beethoven and Sweet Little Sixteen, and walked out, never to return. By this time, Elmo Lewis, the three Dartford boys and the lantern-jawed Stew had found enough in common to carry on together.
Practice sessions at the Bricklayer’s Arms took place three times a week, even though the embryo – and untitled – group still had no prospect of a booking. ‘It was a seven o’clock start, and we’d all be there sharp at seven,’ Ian Stewart remembered. ‘The one you could never depend on was Brian. He’d suddenly disappear for a few days, then he’d turn up again and want to get another rehearsal going. I never really trusted Brian – mainly because he was always saying, ‘Trust me, Stew.’
The solid Stew had a steady daytime job as a shipping clerk with Imperial Chemical Industries in Buckingham Gate. His first impression of Mick and Keith was of semi-vagrants, permanently broke, shabby and ravenous. Mick had no money but his seven pound per week student grant, plus the few shillings he got for singing with Alex. Keith, at the point of expulsion from Sidcup Art College, was entirely dependent on handouts from his mother. ‘They looked like they were going to starve together. But Mick was rather better off. Every so often, he’d leave Keith and go off to a slightly better caff. Mick always was very fond of his stomach.’
The first spark of originality in the group was struck by spontaneous interaction between Brian on his Gibson guitar and Keith on his Hofner. They would play, not as lead and subordinate rhythm, but as a duet, matching one another solo for solo, merging in a natural two-amp harmony, one zigzagging down the bass notes as the other climbed into treble register. This emergence of a ‘two-guitar band’ seemed an infinitely more exciting prospect than the skinny LSE student who sat about patiently, awaiting his chance to sing. Even then, in the trio of Mick, Keith and Brian, the joining of two inexorably left the third one out in the cold.
The sound they made could be heard in the main pub and, one night, fell on appreciative ears. Later, in the bar, a middle-aged man came up and introduced himself by visiting card as ‘David Norris, Artists’ Representative, Cockfosters’. He told them he’d liked what he’d heard, and could get them some engagements in ballrooms and dance halls – perhaps even at military bases on the Continent – provided they got themselves some decent instruments and stage suits. Mr Norris, for his pains, was firmly snubbed. All five had vowed they would never sell out their music to the commercial world, even if it meant they never got a single engagement.
Alexis Korner remained the only real star in the blues firmament. And, in the summer of 1962, it seemed as if Korner’s meteoric career was about to leave Mick Jagger behind. Blues Incorporated had been offered their first nationwide broadcast, on the BBC Light Programme’s Jazz Club. There were, however, two drawbacks. The first was that the BBC appearance, on July 12, clashed with Korner’s regular Thursday booking at the Marquee. The second was that the BBC, with typical frugality, would pay for five musicians only. Korner must therefore shed the most dispensable one in his line-up, the vocalist.
Jagger did not mind being dropped. He was, on the contrary, anxious for Korner to seize this chance to bring blues to a national audience. It was arranged that the Marquee date should be filled by Korner’s original Ealing vocalist, Long John Baldry. For an intermission band, the Marquee’s manager, Harold Pendleton, agreed to give a chance to the group which had been rehearsing at the Bricklayer’s Arms, though with so little hope it did not yet have a name.
The engagement was sufficiently important to merit a paragraph in the July 11 issue of Jazz News.
Mick Jagger, R & B vocalist, is taking a rhythm and blues group into the Marquee tomorrow night while Blues Inc. is doing its Jazz Club gig.
Called ‘The Rolling Stones’ (‘I hope they don’t think we’re a rock and roll outfit,’ says Mick), the line-up is: Jagger (vocals), Keith Richards, Elmo Lewis (guitars), Dick Taylor (bass), ‘Stew’ (piano) and Mick Avory (drums).
The name was chosen by Brian, in honour of the Muddy Waters song Rolling Stone. Ian Stewart, for one, objected strongly to it. ‘The Rolling Stones – I said it was terrible! It sounded like the name of an Irish show band, or something that ought to be playing at the Savoy.’ Mick Avory, the drummer they had recruited, felt equally dubious, but accepted – as the others did – that, since Brian had formed the group, he could call it what he liked.
So on July 12, 1962, with a playing order written on a page of Ian Stewart’s pocket diary, the six Rolling Stones faced their first audience. Mick wore a sweater, Brian a cord jacket and Keith a skimpy dark suit which left his shirt collar and cuffs exposed like the surplice of the angelic choirboy he formerly had been. Behind them, Dick Taylor, Ian Stewart and Mick Avory glanced at one another ominously. ‘You could hear people saying “Rolling Stones … Rolling Stones …”’ Dick Taylor remembers, ‘“Ah … rock ’n’ roll, are they …” Before we’d played a note, we could feel the hostility.’
Britain in 1962 was a nation still predominantly interested in recovering from 1939. The only generation that mattered was the one which had survived the war and its scarcely less uncomfortable aftermath, inspired by a common belief that one day butter would cease to be rationed; that coupons would no longer be needed to buy clothing or chocolate. These miracles had come to pass – and more. In British homes, as in American ones seen on the cinema screen, there were now TV sets, washing machines, garages containing cars with fins. There were transistor radios, cocktail cabinets and ‘genuine champagne perry’. Harold Macmillan, prime minister since the Suez Crisis, could be believed when he told the country, ‘You’ve never had it so good.’ Largely through that powerful superstition, government remained firmly in the hands of an elderly Edwardian whose winged white hair and drooping moustache gave him the appearance of a dilapidated but complacent sea lion.
The decade which still had not defined itself in 1962 was actually starting to form in 1955, with early sightings of that problematical new species, the ‘teenager’. It was a species, however, which for the next five years caused little profound effect on British life. For it sprang almost wholly from what was still dismissively called the ‘working’ class. Rock ’n’ roll music, skiffle, long hair and coffee bars were condemned all in one as a deviation of the lower proletariat. ‘Pop’, the rock sound watered down, figured not much higher in the social register. Its most successful British exponent, Cliff Richard, owed his survival to having exchanged the grubby aura of the Rocker for that of a conventional show-business personality.
Change was coming, even now, in a battered van making its way to London from the unregarded northern city of Liverpool. In June 1962, the head of an obscure record label, Parlophone, gave an audition to four young Liverpool musicians who had, up to then, been rejected by all the major companies. Their first record – chosen with difficulty from an eccentric and uncommercial repertoire – was not released until the following October. The record was called Love Me Do; the group was the Beatles.
For the Rolling Stones, in October 1962, the most pressing question was whether they could survive another week. It scarcely mattered that their debut at the Marquee Club had gone better than any of them dared hope. To the club’s jazz and pure blues crowd, merely the sight of Dick Taylor’s bass guitar had been reason enough to detest them. But there had also been a contingent of Mods, up on the town from Wembley or Shepherd’s Bush, who loved Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley as much as Keith did, and – being Mods – had conclusively drowned out the jazz fans’ disapproval. That endeared the new group still less to Harold Pendleton, who ran the Marquee on behalf of the National Jazz League, and loudly disapproved of their music, their clothes, their attitude and – as it seemed to Ian Stewart – their perversely ill-chosen name.
The only further bookings Harold Pendleton would offer them were as dogsbodies, filling in for other bands that had not turned up. Often, after booking them, Pendleton would telephone Brian Jones and say he didn’t want them after all. On the nights when they did make it to the Marquee stage, Pendleton would indulge in sarcasm at their expense. Keith Richards was a frequent target, gawky and shy, with his skinny black suit and pimple-chapped face, playing the Chuck Berry guitar riffs that Pendleton so despised.
The slights they continually received from the jazz faction led Brian Jones, in his capacity as leader, to compose a long, erudite letter to Jazz News, complaining of ‘the pseudo-intellectual snobbery that unfortunately contaminates the Jazz scene … It must be apparent,’ Brian continued weightily, ‘that Rock ’n’ Roll has a far greater affinity for r & b than the latter has for Jazz, insofar that Rock is a direct corruption of Rhythm and Blues whereas Jazz is Negro music on a different plane, intellectually higher but emotionally less intense …’
Harold Pendleton had some cause for complaint. The Rolling Stones, though top-heavy with guitarists and their non-playing singer, could persuade no drummer to throw in his lot with them. While anyone could buy a guitar and strum at it, a drummer, with his vast capital investment of fifty pounds or more, conferred instant professionalism and permanence. Mick Avory, on that first Marquee night, had sat in only as a favour. All the drummers they had tried since then were from jazz bands, unable or unwilling to find the r & b backbeat. The only exception was Charlie Watts, Blues Incorporated’s part-time drummer, who sat in also with a Soho band called Blues by Six. Charlie, despite his jazz background and long, glum face, always gave them just what they wanted. But he seemed altogether too well set up and prosperous to consider joining them for good. ‘We were all a bit in awe of Charlie then,’ Keith says. ‘We thought he was much too expensive for us.’
Brian Jones’s double life as a reluctant family man and fancy-free London bachelor took on a new complexity, late that summer, when he, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards rented a flat together in Edith Grove, Chelsea. The three shared two rooms halfway up a shabby house racked by the noise of lorries thundering through to Fulham Road. The flat was squalid even by London bedsitter standards, with its damp and peeling wallpaper, grubby furniture, filthy curtains and naked light bulbs that functioned at the behest of a single, iron-clad electric coin meter. The lavatory was communal, on the staircase to the flat above. Those who visited it after dark did so with a supply of newspaper, matches and a candle. Keith spoke of buying a revolver, so that he could sit there and shoot at the rats.
The minuscule rent was paid by the pooling of Mick Jagger’s student grant with Brian’s wage as a shop assistant at Whiteley’s. Keith – apart from one brief stint as a Christmas relief postman – contrived to remain unencumbered by any job but playing his guitar. His contribution was a supply of food parcels sent up from Dartford by his mother. Doris Richards would also descend on the flat once a week and take away mounds of dirty underwear and shirts to wash.
To help with the rent, they found a fourth tenant – a young printer whom they knew only as ‘Phelge’. ‘He was the sort of madman you’d meet around Chelsea then,’ Keith says. ‘You’d walk in through the front door and there would be Phelge, standing at the top of the stairs with his underpants on his head.’
For Mick, the Edith Grove flat was a chance to break free of the constraints of home and his mother’s reproaches for the opportunities he was wasting. He remained, even so, primarily an economics student, tacitly acknowledging that he must one day give up blues singing to work for his degree. Up all night at the Marquee, and Chelsea’s perpetual bottle parties, he would still go off next morning to the London School of Economics in Aldwych. His father’s waning influence could not altogether remove the habit of exercise. The pale, languid Chelsea layabout still turned out at regular intervals to play soccer in the LSE second eleven.
Keith, jobless and almost penniless, spent most of his days at the flat with no other company than the coin meter and his guitar. Brian, at the outset, still had a job at Whiteley’s and, it was presumed, an alternative home with Pat Andrews and the baby. The Whiteley’s job vanished when Brian was caught pilfering from the cash register. The link with Pat and the baby was similarly broken – although his friend, Dick Hattrell, remained a faithful follower. After that, Brian also had nothing to do, and would sit around the Edith Grove flat all day with Keith, practising their guitar duets, working out on the harmonica he had almost mastered and plotting where their next meal was coming from. He taught Keith the trick, learned in his Oxford wanderings, of creeping into neighbours’ flats on the morning after bottle parties, collecting all the empty beer bottles and returning them to a pub or off-licence to collect the twopence deposits.
A tiny trickle of money came from dates arranged by Brian at venues he had already reconnoitred on his travels outside London. The venues were mostly weekend dances, put on in church halls or suburban sports pavilions. The fee – seldom more than a couple of pounds a night – would be received by Brian, then shared among the other five. They did not know, since Brian thought it not worth mentioning, that he had invariably obtained an extra payment for himself as their leader and – he would also say – their manager and booking agent. Brian, in those days, was always ahead by a tiny, surreptitious percentage.
One of their regular dates was at St Mary’s Parish Hall, in Hotheley Road, Richmond, playing in alternation with a group from Shepherd’s Bush called the High Numbers, later transfigured into The Who. Another was in a dilapidated wooden dance hall on Eel Pie Island in the River Thames at Twickenham, crossed by a footbridge that levied a sixpenny toll. They would go there by public transport, by bus or by tube, accompanied by Dick Hattrell, whom Brian seemed able to persuade to do almost anything. Hattrell acted as their road manager until he left London for a stint of part-time soldiering in the Territorial Army.
At the Marquee, meanwhile, Harold Pendleton’s sarcasm continued unabated. Even Cyril Davis, who had liked the Stones at first, now joined the jazzers against them, brusquely sacking them from a bill on which his band was headlining. No one in those days knew Keith Richards well enough to recognize the warning signs. One evening, late that autumn, after carefully considering something Harold Pendleton had said to him, Keith picked up his guitar like a caveman’s club and swung it at Pendleton’s head.
After that, there could be no more Marquee dates for a while. There was even less hope at Ken Colyer’s Studio 51 or Giorgio Gomelsky’s Piccadilly Club, where they had had one disastrous flop. The Rolling Stones therefore decided to do what Alexis Korner had when snobbery and prejudice were threatening to extinguish Blues Incorporated. They set out to start a club and a following of their own.
The club was a peripatetic one, convened on Saturday nights or Sunday afternoons in a succession of pubs in Sutton, Richmond, Putney and Twickenham. Each date along the meridian would display the same laconic poster: ‘Rhythm and Blues with the Rollin’ Stones [sic]. Admission 4s.’ Fortunately, Ian Stewart owned a van as well as his racing bike, and could chauffeur them and their equipment to pubs in places even further distant, like Windsor, Guildford and Maidenhead. Stew proved a sterling hand at unloading guitar cases and amps, even though he might not himself always get the chance to play. ‘If there was no piano, I’d just settle down in the van and go to sleep. I did have to be up the next morning to go to work at ICI.’
The lack of a permanent drummer continued to be vexing. Mick Avory, who sat in with them most often, had little natural feel for r & b. Carlo Little, from Cyril Davies’s group, whom they liked much better, had more pressing extra-curricular work with Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages. Unable to approach Charlie Watts, they reluctantly settled for a boy called Tony Chapman, who had played in several semi-pro rock ’n’ roll groups. But Chapman, a commercial traveller, wasn’t always reliable and was frequently out of town on business trips.
Just before Christmas came another setback. Dick Taylor, their bass player, announced he was quitting to begin a course at the Royal College of Art. The others asked Tony Chapman if he knew any bass guitarists looking for work. Chapman said he might know someone, an ex-colleague of his in a conventional pop group called the Cliftons. It was arranged that Tony Chapman’s friend should come for an audition with Brian, Keith and Mick at their local Chelsea pub, the Wetherby Arms, one cold, snowy day in December.
Bill Perks had always hated his family name, and wished he could change it to something more in keeping with his nature and ambitions. His grandfather Perks, he knew, had done the same thing fifty years earlier when fighting illegally as a bare-fist pugilist. ‘And when he got older and used to breed racing pigeons, he still went on using another name,’ the metamorphosed Bill Wyman says. ‘He always raced his pigeons under the name of Jackson.’
The son born to William and Kathleen Perks on October 24, 1936, showed little sign of his ultimate destiny for almost the first quarter of his life. As a child, he was thoughtful, steady, quiet, rather pious. His mother remembers how he would spend hours in his bedroom, in Blenheim Road, Penge, just reading the Bible. At Beckenham Grammar School he was proficient in art and mathematics and a useful athlete. With his precise mind and prodigious memory, he would have been natural university material if born just one decade later. Then, amid Britain’s post-war and class-ridden chill, the best a bright working-class boy could hope for was respectable clerkship. His father, a bricklayer out of doors in all weathers, was delighted to think Bill might get a comfortable office job.
His first employment was with the City Tote, a firm of multiple bookmakers in London’s West End. He was then called up for two years’ service as a clerk in the Royal Air Force. Some of that time he spent in West Germany, at an RAF station near Bremen, where he heard rock ’n’ roll music for the first time over the American Forces Network. He remembers, too, what a liking he developed for a fellow serviceman called Lee Wyman, not realizing it was the surname that really appealed to him.
He already thought of himself as Bill Wyman when, demobbed from the RAF, he took a job as storekeeper with an engineering firm in Streatham, south London. He organized the stores with fastidious efficiency, cataloguing the stock and recording its level by a neat system of dockets and coloured strings. In 1959, he married a girl named Diane whom he had met at a dance in Beckenham, and moved with her into a flat above a Penge garage.
His first guitar, bought during his RAF service, was a Spanish model, so badly made he could hardly hold down the strings. He played with scratch groups, in and out of the service, for the next year or two. ‘I was never much of a guitarist. I was no good at playing chords. That’s why I switched to bass as soon as they started coming in.’
In December 1962 he was already semi-professional, playing bass regularly in the Cliftons and, occasionally, in stage shows presented by the great pop impresario Larry Parnes. He had risen as high as backing Parnes’s discovery Dickie Pride, a tiny youth then billed as ‘Britain’s Little Richard’. ‘We had to wear stage make-up … little suits all the same. Horrible, they were. You always knew they’d been passed on to you from someone else.’
It was, therefore, with no great hope or expectation that Bill Wyman walked into the Wetherby Arms in Chelsea and beheld the group with whom Tony Chapman had arranged for him to audition. His first thought – tinged with working-class resentment – was that they looked off-puttingly ‘bohemian’ and ‘arty’. They, on their side, felt no instant rapport with the hollow-cheeked, unsmiling newcomer, seven years older than Mick and Keith, and whose reserved manner suggested the superiority of a bass player who had once accompanied Dickie Pride.
What made him desirable was the sheer magnificence of his equipment. With his bass guitar, he hauled in two enormous black and gold amplifiers. Even the one he airily called his ‘spare’ was a Vox 850, bigger than Keith Richards had ever seen outside a shop window. Plugging in his bass, he indicated the 850 and said, ‘One of you can put your guitar through that.’
‘I wasn’t sure – I thought I’d just try things out with them for a bit,’ Bill says, ‘even though I did think they looked too bohemian. Not long afterwards, they decided they wanted to get rid of Tony Chapman as drummer and bring in Charlie Watts. Tony came to me and said, “Well, that’s it, Bill. We can form a new group of our own now.” I said, ‘No – I think I’m all right where I am.” I think I made a wise decision.
Initially, it seemed far from wise. Bill Wyman’s recruitment to ‘the Rollin’ Stones’ coincided with heavy snowfalls, which, as they grew steadily worse, prevented them from getting to all but a scattered few of their suburban dates. At those they did manage to reach, attendance was disastrously reduced. Even their large Eel Pie Island following seemed reluctant to brave the toll bridge over the fast-freezing Thames. Wyman, perched on his amplifier rim, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, regretted his folly in exchanging Larry Parnes’s stage shows for arty types like this, who did not even stand up to play, but sat on chairs or stools in a semicircle behind their head-shaking vocalist.
The winter, it turned out, was Britain’s worst for more than a hundred years. The entire country became submerged in a featureless white plain, swept by unremittingly savage cold which turned milk to creamy granite and made beer explode spontaneously in its bottles. From December to mid-February, the weather was Britain’s sole talking point – apart from a brief scandal, reported from Carlisle just after Christmas, when a group called the Beatles was ejected from a Young Conservatives dance for the impossibly tasteless offence of arriving in black leather jackets.
At Edith Grove, the water pipes were now all frozen solid: Mick, Keith, Brian and Phelge could not wash or pull the lavatory chain. What puny room heaters they had barely took the edge off the biting cold. Bill Wyman, the settled married man, could hardly believe the squalor of the conditions. ‘They weren’t cooking – just living on pork pies and cups of instant coffee,’ Bill says. ‘I used to get through pounds, just feeding that electric meter of theirs.’
Their diet was mainly potatoes and eggs, which Brian and Keith would pilfer from Fulham Road grocery shops, and stale bread scavenged from the debris of parties given by other tenants in the house. Bill Wyman, when he dropped by, would bring food and cigarettes as well as shillings for their ravenous coin meter. Once a week, Ian Stewart would hand them a supply of six-shilling (30p) luncheon vouchers, bought up at a shilling each from weight-conscious secretaries in his office at ICI.
On many days, Keith remembers, it would not be worthwhile even getting out of bed. ‘We hadn’t got any gigs. Nothing to do. We’d spend hours at a time just making faces at each other. Brian was always the best at that. There was a particularly horrible one he could do by pulling his eyes down at the corners and sticking his fingers up his nostrils. He called it “doing a Nanker”.’ Even when every pipe in the flat was frozen, Brian somehow managed to wash his hair every day, and find a shilling somewhere to blow-dry it into its elaborate cresting wave. He seemed, for all his fastidiousness, the most adept of them all at living rough. Even Keith did not have Brian’s sublime assurance, as each frozen midday dawned outside their filthy, iced-up windows, that the wherewithal of keeping warm and not starving could always be borrowed, begged or stolen.
An unexpected windfall was the reappearance of Dick Hattrell, fresh from Territorial Army camp, his £80 gratuity in his pocket, and willing as ever to do anything Brian told him. Within a week, Brian had annexed every penny of Hattrell’s money for meals, drinks, even a brand-new guitar. On Brian’s orders, Hattrell took off his army greatcoat and handed it to the shivering Keith. He would obediently follow them to their local hamburger bar, hand them more money and, at Brian’s command, stand patiently in the snow until they came out again. When Dick Hattrell’s money ran out, so did his welcome at the flat. One night as he lay in bed, Brian threatened to electrocute him with a guitar lead. Hattrell fled into the snow, terrified, wearing only his underpants. ‘He wouldn’t come back for an hour, he was so scared of Brian,’ Keith says. ‘When they finally did bring him in, he’d turned blue.’
The new year 1963 found Britain still snowbound, with villages, towns, even whole counties cut off, most transport paralysed, all sport fixtures cancelled, a whole nation gone to ground and huddled round the fitful blue warmth of its television screen. On January 12, the Saturday night pop show Thank Your Lucky Stars provided its snowed-in bumper audience with the spectacle of the Beatles, in the mop-top haircuts and crew-necked suits, miming their new record Please Please Me, not with scowls and prissy dance steps like Cliff Richard’s Shadows, but jigging about uninhibitedly, grinning at the camera and each other. To viewers over twenty-one, the interlude seemed no more than faintly comic. But on a million British teenagers, pent up by so much more than cold, that zesty ‘Whoa yeah’ chorus had an altogether different effect. By February 16, Please Please Me was number one on the Melody Maker’s Top Twenty chart.
The Beatles were also beginning to make regular radio appearances on the BBC Light Programme’s Saturday Club, giving live performances from their stage repertoire in a far-off Liverpool cellar club called the Cavern. Much of their material was rhythm and blues which they had copied from import discs brought from America to Liverpool by stewards on the transatlantic ships. Brian and Keith, listening to Saturday Club, huddled under their blankets at Edith Grove, were astonished to hear Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley songs on the stuffy BBC.
Since Saturday Club had a reputation for booking groups which had not yet even made a record, Brian sent off one of his prosy letters to the BBC, requesting an audition for the Stones. A fortnight later, they received a summons to report to a BBC rehearsal room. Before they set off, Brian shampooed and blow-dried his hair into a Beatle cut thicker and more eye-enveloping than the Beatles wore. ‘It shocked even us a bit,’ Keith says. ‘He looked like a Saint Bernard with hair all over his eyes. We told him he’d have to be careful or he’d bump into things.’
The audition took place under the eye of the show’s producer and of its compere, Brian Matthew. Both men based their musical judgement on the hidebound prejudices of a corporation which, for years, had banned even the phrase ‘Hot Jazz’ as being sexually suggestive. ‘We got a letter back from the producer in the end,’ Bill Wyman says. ‘He said they liked us as a group but they couldn’t book us because “the singer sounds too coloured”.’
Wyman still did not quite know why he stayed on in the Stones, especially now that his friend Tony Chapman had left. The country-wide thaw, and consequent improvement in suburban club dates, only emphasized their desperate need of a regular drummer even as semi-reliable as Chapman had been. Brian’s idea was to bring in Carlo Little, a bravura performer with Cyril Davis. But to Mick, Keith and Ian Stewart, there was only one possible candidate. ‘One night, we all just looked at each other and that did it,’ Stew says. ‘We went up to Charlie Watts and said, “Right, that’s it. You’re in.”’
The boy with the long, thin, dourly soulful face and the neat mod three-piece suit came from several social worlds away. Charlie Watts was a true Londoner, born at least within a rumour’s distance of Bow Bells, and with that air peculiar to many cockneys of being older than his years. His father worked for British Railways at King’s Cross station as a parcel deliveryman. His mother had formerly been a factory worker. The family lived in Islington, North London, in a house which, however modest, was ruled by Charles Sr’s punctilious tidiness. ‘My dad made me cover all my books with brown paper,’ Charlie says, ‘– even my Buffalo Bill annual.’ He cherished that annual, with its colour portrait of William F. Cody, looming ferociously from a Wild West that was – and remains – Charlie Watts’s abiding passion.
Charlie, at twenty-one, seemed set on a promising professional career. Since leaving Harrow Art College, he had worked as a lettering and layout man for the Regent Street advertisement agency Charles Hobson and Gray. It was a prestigious and – for that time – well-paid job which Charlie was reluctant to jeopardize, even for his beloved jazz. He had, indeed, recently given up playing with Blues Incorporated for fear that too many late nights would impair the daytime steadiness of his hand.
For the Stones, it was not simply that Charlie Watts owned a handsome set of drums and played them with an unobtrusive skill that held each ramshackle blues song together like cement. He was also warmly liked by each of them. He seemed to get on best with the group’s shyest and most uncertain member, Keith. Dapper as Charlie himself was, something in Keith’s incorrigible raggedness stirred him to wistful admiration. He would sit for hours at Edith Grove, listening to Keith play guitar duets with Brian, listening to their accumulated wisdom concerning Chuck Berry B-sides and, every so often, putting another shilling in the electric meter.
The drawback, in Charlie’s eyes, was that he loved jazz above everything, and saw no prospect, via these hard-up student types, of realizing his ambition to visit New York and see Birdland where Charlie Parker used to play. At the time the Stones pounced on him, he was also considering the offer of a regular place in the far more respectable Blues By Six. ‘He came to me, agonizing about it,’ Alexis Korner said. ‘I told him I thought the Rolling Stones were likely to get more work than the others, in the long run.’ So at last, with that resigned shrug – that look of placidly expecting the worst – Charlie Watts was in.
On Sunday evenings in the sedate Thames-side borough of Richmond, crowds of teenage boys in corduroy jackets and peg-top trousers, accompanied by white-faced, bare-kneed, shivering girls, could be seen emerging from the railway station and streaming up a narrow passageway by the side of a Victorian pub. At the end, under an improvised sign, CRAWDADDY CLUB, a black-bearded young man, somewhat like Captain Kidd in the comic books, stood guard on the door into the pub’s mirror-lined committee room, chaffing his customers in an accent exotically and indeterminately foreign. ‘Any girls who want to come in …’ Giorgio Gomelsky would say, ‘we’re so full, you’ll have to sit on your boyfriends’ shoulders.’
Giorgio was a twenty-nine-year-old Russian emigré, born in Georgia, exiled to Switzerland, educated in Italy and Germany, and now one of the best-known figures on the London jazz scene. He had worked for Chris Barber in the Fifties, helping to set up the National jazz league and, later, organizing the first of the League’s annual Jazz Festivals at Richmond Athletic Ground. He had discovered blues while working as a courier, escorting American blues singers on from London to Continental dates booked for them by Barber’s organization. ‘Sonny Boy Williamson lived in my house for six months. I travelled all over with him. We were in Liverpool when the Cavern was still only a Trad Jazz club.’
In the early Sixties, Giorgio combined the role of assistant film editor and West End Jazz Club manager, running the old Mississippi Room, with earnest attendance at classes to study Stanislavsky’s Method acting. Among his fellow students in the class was a young Irishman named Ronan O’Rahilly, whose family was rumoured to own the greater part of County Cork, and who was also trying to crash into the London entertainment scene by managing Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated.
Gomelsky’s first blues club was the Piccadilly, set up on a Russian shoestring in the old Cy Laurie folk cellar. The Rolling Stones played there just once, shortly before Harold Pendleton and Cyril Davies squeezed them out of the Marquee. Much as Gomelsky liked them as individuals, he thought their playing ‘abominable’. Counting Mick Jagger’s younger brother, Chris, only twenty or so people turned up that night to see them.
In early 1963, the Piccadilly Club had closed and Giorgio needed a new venue that could be hired with the single five-pound note he had in his pocket. He knew the landlord of the Station Hotel in Kew Road, Richmond, and knew that the pub’s substantial back room had not been in use since its regular trad jazz sessions had petered out. ‘I said, “Let me try blues here, just for one night …”’ The club was called the Crawdaddy, after a Bo Diddley song, Do the Crawdaddy. Sessions took place on Sunday nights within the Station Hotel’s licensing hours, 7 to 10:30 p.m. Its first resident attraction was the Dave Hunt Group, featuring Ray Davies – who would one day lead the Kinks – and playing in Louis Jordan’s 1940s ‘jump band’ style.
Brian Jones had long been pestering Giorgio to do something to help the Rolling Stones. ‘He had that little speech impediment – kind of a lisp. It used to be part of his charm. “Come and lithen to us, Giorgio,” he’d plead with me. “Oh, Giorgio, pleathe get us some gigs.”’
Since their first disastrous tryout at the Piccadilly Club, Giorgio had seen the Stones again – at the Red Lion in Sutton – and had noticed a vast improvement. ‘But what could I do? Dave Hunt’s group already had the Richmond gig.
‘It was the weather, really, that got them their chance. Dave Hunt’s band couldn’t make it, because of the snow – and anyway, I didn’t go so much for that jump-band stuff Dave was playing. So, Monday, I rang Ian Stewart – it was so funny: to get the Stones you had to go through to ICI. I said, “Tell everyone in the band you guys are on next Sunday.”’
That first Sunday night when the Rolling Stones played the Crawdaddy instead of Dave Hunt’s group, attendance was disastrously reduced. ‘I even went through to the main pub to try to round some more customers up,’ Giorgio says. ‘Anyone who’d buy a ticket was allowed to bring in another person for nothing.’
Giorgio himself stood in the half-empty room, watching a group that, in the few weeks since their Red Lion date, had changed almost beyond recognition. The principal change was Brian Jones with his new, heaped, yellow Beatle cut, coaxing and caressing the blues harp in his cupped hands to produce sounds like silvery minnows darting in and deftly out of Keith’s guitar riffs. Another change was the boy in the dapper three-piece suit, seated behind his drums with all the pleasure of a convict trying out an electric chair, yet playing with an impeccable, light-handed touch that pulled every loose thread together and closed up every crack. Everything had come right behind the lead singer who was so far from right, but compulsively wrong, in the sweater that slipped off one shoulder like a teagown, his smear of a mouth parroting a black man’s words as his opaque eyes searched for his reflection in the mirrors all round him. That snowy Sunday night, behind a Thames-side pub, where bottles clashed into basketwork skips and feathered darts thudded against targets, the Stones began to be brilliant.
