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Within three weeks, they had attracted a huge following, of whom r & b enthusiasts were only a minor part. Richmond, Twickenham and Surbiton on a Sunday night offered little enough excitement of any kind. The larger and larger crowds that converged on the Station Hotel and flooded down its side passageway contained samples of every teenage faction that had ever done battle on Brighton or Margate beach. There were Mods in high-button suits, newly dismounted from Lambretta scooters. There were black-leather Rockers, in studs and cowboy boots. Unified by the bond of the polo-neck, there were art students and shop assistants and well-brought-up boys and girls from middle-class riverside homes at Putney, Hammersmith and Strand-on-the-Green. ‘And do you know – there was never one fight in that place,’ Gomelsky says. ‘All that glass on the walls, and not even a mirror broken.’
At first, the Crawdaddy crowd behaved like jazz fans, merely standing and watching the Stones in the red-spotlit dusk. Then one night, Giorgio’s young assistant, Hamish Grimes, jumped up on a table top and began to leap and flail his arms with the music like a dervish. From Hamish’s impromptu outburst there evolved a dance peculiar to the Crawdaddy Club, partly derived from the Twist and the Hully-Gully but unique in that it could be performed by single males or even pairs of males, locked in a strange, crablike embrace, each gripping the other’s elastic-sided ankles. The climax of each Stones session was a Bo Diddley song, either Do the Crawdaddy or Pretty Thing, when, at Giorgio’s encouragement, the whole 300 would form a solid mass of corduroy, op-art strips and red-spotlit shirt collars, jumping and gyrating together for as long as twenty minutes at a time.
Giorgio Gomelsky became the Rolling Stones’ first manager, mainly through his own reluctance to be considered anything so bourgeois. ‘It was always a partnership. I used to divide the door receipts from each Sunday equally with them. They would help me keep the club going. For instance, we never paid to advertise the Crawdaddy Club. The Stones and I would put illegal fly posters all over. I got them printed for four pounds a thousand, and the Stones mixed up the paste in the bath at Edith Grove.’
From the moment they began pulling in the crowds at Richmond, Giorgio had been urging his contacts in the London music press to come to Richmond and see the Stones perform. He also began shooting 35mm film of them onstage at the Crawdaddy and arranged for them to make a soundtrack of two Bo Diddley songs at a small studio in Morden. It was typical of the idealistic Russian that, while working to launch the Stones, he never attempted to put them under exclusive contract to himself. His advice, on the contrary, was to let no one have control over them but themselves. ‘I kept telling them, “Wait. Get strong, so that you can handle all of it yourselves and don’t have to ask anyone for anything. Don’t run the risk of someone walking in here and taking you over.”’
Giorgio, in fairness, had a somewhat larger project on his mind. Two years previously, while living in West Germany, he had visited Hamburg’s sleazy St Pauli district and had seen the Beatles in their earliest incarnation as black-leather rockers, pouring out bowdlerized r & b and their own primitive compositions to an audience of whores, transvestites and merchant seamen. Watching them now, in their crew-necked suits, bobbing and frolicking on the torrents of ever wilder hysteria, Giorgio Gomelsky realized they were something more than merely the biggest pop attraction since Cliff Richard and the Shadows.
The tiny world of London impresarios soon brought Giorgio Gomelsky into contact with the Beatles’ twenty-seven-year-old manager, Brian Epstein. ‘I would be there when dance hall promoters rang up Epstein, offering him £50 for one appearance by the Beatles. He’d say, “I don’t know …” and start looking in his diary. So then the promoter would offer him £60. “I don’t know …” he’d still say. The promoter would offer £70, thinking Epstein was stalling for more money. He wasn’t. He just couldn’t find the right date in his diary.’
Giorgio approached Brian Epstein in his role as avant-garde movie director, proposing a film that would bring out the still unperceived wit and knockabout charm of the Beatles’ offstage characters. He was now working on a rough script, helped by Ronan O’Rahilly, his fellow Method-acting student, and the jazz writer Peter Clayton. With the Beatles themselves he was on good enough terms to invite them to the Crawdaddy one Sunday after their appearance on Thank Your Lucky Stars at the ABC-TV studios in nearby Twickenham.
As the Stones played that night, they were astonished to see all four Beatles, in expensive leather overcoats, being escorted by Giorgio to a special vantage point beside the stage. Still more astonished were they, later, to be approached by people they looked on as big-time celebrities, and to be told in thick, pally Liverpool accents that their music was ‘fab’ and ‘gear’. John Lennon, in particular, looked at Brian Jones with something like hero-worship. ‘You really play that harmonica, don’t you,’ he said. ‘I can’t really play – I just blow and suck.’
A lengthy and amicable conversation ensued. For the Beatles, it had been a poignant experience to see a group so much like their former selves, before Brian Epstein cleaned up their music and appearance. The Stones, on their side, recognized blood brothers in the r & b cause who had only reluctantly dropped Chuck Berry in favour of original compositions the pop public increasingly demanded. It fascinated Mick Jagger, especially, to learn that John Lennon and Paul McCartney had already written more than a hundred songs together and that, after just one Top Ten hit, they had a share in their own music-publishing company. For a brief while, Mick cast aside his reserve and quizzed the Beatles closely about how much per song one could earn in royalties.
A week later, the Beatles appeared in their first major London concert, a Pop Prom run by the BBC at the Royal Albert Hall. The Rollin’ Stones received front-row tickets and access to the Liverpudlians’ embattled dressing room. Later, Giorgio and Brian Jones helped the Beatles’ two road managers, Mal and Neil, to load their stage equipment into their van. Some girls, spotting Brian’s blond dome of hair, mistook him for a Beatle, crowded round him, despite his protests, and clamoured for autographs.
The incident, Giorgio remembers, had a transfixing effect on Brian. ‘As we walked away from the Albert Hall, down the big steps at the back, he was almost in a daze. “That’s what I want, Giorgio,” he kept saying. “That’s what I want.’”
Knowing the Beatles was all very nice – but it did not help Giorgio in his efforts to interest powerful London people in a group whose venue, ten miles from the West End, might as well have been in another hemisphere. For record company talent scouts, the only worthwhile journey, if not to Soho, was 200 miles north to Liverpool, in their frenzied search for new groups in the Beatles’ image. It was a quest pursued with especial fervour by Decca, whose head of A & R, Dick Rowe, was celebrated as The Man Who Turned The Beatles Down. A letter from Giorgio Gomelsky about a new blues group in Surrey did not even reach Dick Rowe’s in-tray.
The Stones themselves knew only one person connected with the record industry. This was a school friend of Ian Stewart’s named Glyn Johns, who worked at IBC Studios in Portland Place. Part-owned by the orchestra leader Eric Robinson, IBC had very little to do with pop music. But Glyn, a talented engineer, was allowed to record any artists he thought promising. At his invitation, the Rolling Stones came to IBC and, in a single evening, recorded four songs for their stage act, including Chuck Berry’s Come On.
The excitement of being in a real studio, supervised by a young engineer who was also a Crawdaddy fan, rather tailed off, since IBC carried little weight with the major record companies. A colleague of Glyn’s knew someone at Decca – but on the classical music side. It seemed just more effort wasted on a world whose ears were deaf to all but the Beatles’ second number one single, From Me to You.
On April 13, when the Stones’ spirits were at their lowest ebb, Giorgio Gomelsky’s hustling of newspapers, small as well as large, finally began to pay off. The weekly Richmond and Twickenham Times devoted a full page to the blues club behind the Station Hotel and its effect in taking custom from trad jazz clubs in the area. ‘The Rolling Stones’ – the ‘g’ once more reinstated – received a somewhat incidental mention: “Save for the spotlit forms of the group on the stage, the room is dark … A patch of light catches the sweating dancers and those who are slumped on the floor, where no chairs are provided …’
A few days later, Peter Jones of the Record Mirror succumbed to Giorgio’s entreaties and agreed to give up his Sunday lunchtime to watch Giorgio’s group being filmed onstage at their Richmond pub club. Jones was a prescient as well as a prolific journalist, the first to interview the Beatles in any national music paper. He watched the Stones perform on camera, and afterwards met them in the Station Hotel’s saloon bar. ‘They were hungry, and they were very bitter,’ Peter Jones says. ‘They told me no one had even been bothered before to drive ten miles out from London to see them. I promised to do my best to get a story about them into the Record Mirror.’
Jones was as good as his word. He persuaded the Record Mirror’s star reporter, Norman Jopling, to go out to Richmond with a photographer the following Sunday. Jopling – a blues and soul fanatic – was even more impressed than Peter Jones had been. ‘The Stones had got the real r & b sound, not just a copy of it,’ Jopling remembers. ‘When they played a Bo Diddley number, it sounded like Bo Diddley. And the whole scene around them in that room was unbelievable.’
Norman Jopling’s feature article in Record Mirror, the following Thursday, surpassed Giorgio’s wildest hopes:
As the Trad scene gradually subsides, promoters of all kinds of teen-beat entertainments have a sigh of relief that they’ve found something to take its place. It’s Rhythm and Blues, of course. And the number of R & B clubs that have suddenly sprung up is nothing short of fantastic.
At the Station Hotel, Kew Road, the hip kids throw themselves about to the new ‘jungle music’ like they never did in the more restrained days of Trad.
And the combo they writhe and twist to is called the Rolling Stones. Maybe you haven’t heard of them – if you live far from London, the odds are you haven’t.
But by gad you will! The Stones are destined to be the biggest group in the R & B scene, if that scene continues to flourish …
It was, indeed, an astounding plug for unknown musicians in a paper read throughout the tight community of agents and A & R men. As Norman Jopling recalls, the feedback was instantaneous. ‘Record Mirror hit the streets at about one p.m. in the West End. By four o’clock that afternoon, three different record companies had phoned me, saying “Where can we get hold of these guys?”’ Jopling supplied particulars, although fully aware – as Peter Jones was – that the guys had by now been well and truly got hold of.
THREE (#ud6910e98-c912-5b43-9cd1-8f861586d1bd)
‘I BELONG TO YOU AND YOU BELONG TO ME, SO COME ON’ (#ud6910e98-c912-5b43-9cd1-8f861586d1bd)
At the age of eleven, Andrew Loog Oldham was already incorrigibly addicted to glamour. While other boys read the Eagle comic or swapped matchbox labels, Oldham walked the Soho streets, breathing in with delight the mingling scents of coffee beans, salami, striptease and primitive rock ’n’ roll. Glamorous as these surroundings were, they paled next to the glamour he already perceived in himself. From an even earlier age, he had visualized his own life as an epic film of which he was both the star and the rapt audience. ‘It was the only way I could get to school in the morning. As I walked in through the gates, I’d see the opening credits start to roll …’
The name which in later years seemed so typical a product of its owner’s imagination was, in fact, genuine. Andrew Loog Oldham was the son of a Dutch-American air force officer, killed on a bombing mission over Germany in 1944. Born out of wedlock, the baby received both parents’ names. His Dutch origins were always faintly manifest in a pink complexion, butter-coloured hair and eyes whose myopic pallor gave Oldham, even at his most uppity and outrageous, the look of a rather studious small boy.
A private boarding school to which his widowed mother sent him provided an early object lesson in the relation of fantasy to profit. The school – in Witney, Oxfordshire – was run by an ex-army officer, a dashing figure whose frequent absences were rumoured to be connected with vital work for the government. The head was, in fact, a prisoner on parole who moved around the country, setting up small schools, collecting fees, running up bills, then vanishing without trace. That headmaster was Andrew Loog Oldham’s first lesson in the principle that, provided you had nerve and style enough, you could get away with almost anything.
In 1955, the pink-faced Hampstead schoolboy was a familiar figure among the teenage crowd at Soho’s famous 2 I’s coffee bar. Norah, the doorkeeper, knew him well and would let him downstairs into the skiffle cellar without paying the usual one-shilling cover charge. His taste in pop heroes was eccentric even then – Wee Willie Harris, green-haired and wizened; Vince Taylor, an early American rocker, afterwards famous in France. ‘It was always the sex in rock ’n’ roll that attracted me … the sex that most people didn’t realize was there. Like the Everly Brothers. Two guys with the same kind of face, the same kind of hair. They were meant to be singing together to some girl, but really they were singing to each other.’
From the age of thirteen or so, Oldham saw himself as an amalgam of two movie roles, both portrayed by his screen idol, the suave if faintly reptilian Laurence Harvey. He wanted to be Harvey’s version of Joe Lampton, ruthless working-class hero of Room at the Top. He wanted just as much to be the jive-talking young Jewish hustler whom Harvey played in Expresso Bongo, sashaying round Soho in Italian box jacket and rakish trilby hat, scouring the pasteboard streets for any quick way to a dividend.
He left Wellingborough College at sixteen with three GCE O-Levels – in English, divinity, and, he claims, rifle shooting – and at once set about making his way in the world as Laurence Harvey had shown him. His first coup was to go to Chelsea, walk into Mary Quant’s clothes boutique and ask for a job in any capacity whatever. Mary Quant and her husband, Alexander Plunkett-Green, were amused by the blond-haired youth and his barefaced effrontery. They agreed to take him on as an odd-job boy, teamaker and messenger.
He worked for Mary Quant throughout the period when her plungingly simple black and white dresses, short skirts, sailor necks and oversized bows altered the look of haute couture, and of London, forever. In February 1962, the first issue of a colour supplement by the hitherto stuffy Sunday Times featured a Quant dress worn by a new young model, Jean Shrimpton, and photographed, not by the customary middle-aged society acolyte but by a young man, David Bailey, who came from London’s East End and – still more outrageously – made no attempt to conceal it. This first ‘in crowd’, as defined by the Sunday Times, did not, of course, include anyone named Andrew Loog Oldham; still, he was happy. ‘I was where I wanted to be – around stars.’
At this stage, the only way of achieving stardom himself, as his mental scenario had dictated, was to become a pop singer. The fact that he could neither sing nor play an instrument seemed hardly relevant. Over a period of months, London agents and managers would be intermittently persecuted by the same blond, bespectacled, unmusical youth, posing under such aliases as ‘Chancery Laine’ and ‘Sandy Beach’.
By working for Mary Quant all day, and by night as a waiter at Soho’s Flamingo Club, he saved enough to migrate to the French Riviera. There, for several months, he worked in sea-front bars and as an itinerant window dresser. There, too, in company with two freelance journalists, he concocted his first great money-making scheme. The plan was to kidnap a wealthy heiress. Andrew would keep her, drugged, in a flat in Monte Carlo while the journalists sold the story to the London Daily Express. It would give the story a piquant twist, they said, if Andrew were subsequently to marry the heiress. This he was quite willing to do. Unfortunately, the scheme foundered after the, not unwilling, girl had been taken to the Monte Carlo flat. Her father had friends in the British government, and got an official D-notice issued, prohibiting any newspaper from running the story. Andrew Loog Oldham thus failed to become nationally famous either as a kidnapper or as a cad.
Back in London, a job with the Leslie Frewin publishing house provided an entrée into the decidedly glamorous world of public relations. He left Frewin to join a PR company whose clients included the pop singer Mark Wynter. Handsome, blow-waved and insipid in the prevailing American style, Wynter was following what seemed an inexorable course from Top Twenty hit to low-budget ‘exploitation’ feature film. One of Oldham’s jobs was to accompany him on location to Twickenham studios and share a bedroom with him at a nearby small hotel. ‘Every morning, Mark used to get up very early and creep off to the bathroom to wash and shave and fix his hair. Then he’d come and get back into bed. A bit later, he’d sit up and say “Well, Andrew – time to set off for the studios.” He was convinced I thought he always woke up looking like that. I thought that was great – that really was looking after your image.’
Two major pop impresarios, Larry Parnes and Don Arden, between them controlled all the singers and groups for whom Oldham hoped to work as publicist. Parnes ran a menagerie of exotically named singers from offices in Cromwell Road, opposite the headquarters of the Boy Scout movement (at which, in spare moments, he liked to gaze through binoculars). Don Arden, an authentically frightening figure, rivalled Larry Parnes in promoting pop package tours, cobbled from the hitmakers of the moment. Andew Loog Oldham joined Arden for a while but was fired after inviting journalists to view cinema seats which, during a particularly well-appreciated package show, had been slashed with razors and drenched with female urine.
He was by this time a well-known figure around ABC-TV’s studios in Aston Road, Birmingham, where Thank Your Lucky Stars was recorded. In February 1963, he stood and watched the Beatles give their first nationwide performance of Please Please Me. He later approached Brian Epstein, and offered himself as publicist for Epstein’s company, NEMS Enterprises. Brian Epstein, it happened, was preparing to launch two other Liverpool acts, Gerry and the Pacemakers and Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas. He agreed to hire Andrew Loog Oldham to promote the two groups on a monthly retainer of £25.
The arrangement was somewhat hampered by Tony Barrow, a London-based Liverpudlian already writing press releases about the Beatles and sleeve notes for their first album Brian Eptstein ordained that Barrow should concentrate on written handouts while Oldham – by now running his own PR company – dreamed up stunts to get paragraphs into the papers. The Beatles themselves, watched over with obsessive jealousy by Epstein, remained always tantalizingly out of reach. His NEMS work was for the advancement of Gerry Marsden and Billy J. Kramer, each awaiting Top Twenty success in cardboard shoes and cheap little shortie overcoats.
Oldham’s journeys north, though chilly and unglamorous, brought one further big advance. In Manchester, he met Tony Calder, a young agent handling local groups like the Hollies and Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders. Manchester groups were by now starting to benefit from London’s obsession with the Mersey Sound. Tony Calder also took on Oldham as publicist for his firm, Kennedy Street Enterprises. ‘It felt just like tiddlywinks. I’d already got Liverpool sewn up, with Epstein and NEMS. Now I’d got Manchester as well.’
A chance PR assignment for the American record producer Phil Spector, early in 1962, altered Oldham’s conception of how he might seize his still unspecified destiny. Up to then, in pop music, celebrity had come only to performers – the singers first, then the star guitarists and, latterly, the groups. No fame, or even credit, was given to the A & R men who arranged and supervised even the biggest hit recordings. Phil Spector was the first A & R man to be as well known as the artists he recorded – to produce each three-minute disc in his individual and unmistakable style of complex multitrack effects and cavernous echo: the Spector Wall of Sound.
Phil Spector became the epitome of all Andrew Loog Oldham wished to be. His persona was that of a semi-gangster, riding round in dark-windowed limousines, protected by ugly bodyguards with bulges under their arms. While Spector was in London, Andrew Loog Oldham rode round with him, devoutly questioning him about the secret of his success. Instead of the hoped-for technical hints, Phil Spector imparted a piece of advice which Oldham at the time found rather disappointing. If Oldham ever found a group to record, Spector said, he should on no account let them use the record company’s studio but should instead pay for an independent studio session and afterwards sell or lease back the tapes to the record company. That way, you had control and you had much more money.
In April 1963, the Beatles were number one in every chart with From Me to You. Gerry and the Pacemakers were Number Two with How Do You Do It? Oldham lost his retainer from NEMS Enterprises, and began looking around for something else to make up that monthly £25. Calling in at the Record Mirror office – a habitual haunt of his for picking up tips – he found Peter Jones enthusing over an unknown blues group whose fortunes Norman Jopling was about to change with a eulogistic article. As Oldham listened, the pop singer and the publicist faded; a brand-new incarnation of himself took shape on his mental Cinerama screen.
He drove to Richmond the very next Sunday. In the narrow passageway beside the Station Hotel, he met a boy and girl coming out into the warm spring dusk. Neither Mick Jagger nor his girlfriend Chrissie Shrimpton noticed Andrew Loog Oldham, for the simple reason that they were having a furious argument.
The Crawdaddy that night was anything but the wild spectacle Norman Jopling had described. Giorgio Gomelsky had been called away to Switzerland by the death of his father. Without Giorgio to enliven it, the club was in a torpid mood. The Stones had even resumed their old purist habit of playing seated on a ring of bar stools. ‘There was no production,’ Oldham says. ‘It was just a blues roots thing … “Here I am and this is what I’m playing.” Even so, I knew what I was looking at. It was Sex. And I was maybe forty-eight hours ahead of the pack.’
Suffering an uncharacteristic fit of shyness, Oldham did not approach the Stones that first night. For all his hubris, he knew he was in no position on his own to try to manage a pop group. As a PR man he could exist on the wing, using other people’s office desks and telephones. As a would-be manager, he could not function unless connected to the crucial network of tour promoters, song pluggers and record company talent scouts. He realized there was no alternative – his discovery would have to be shared.
His natural first choice was the PR client who happened to be Britain’s most famous pop manager. Oldham went to Brian Epstein and said he would be leaving NEMS Enterprises as he’d found this great group out at Richmond and wanted to have a shot at managing them. He offered a deal whereby, in exchange for some office space and minimal funding by NEMS, Epstein could have 50 per cent of the Rolling Stones. But Epstein felt that, with the Beatles and his other Liverpool acts, he already had enough and more to think about. He thus passed up the chance to manage what would become the two greatest supergroups of all time.
Oldham’s next approach was to Eric Easton, an agent handling such middle-of-the-road acts as guitarist Bert Weedon, singer Julie Grant and the pub pianist Mrs Mills. A former electronic organist, bespectacled and quiet, he seemed the least likely of all patrons for a shaggy r & b band. None the less, he agreed to go with Oldham and see them the following Sunday night, even though it would mean missing his favourite television programme, Sunday Night at the London Palladium.
For a second time, Oldham watched the Stones play their ‘blue-roots thing’ behind their diffident, loose-lipped vocalist in his sloppy student pullover. At the end, Eric Easton, who also hired out electronic organs to Butlins holiday camps, gave Oldham a look that was only the faintest ‘maybe’. Oldham approached the group’s drummer, a sad-faced, smartly dressed boy, and asked who their leader was. Charlie Watts pointed to Brian Jones. Oldham remembers with what determination Brian headed him off from talking to either Mick or Keith. ‘Brian was a really weird shape with that big head, broad body and short legs, like a little Welsh pony. But he had incredible magnetism. He could make you focus on just his face.’
There were subsequent meetings at Eric Easton’s London office, at which the cautious agent said he might be able to do something for the Stones though he was making no promises. His one creative suggestion, to Oldham privately, was that Mick Jagger’s voice might not be strong enough to stand the pressure of performing night after night. When Brian, as ‘leader’, was brought into the discussion, he seemed quite amenable to dropping Mick if necessary. But Oldham, for reasons he himself still did not quite understand, insisted that the vocalist was irreplaceable.
While Easton pondered overall strategy, Oldham applied himself to getting on friendly terms with the six Stones in a way that might have warned his older colleague of things to come. It was, indeed, the most brilliant self-selling job the nineteen-year-old had yet pulled off, expertly mixing audacity with intuition. He came on to Brian, Mick, Keith, Stew, Bill and Charlie as a London big shot who could give them anything they wanted and get anywhere they cared to go. At the same time, he was one of them, a rebel, an outsider who shared their quasi-Marxist ideals and evangelistic zeal for bringing pure blues and r & b to a wider audience. Without being able to play or sing a note, Andrew in effect joined the band.
When Giorgio Gomelsky returned from Switzerland early in May, he found that the Stones had signed an exclusive management agreement with Andrew Loog Oldham and Eric Easton. Brian Jones broke the news to Giorgio, mysteriously claiming that Oldham was a schoolfriend of his. Brian, in fact, had signed the agreement on behalf of all the Stones and had, additionally, done a private deal with Easton to receive £5 a week over and above what the others were paid in salary.
In 1962, the most unenvied figure in British pop music was Dick Rowe of Decca Records, The Man Who Turned The Beatles Down. It made no difference to remind himself – as Rowe constantly did – that his decision at the time had seemed entirely logical. Two auditions, in Liverpool, then London, had failed to detect any noticeable merit in a quartet of juvenile eccentrics singing Besame Mucho, Your Feet’s Too Big and other items perversely unsuited to current teenage fashion. So, in January 1962, Dick Rowe passed on the Beatles, instead signing up a group with the altogether more desirable and commercial name of Brian Poole and the Tremeloes.
Ten months later, the calamity of Dick Rowe’s decision confronted him each day of his working life. The Beatles had become the biggest thing in teenage entertainment since Elvis Presley. Dick Rowe had let them slip through his fingers and into the waiting clutches of Decca’s deadly rival, EMI.
For twenty years, these two companies had controlled British popular music, producing 95 per cent of all discs on their myriad labels as well as manufacturing the wireless sets, record players – and even needles – required to bring their product to life. Of the two, Decca seemed more wholeheartedly devoted to entertainment. The blue Decca label, the white Decca factory at Wimbledon, were synonymous with the age of the wind-up gramophone. Decca introduced the first long-playing record into Britain when EMI was still mainly an electrical company, manufacturing TV sets, radiograms and weapons systems for the then War Office.
Decca was the creation – and, substantially, the property – of Sir Edward Lewis, a white-haired, gangling man who, even on days that paid high dividends, was seldom observed to smile. For Sir Edward, recorded music was a commodity little different from soap or safety pins, and only really in tune if it harmonized with a good showing on the Stock Exchange, Sir Edward Lewis’s favourite place in the world. ‘I only ever knew of one person who could make him laugh,’ Dick Rowe remembered later. ‘That was Tommy Cooper. If Sir Edward ever left the office early, you could be sure Tommy Cooper was on television that night,’
Decca’s pre-eminence as a record company ended in 1954 with the arrival of Sir Joseph Lockwood, a successful flour miller, to the EMI chairmanship. Lockwood instantly halted EMI’s decline, ending the manufacture of radiograms and investing in a new record-pressing plant just in time for the first pop music boom. Sir Edward, for his part, took Lockwood’s success as a personal insult, and would speak of him only in the most slighting manner. He took some comfort from the fact that Lockwood, unlike himself, owned no substantial part of his company’s stock and was, therefore, ‘just an employee’.
Now, thanks to Dick Rowe, Lockwood had carried off the greatest prize of all. Not only the Beatles but all other northern groups and their new money-spinning sound seemed to have been engorged by EMI. No one wanted Decca after the preposterous mistake of its hapless A & R chief. ‘Things got so bad,’ a former Decca employee says, ‘that if a boy with a guitar had just walked along Albert Embankment past our office, the whole A & R staff would have rushed out to sign him up.’
Rowe’s only consolation was that no group, however big, could possibly appeal to British teenagers for longer than six months. He might have lost the Beatles, but he had a sporting chance of finding the next Beatles. It was to this objective that Rowe’s entire A & R department was now frenziedly devoted. Like every other record company, Decca had sent teams of talent scouts up to Liverpool to scour the Merseyside clubs and ballrooms. The fact that the Beatles’ home town was a seaport acted powerfully on the A & R men’s overheated minds. The search for new Beatles was widened to other seaports, Cardiff, Bristol and Southampton.
Dick Rowe himself was still drawn back, with remorseful fascination, to Liverpool. He was there again in the first week of May 1963, hoping to find the next Beatles in a talent contest he had been asked to help judge at the city’s Philharmonic Hall. To add to his discomfort, a Beatle, George Harrison, sat with him on the judging panel. Rowe remarked to George with a brave show of lightheartedness that he was still kicking himself. Though John Lennon had been heard to say he hoped the Decca man kicked himself to death, George seemed to cherish no animosity. ‘In fact,’ Rowe said, ‘he told me I’d been right to turn the Beatles down because they’d done such a terrible audition.’
Halfway through the talent contest, the next Beatles still had not materialized. George Harrison remarked to Dick Rowe that there was a group down in London he should consider signing; a group called the Rolling Stones who played each Sunday night at the Station Hotel, Richmond … When George turned round, he found he was talking to himself. Rowe’s chair was empty.
He remembered that, as he drove through Richmond after his headlong journey down from Liverpool, the sun was low in the sky, red and warm like a portent of redemption. ‘The sun was so bright that when I got into the club, I could hardly see anything at all. Just crowds of boys – I couldn’t see any girls. Crowds of boys, rising and falling on the balls of their feet.’ Unannounced – unnoticed in the Crawdaddy’s Sunday night crush – Dick Rowe stood and watched the five figures who were about to rescue his reputation.
Elated as he was, he forced himself to follow A & R protocol. ‘I’d never speak directly to a group that interested me. It was always to their agent or manager. I couldn’t find anything out in the club about who managed the Stones. Next morning, I was in my office at eight o’clock ringing round all the main agencies. No one I spoke to seemed to have heard of the Rolling Stones. Eventually someone said, “Try Eric Easton.” I knew Eric, of course. Once I’d spoken to him, the whole deal went through in a matter of days.’
Before the Stones could sign with Decca, one small difficulty had to be overcome. The tape of five songs they had recorded with Glyn Johns at IBC studios was still held by IBC, and could thus be termed a prior recording commitment. Eric Easton’s advice was that the Stones themselves should approach IBC, saying they had now split up and wanted to buy the tape back as a souvenir. An unsuspecting IBC agreed to return the tape for what it had cost in studio time: £109.
Within less than a week, Easton and Dick Rowe were concluding what Decca’s A & R chief presumed would be a straightforward two-year recording contract. If anything, Rowe considered, it showed largesse on Decca’s part. When Brian Epstein signed the Beatles with EMI, he had been forced, after many previous rejections, to accept a miserly rate of one old penny royalty per double-sided record, rising in yearly increments of one farthing. Rowe, therefore, felt it almost a point of honour to offer the Rolling Stones, however unknown and untried, the standard record royalty rate, five per cent of the retail price of each copy sold.
Thus far, Dick Rowe’s dealings had been with his pleasant and obliging contemporary, Eric Easton. The familiar process, of doing deals quietly over the heads of inexperienced boys, was now rudely shattered by Easton’s nineteen-year-old associate. Before Andrew Loog Oldham even walked into Decca he had imagined the film cameras starting to roll on yet another version of himself. ‘I’d decided I was going to be a nasty little upstart tycoon shit.’ At his first meeting with Decca’s managing director, Bill Townsley, Oldham sat down, uninvited, and coolly put his feet up on Townsley’s desk.
Dick Rowe gazed just as expressively at the fair-haired youth who had peremptorily cut across his genial suggestions to Eric Easton about possible dates for the Stones to cut their first record at Decca’s West Hampstead studios, and which of Decca’s staff producers might supervise them. Oldham replied that the Stones would not be using Decca studios and, while Rowe was still goggling, added that they did not need a producer. They already had one, named Andrew Loog Oldham.
Oldham had never forgotten the advice imparted to him in the depths of Phil Spector’s limousine. That advice was, simply, that all material taped in the studios of a record company remained the company’s copyright. By recording the Stones independently, then leasing the record ‘masters’ back to Decca for manufacture and distribution, Oldham would retain the copyright and, simultaneously, rob Decca of control over what was recorded. Such a deal had not been proposed in the whole history of British recorded music. It was a measure of Decca’s desperation to launch the ‘new Beatles’ that Oldham’s conditions were accepted.
The sunglasses through which Andrew Loog Oldham blandly surveyed his disgruntled new associates were a further ploy borrowed from Phil Spector. Through his mind’s movie camera, he saw himself already as an English Spector – an entrepreneur as famous and glamorous as any performer in his care. So Oldham, despite never before having set foot in a record studio, announced to Dick Rowe and Decca that the Rolling Stones’ first single would be under his exclusive direction.
It was a simple matter, anyway, to hire a studio at Olympic Sound, just off Baker Street, at a fee of five pounds per hour. There, on May 10, 1963, Oldham met the six Stones under the slightly bemused eye of the single engineer, Roger Savage, whose services were included in the price.
Oldham had instructed the Stones to choose what they considered the five best numbers in their repertoire. He himself would then decide which would be the A-side and which the B-side of the single. That decision proved more troublesome than he had expected. The Stones’ best stage numbers were Roll Over Beethoven, Dust My Blues, Roadrunner – rhythm and blues standards, now so widely in use among other groups they could have little impact on the commercial record charts.
The final choice for the A-side was Come On, the Chuck Berry song they had already taped at IBC studios. As a number, its chief virtue was its obscurity. Few of Berry’s British fans had heard the original version with its uncharacteristically ill-humoured lyric and odd rumba beat. The B-side – which did not have to be so commercial – was another song already taped at IBC, Willie Dixon’s I Want to Be Loved.
For three hours or so, the Stones worked to polish a version of Come On, which, even at its best, would still betray for all time their sense of uneasy self-compromise. Chuck Berry’s perverse rumba was stripped down to bare guitars and bass, played at the tempo of rapid feet pattering in and out of a wah-wah harmonica riff. Mick Jagger’s vocal similarly purged the lyric of its exasperation at ramshackle cars and crossed telephone lines. Where Chuck Berry sang of ‘some stupid jerk’, Jagger felt it more judicious to say ‘some stupid guy’. Even with a key change, allowing much of the song to be repeated, the finished track lasted barely a minute and three-quarters.
As producer, Andrew Loog Oldham confined himself to watching the studio clock, fretting that another hour had passed and another five pounds had been spent. The final take was finished at just before 6 p.m. Unwilling to spend five pounds more, Oldham said that one would do and began to walk out of the studio. ‘What about mixing?’ the engineer asked in bewilderment. Britain’s putative Phil Spector had not realized that, after a song was taped, its separate vocal and instrumental tracks were then ‘mixed’ for internal balance. ‘You mix it,’ Oldham said airily. ‘I’ll drop in and pick it up in the morning.’
The result, even after mixing, was clearly far below even the very moderate standard of a 1963 pop single. Dick Rowe said so, and the Stones agreed. They were now as keen as Rowe that the single be recorded under experienced supervision in Decca’s own studios. There, at last, both Come On and I Want to Be Loved reached a standard satisfactory to musicians and A & R man. Then it was decided to go with the IBC version after all. The release date was fixed as June 7.
The Stones were now Decca recording artists, part of a galaxy of talent that included Little Richard, Tommy Steele, Duane Eddy and the works of Buddy Holly. For all that, while Eric Easton worked on their future career, present circumstances remained much as before. They continued playing the same few club dates for the same few pounds each – Giorgio’s Crawdaddy, the Marquee, Ken Colyer’s Studio 51. Even that former nest of folk purists was now so packed out each Sunday afternoon that girls could reach the lavatory only by letting themselves be lifted up and passed along over people’s heads.
One Sunday at Studio 51, the crush was so fierce that a girl named Shirley Arnold fainted. She came to in the band’s changing room, under the solicitous gaze of the Stones and their young manager. Shirley was a passionate blues fan, then going out with a member of another r & b group, the Downliner Sect. She got talking to Oldham who, after very few minutes, offered her the job of organizing the Stones’ embryonic fan club. ‘I said I’d give it a go. There and then, Andrew handed me about three hundred postal orders that girls had sent in as subscriptions and said, “Okay, get on with it.”’
Decca, meanwhile, prepared to launch their new acquisition with all the fire and verve of civil servants on a Friday afternoon. Decca’s promotional strategy – in common with everything else – came directly from the chairman’s office. Sir Edward Lewis did not believe in publicity. In his experience, greater profits accrued from artists whose private lives remained obscure. So it had proved in the case of Ted Heath the bandleader, whose very death had gone largely unnoticed by his sizeable American public, thus allowing Decca to go on recording the Heath band as if he were still conducting them.
As Andrew Loog Oldham knew from his months as a publicist, there was only one sure way of pushing a debut single by an unknown group into the national Top Twenty charts. The group must appear on ABC-TV’s hugely popular Saturday night pop show, Thank Your Lucky Stars.
It seemed a great stroke of luck that Brian Matthew, compere of Thank Your Lucky Stars – and of BBC Radio’s equally influential Saturday Club programme – was also one of Eric Easton’s clients. Unfortunately, Matthew had so far reacted adversely to the Stones, criticizing Mick Jagger’s vocal style and their general scruffiness. To get a booking on Thank Your Lucky Stars, the Stones must conform to the pattern for all pop groups that the Beatles had ordained. They must wear matching stage suits, and look neat and clean and amiable.
Whatever outrage the Stones felt at his proposal was subdued by their eagerness to get in front of the TV cameras. They allowed themselves to be presented to Matthew and his producer, Philip Jones, in uniform outfits whose Carnaby cuteness might better have suited a team of chorus boys. The jackets were houndstooth check bumfreezers, high-buttoning, with velvet half-collars. With the jackets went round-collar shirts, slim ties and Cuban-heeled Beatle boots. The ensemble had been financed – and chosen – by Eric Easton, and earned nods of approval from all but those compelled to button and tab themselves into it. The humiliation, though, was more than worthwhile. The Stones were booked to mime their single on Thank Your Lucky Stars on the day of its release, June 7.
The alterations did not stop there. Keith Richards, to his eternal mystification, was told to drop the ‘s’ from his surname to give it a ‘more pop sound’, like Cliff Richard. And Ian Stewart, the Stones’ piano player, chauffeur and provider of luncheon vouchers, was dropped from the stage line-up. Six in one group was too many, Andrew Loog Oldham had decided. And Stew, with his short hair, beefy arms and pugnaciously sensible face, looked ‘too normal’ for what Oldham’s mental movie camera was already starting to run.
‘It wasn’t done very nicely,’ Stewart remembered. ‘I just turned up one day to find the others had stage suits and there was no stage suit for me. None of them even mentioned it to me – apart from Brian. “You’re still a full member of the group, Stew,” he kept telling me. “You’ll still get a sixth share, I promise you.’”
The Stones, however, did not ditch Stew with the amnesiac finality with which the Beatles had ditched their first drummer, Pete Best, in favour of Ringo Starr. Oldham’s request was that Stew should stay on as their roadie, driver and packhorse and occasional back-up pianist. He agreed, though his pride was badly hurt. ‘I thought, “I can’t go back to ICI after this. I might as well stay with them and see the world.”’
Thank Your Lucky Stars on June 7, 1963, offered Britain’s teenagers the customary spectacle of records mimed by their artists, not always accurately, dwarfed by elaborate stage sets and half-drowned by pre-recorded female screams. Top of the bill was Helen Shapiro, a sixteen-year-old got up to look forty, in bouffant hair and flouncy petticoats. The Viscounts, an English close-harmony trio, sang their cover version of the American novelty hit Who Put the Bomp? Two disc jockeys, Pete Murray and Jimmy Henney, delivered judgement on new singles with all the fatuous disinterest of men in their late thirties, aided by a local girl named Janice Nicholls, whose invariable adjudication, ‘I’ll give it five’ – or, in Birmingham dialect, ‘Oi’ll give eet foive’ – had become a national catch phrase.
The Stones were bottom of the bill and, as such, merited only a simple, two-sided set, decorated with cut-out playing-card shapes. Mick stood on a low plinth, just to the rear of Brian and Bill. Keith, seated on a stool, and Charlie at his drums were seen in profile. Their spot in all lasted barely a minute and a half. As the cameras moved up and back, and pre-recorded screams raged around them, the houndstooth-checked, velvet-collared Rolling Stones tried as hard as they could, or ever would again, to be a conventional pop group.
A minute and a half proved enough for many viewers, when the recorded show was broadcast the following weekend. Afterwards, ABC-TV’s Birmingham switchboard was jammed with calls protesting that such a scruffy group had appeared on Lucky Stars, and hoping they would not be invited back.
First review of Come On in the trade press new release columns were not much better. Record Mirror, the most enthusiastic, commended ‘a bluesy, commercial group which could make the charts in a small way’. For the pop-oriented Disc and New Musical Express, Come On fell between two stools, being neither ‘Mersey Sound’ nor imported American ballad. What little radio play the single received made it sound thin and anaemic. A month after its release, the New Musical Express chart showed it at number twenty-six, only one place higher than the Beatles’ From Me to You, issued almost three months earlier.
The only significant piece of publicity, apart from Thank Your Lucky Stars, came about thanks to Giorgio Gomelsky’s good nature. Giorgio bore the Stones no ill will for his peremptory squeezing out, and had gone on plugging them enthusiastically to his friends in Fleet Street. Patrick Doncaster, the Daily Mirror’s rather elderly pop columnist, was at length persuaded to come to Richmond and write about the Crawdaddy Club, the Stones and a new young group, the Yardbirds, whom Giorgio now promoted.
Doncaster’s full-page Mirror piece on June 13 set the scene only too well. The Ind Coope brewery – which had not previously been aware of the frolics conducted on its property – summarily evicted Giorgio Gomelsky from the Station Hotel’s back room. Thereafter, the Crawdaddy Club convened in the open air at Richmond Athletic Ground. The Stones, the Yardbirds, Cyril Davies and Long John Baldry played on a rugby pitch in front of the main grandstand, to promenading audiences of up to a thousand.
Eric Easton, meanwhile, laboured to set the Stones on the path ordained for an aspiring beat group – the dreary round-Britain path of the pop package show. It was no mean achievement, after the poor chart performance of Come On, for Easton to book them into a nationwide tour beginning on September 29, headed by America’s famous Everly Brothers and featuring the Stones’ own r & b hero, Bo Diddley.
The prospect was one alluring enough to make up Mick Jagger’s mind, at last, about the direction he wanted his life to take. Even after the Stones had signed with Decca, he had continued to hover between music and the London School of Economics, keeping all options open to a point where the other Stones became irritated hardly less than Joe and Eva Jagger, and even threatened to drop him as vocalist if he were not available to go on tour. So Mick Jagger went to the LSE registrar and announced he would not be completing his economics course. To his surprise, and relief, no obstacle was put in his way. ‘The registrar said I could go back later if I wanted. It was all surprisingly easy.’
On August 12, the Stones made their last appearance on their Richmond home turf, playing at the Evening News-sponsored National Jazz and Blues Festival with Acker Bilk, Cyril Davies and Long John Baldry. It was to be almost their only London booking prior to leaving on tour with the Everly Brothers. The next step in Eric Easton’s strategy was to launch them into a practically non-stop schedule of one-nighters at ballrooms in remote East Anglian towns like Wisbech, Soham, Whittlesey and King’s Lynn.
For most of Britain throughout that unseasonably wet summer, interest had centred on the developing scandal of John Profumo, a Conservative cabinet minister, Christine Keeler, his twenty-two-year-old mistress, and the subsequent lurid press exposures which had revealed Britain’s High Tory establishment to be sexually linked with an underworld of call girls, Mayfair pimps, property racketeers and even – it was suggested – Russian spies. For once, Britain suspended disapproval of its renegade young to contemplate the possibility that senior government ministers indulged in public fellatio; that ‘up to eight’ High Court judges had been involved in a single sex orgy; that at a fashionable London dinner party, another eminent politician had waited at table naked and masked and wearing a placard which read ‘If my services don’t please you, whip me.’
By contrast with Profumo, Christine Keeler, Stephen Ward and Mandy Rice-Davies, the preoccupations of teenagers seemed positively wholesome. The exact nature of that preoccupation was earnestly sought by London’s commercial TV company, Associated-Rediffusion, in planning a new weekend pop music show to pre-empt Thank Your Lucky Stars. The A-R show was to be called Ready, Steady, Go and be introduced – unprecedentedly – by people the same age as its audience. The producer, Elkan Allan, auditioned each applicant for the job by asking one question: ‘What do you think young people in this country care about most?’ A girl named Cathy McGowan was hired for answering, simply, ‘Clothes.’
It was the clothes of its audience – not confined to seats as before in such shows, but thronging a large, high-ceilinged, multi-level studio – which established Ready, Steady, Go as the epitome of a new pop style, a fashion changing almost as quickly as did the Top Ten sounds. Hipster trousers, flared jeans, leather jackets, op-art dresses, the girls’ Quant crops, the boys’ Beatle cuts, seethed all around Cathy McGowan and the deliberately exposed TV hardware. The atmosphere was that of a King’s Road party where the performers themselves had just chanced to drop by. It was an atmosphere powerfully established by the show’s Friday-night slogan ‘The weekend starts here’; a feeling projected to millions that all belonged to the same quintessentially fashionable club whose only qualification was that you must be under twenty-one.
The Stones, to their great chagrin, spent those same Friday nights packed into Ian Stewart’s van, heading out through the East End to Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire or the Cambridgeshire Fens. It irked them particularly to think that the Beatles, mere northerners, were kings of the new London while they themselves suffered this provincial banishment. In Stew’s van, Bill Wyman always insisted on the front passenger seat as safeguard against the travel sickness from which he claimed to have suffered since childhood. Not for years did the others realize that was Bill’s way of securing the van’s most comfortable seat.
The town halls and ballrooms of Whittlesey, Soham and Wisbech were about as far as one could travel from Ready, Steady Go: big, draughty vaults, filled with boys in Fifties cowlicks and girls in twinsets and ballooned petticoats. The Stones’ r & b repertoire was greeted with puzzlement, if not downright hostility. Better things happened when they tried American songs in the pop-soul idiom – Lieber and Stoller’s Poison Ivy; Arthur Alexander’s You Better Move On. Even after Come On became a minor hit, the Stones were so ashamed of their performance on record, they refused to do the song on stage.
Somewhere between Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire, and the Everly Brothers tour, Eric Easton’s houndstooth-check jackets were cast off for good. It was a discreet rebellion, led – surprisingly – by Charlie Watts, the first to abandon his stage suit in some Fenland dressing room. Keith Richard made his unwearable by multilayered whisky and chocolate stains. The group photograph taken for the tour poster shows them restored to their corduroys and polo necks, standing on a jetty beside the Thames, not far from Edith Grove. A short pre-tour feature in New Musical Express began: ‘They are the group who prefer casual wear to stage suits and who sometimes don’t bother to change before going onstage …’
The tour that opened at the London New Victoria Cinema on September 29 was an odd mélange assembled by its promoter – the frightening Don Arden – to attract all possible levels of the pop listening public. The Everly Brothers were fading legends of the rock ’n’ roll Fifties. Bo Diddley was a cult r & b star. The Flintstones were a heavy saxophone combo. Julie Grant – another Eric Easton client – was a middle-of-the-road ballad singer. When, after barely a week, the mixture proved insufficiently powerful at the box office, Don Arden hastily flew in a second rock ’n’ roll legend Little Richard, to co-star with the Everlys.
For the Stones – given small-type billing equal to Julie Grant – what mattered most was the honour of appearing on the same programme as their idol, Bo Diddley. To show their respect, they dropped all Bo Diddley material from their tour act. Diddley was flattered by the homage of his five shaggy acolytes and was so impressed by Bill and Charlie’s playing he asked both to appear with him as session men on BBC Radio’s Saturday Club.
