Mick Jagger

Puts it down

M: ‘You were saying?’

J & S: Inordinate mumbles

M: ‘I thought you were the bloke coming to see me s’morning about some script.’

J: ‘Oh, is that for the Rice Krispies advertisement?’

M: ‘No, but how did you know about that?’

J: ‘Oh we were there when that bloke asked you.’

S: ‘We were in your dressing room at Wimbledon.’

J: ‘Yes, it was Brian that wanted to do it, wasn’t it?!’

No answer. Various other topics of conversation, then

M: ‘What’s the time?’

J: ‘Twenty past twelve.’

M: ‘Oh, he’ll be here soon. I’ve got to go & have a bath & get some clothes on. I’d invite you up but it’s a bit awkward – you do understand.’

Giggles

J & S: ‘Yes, we understand.’

M: ‘And I’ve only got a little room to myself. Can’t very well invite you in there, people might get ideas.’

J & S: ‘Uh . . . yea.’

Shows us the door

M: ‘Oh well, give us a ring sometime, when we’re at a theatre or dance hall & come and see us.’ Mumble Mumble ‘Come into the dressing room. Cheerio.’

J & S: ‘Cheerio.’

Exit

Door slams shut.

We trail around Willesden miserably – we return to Wimbledon & make dinner at around 3.30. We feel choked up & a bit silly.

GOING OUT WITH Jean Shrimpton’s younger sister was not Mick’s automatic passport into the upper echelons of Swinging London. Jean had always done her best to keep Chrissie at arm’s length and, besides, was still far from certain about the ‘ugly’ young man who sometimes decorously occupied her bed at her parents’ home in Buckinghamshire while she was away. Far more important to Mick’s initial social rise was David Bailey, the East End photographer who had put Jean into Vogue, made them both international celebrities and was now going out with her. Bailey, indeed, was to become a friend outlasting the era of both Shrimpton sisters; perhaps his closest ever outside music.

When the two first met, they could not have been much more unequal, one a nineteen-year-old LSE student, the other five years older and at a seemingly unsurpassable peak of celebrity. Mick was frankly awestruck by the glamour and sophistication of Bailey’s lifestyle – the Lotus Elan sports cars, mews studios and cowboy boots he had made a photographer’s essential accessories in place of potted palms, black cloths and ‘watch the birdie!’ Of no small influence either was the delighted frisson Bailey’s unreformed (and totally genuine) Cockney accent created among the debs and high-born female magazine editors who lionised him. Such was Mick’s admiration that he even allowed Bailey to tease him, as few others dared to do openly, about his appearance. When Eva Jagger took him shopping as a boy, Bailey used to joke, there would have been no problem about going into places where small children weren’t welcome. She could leave him outside, securely clamped to the shop window by his lips.

Early in their friendship, rather like Pip with Herbert Pocket in Dickens’s Great Expectations, Mick asked Bailey to take him to a posh restaurant and teach him how to conduct himself. They went to the Casserole on King’s Road, not far from the World’s End village where three hard-up Stones had so recently subsisted on stolen milk and stale fruit pies. Mick paid the bill – not an act to be much associated with him – but jibbed at Bailey’s suggestion that he should also leave a tip. Finally, he put down a pre-decimal ten-shilling (or ‘ten-bob’) note, equivalent to fifty pence today, with a 1964 purchasing power of £10. But as they left, Bailey saw him slip it back into his pocket.

Bailey soon picked up on Andrew Oldham’s influence over Mick, one that reminded him of a worldly-wise older brother with an awestruck younger one, and made his own moulding of Jean Shrimpton as a couture icon seem superficial by comparison. At the few Stones gigs he attended, he also found himself an uncomfortable witness to Brian Jones’s decreasing influence in the band and continual attempts to claw some power and status back. The photographer’s eagle eye for nuances noted that, while Mick was happy to zoom around with Jean and him in an unpretentious Mini-Minor, Brian drove a bulky Humber saloon, ‘the kind of car a vicar would use’. At the end of a gig, Bailey recalls, Mick and Keith would be like unkind children, playing an obviously habitual game of ‘let’s get away from Brian’.

Chrissie Shrimpton, too, recognised Oldham’s power over Mick, although at her tender age – she was still not yet nineteen – it represented unfathomably deep waters. Chrissie now spent most nights with Mick at 33 Mapesbury Road while officially sharing a bedsit with her friend Liz Gribben for the sake of appearances with her parents. When Jacqui Graham or other schoolgirl fans rang up the flat, a terse female voice would answer, discouraging them from further surprise appearances on the front doorstep.

For all the Stones’ growing fame, Mick still felt it a huge feather in his cap to be going out with Jean Shrimpton’s sister, even though Chrissie refused to capitalise on her surname or her own spectacular looks, and continued to work as a secretary, now at the Stones’ record company, Decca. ‘I still wanted to be with him all the time,’ she remembers. ‘The trouble was that my life was going on mostly in the daytime and Mick’s mostly went on at night.’ And Oldham’s rival stake in him was something she could only characterise as ‘powerful and frightening’.

The explosive, sometimes physically violent quarrels she and Mick had always had increased exponentially as the Stones’ fame did and he became more aware of himself as their star attraction and more prone to shove her out of sight whenever female fans materialised. Mortifyingly, to someone who valued coolness and self-possession above all, the blow-ups with Chrissie increasingly tended to happen in front of other people, at gigs, parties or new clubs like the Ad Lib. ‘They once had a terrible one at Eric Easton’s office,’ Shirley Arnold remembers. ‘It ended with Chrissie kicking Mick down the stairs.’

The fans who thought him so untouchable would have been astonished by his distress after Chrissie had stormed off into the night, and repeated phone calls to her mother could not locate her. Andrew Oldham would receive an anguished SOS and would go and meet him, usually at a bench on the Thames Embankment as far as possible from other prying eyes and ears. As Oldham recalls in Stoned, Mick would pour out his side of the story and almost tearfully recount how Chrissie had gone for him with her fists. (She herself now says firmly that she never used fists and ‘he wasn’t a victim of domestic abuse’.) The heart-to-hearts with Oldham would often last the rest of the night, ending at dawn with a walk through the deserted West End and breakfast at a taxi drivers’ café.

Oldham writes in Stoned that during this period he and Mick were ‘as close as two young men could probably become’ – and there has been endless speculation ever since about the extent of that closeness. Oldham certainly was not homosexual – indeed, had lately begun going out with a Hampstead girl named Sheila Klein (a surname to have large resonance in another context later in this story) whom he was soon to marry. At the same time, with his homing spirit for all outrage, he sought out the company of notable gay men in the music business – in particular the composer of Oliver!, Lionel Bart – and added their gestures and speech mannerisms to his repertoire of devices for amusing his friends and disconcerting his foes.

At all events, rumours began to fly around that in the extremely crowded quarters of 33 Mapesbury Road Mick and Oldham’s closeness extended to sharing the same bed. One must hasten to add that, in purer-minded 1964, that did not necessarily signify what it would today. Young men could still have platonic friendships in the Victorian mode, sharing flats, rooms and even beds (as pop band members often did on tour) without the slightest homoerotic overtones. Oldham’s own memoirs recall a night when the two of them ended up at his mother’s flat in Netherhall Gardens, Hampstead, and, rather than struggle home to Willesden, decided to crash out there. When Mrs Oldham looked into his room the next afternoon, she found them both squeezed into his single bed, still dead to the world.

According to Chrissie, Oldham’s soon-to-be fiancée, Sheila Klein, was also vexed by these rumours and – on a different occasion, at Mapesbury Road – suggested that the two of them should investigate for themselves. ‘[Sheila] got me to wait all night with her to see if Andrew and Mick slept in the same bed and they did . . . We found them asleep, facing the same way, and I can remember thinking how sweet they looked. Sheila said, “There, I knew they were!” and I still didn’t know what she meant.’

ON 7 FEBRUARY 1964 the Beatles had crossed the Atlantic for the first time, touching down in New York amid scenes of juvenile hysteria that made European Beatlemania seem muted by comparison and ending American dominance of pop music with a single appearance on the nationwide Ed Sullivan TV show. They were Britain’s most successful export since Shakespeare and Scotch whisky, ambassadors of seemingly boundless charm and good manners whose once-controversial hair was now regarded back home as a precious national asset. During a reception for them in Washington, DC, a woman guest produced some nail scissors and playfully snipped a lock or two from the back of Ringo Starr’s neck. For the attendant British media, it was an outrage tantamount to defacing the Crown Jewels.

While the Beatles conquered America, the Rolling Stones had to be content with conquering the American act meant to have headlined their second UK package tour. This was Phil Spector’s black female vocal trio the Ronettes, whose tumultuous ‘Be My Baby’ was a UK hit single currently far outselling ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’. They were also sexy in a way no female pop group had ever been, with their beehive hair, brazen eye makeup and slinky, chiffon-sleeved trouser suits. Even that could not save them from the same fate as the Everly Brothers, two months previously. Before the tour even began, the Stones replaced them as top of the bill.

Spector, the trio’s manager as well as record producer, was already fixated on lead singer Veronica – ‘Ronnie’ – Bennett (whom he would later subject to a gothic horror story of a marriage). Having received an advance character sketch of the top three Stones from his would-be British counterpart, Andrew Oldham, he sent them a stern collective telegram saying ‘Leave my girls alone’. This did not stop both Mick and Keith from making a beeline for Ronnie’s beehive at a party at deejay Tony Hall’s Mayfair flat which John Lennon and George Harrison also attended on the eve of their departure for America. Boyfriend magazine’s correspondent, Maureen O’Grady, remembers the atypical tension between the Dartford chums as they competed for Ronnie’s attention, and Mick’s sulky pique when she proved immune to his charms and went off with Beatle George.

With ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ barely out of the Top 10, the insatiable pop music machine was already slavering for a third Rolling Stones single. And this time there would be no friendly Beatles to help out. Instead, the Stones looked beyond the over-ransacked R&B back catalogue to the one white American performer who counted as an equal influence on them all. The unanimous choice was ‘Not Fade Away’, the B-side to Buddy Holly’s 1957 hit ‘Oh Boy’, which Mick had seen Holly play live at the Woolwich Granada cinema during the one British tour he managed before his premature death. Serendipitously, the Stones–Ronettes show would appear at the same venue.

‘Not Fade Away’ was recorded at Regent Sound Studios during a brief interlude between early tour dates. To lighten an initially rather tired, grumpy atmosphere, Oldham turned the session into a booze-fuelled party, inviting various other pop personalities along to lend a hand. The American singer Gene Pitney, a former PR client of Oldham’s, contributed extra percussion and an outsize bottle of cognac. Graham Nash and Allan Clarke of the (highly appropriate) Hollies dropped by to watch while the great Phil Spector, who had formerly produced Pitney’s records, shook maracas.

Buddy Holly and the Crickets’ ‘Not Fade Away’ had been an almost hymn-like chant of a cappella voices, whose only beat was drumsticks tapping on a cardboard box. But the Stones’ cover version was as full-on and aggressive as ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, with Keith’s rhythm guitar turned up to maximum for the first – but not last – time in the staccato, seesaw beat invented by their late tour companion Bo Diddley. Mick’s vocal made no attempt to replicate Holly’s subtlety and charm, but stuck to the same snarling sexual challenge as before. In counterpoint to Keith’s rhythm-led chords, Brian supplied a throbbing harmonica bottom line that made the others, temporarily, forgive him everything. The result might not exactly be a Wall of Sound on the Phil Spector level, Andrew Oldham commented, but it certainly was a Wall of Noise.

With nothing to put on the B-side, and tipsiness now firmly in control, Spector and Mick together cobbled up a song called ‘Little by Little’, an outright copy of Jimmy Reed’s ‘Shame Shame Shame’. At a later session, two further tracks were put on tape, both obviously unreleasable for commercial purposes. ‘And Mr Spector and Mr Pitney Came Too’ was a free-for-all instrumental featuring a wicked Mick take-off of Decca Records’ elderly boss Sir Edward Lewis. ‘Andrew’s Blues’ was a pornographic monologue by Phil Spector, dedicated to his British disciple-in-chief, featuring Allan Clarke and Graham Nash on back-up vocals.

When ‘Not Fade Away’ was released on 21 February few among the target audience even recognised it as a Buddy Holly homage. In its raw belligerence it seemed quintessentially Rolling Stones, which by now meant quintessentially Mick. For Jacqui Graham and her ilk, the accompanying vision was not of a bespectacled young Texan, dead too soon, but of ironic eyes and overstuffed, well-moistened lips slurring Holly’s original ‘A love for real will not fade away’ to a barely grammatical ‘Love is love and not fade away’; turning wistful hope into a sexual fait accompli. The single raced up every UK chart, peaking at No. 3, while Mick was still out on the road, upstaging, if not upending, Ronnie of the Ronettes.

With so many readers – or, at least, readers’ offspring – converted to the Stones, Britain’s national press now had to find something positive to say as well as recoiling like a Victorian maiden aunt from their hair and ‘dirtiness’. And the line from Fleet Street could not have been more perfect if Andrew Oldham had dictated it himself. ‘They look,’ said the Daily Express, ‘like boys whom any self-respecting mum would lock in the bathroom . . . five tough young London-based music-makers with doorstep mouths, pallid cheeks and unkempt hair . . . but now that the Beatles have registered with all age-groups, the Rolling Stones have taken over as the voice of the teens.’ Maureen Cleave of the London Evening Standard – who had been among the first national columnists to interview the Beatles – wrote about the Stones in a tone of repugnance more valuable than five-star adulation: ‘They’ve done terrible things to the music scene, set it back, I would say, about eight years . . . they’re a horrible-looking bunch, and Mick is indescribable.’

The rest of Fleet Street tumbled over itself to follow Oldham’s script, depicting the Beatles – without circulation-damaging lèse-majesté – as just a teensy bit staid and conventional and the Stones as their unchallenged successors at the cutting edge. The two bands’ followings were made to seem as incompatible and mutually hostile as supporters of rival soccer teams (though in truth there was huge overlap), one side of the stadium rooting for the honest, decent, caring North, the other for the cynical, arrogant, couldn’t-give-a-shit South; the family stands applauding tunefulness, charm and good grooming, the hooligan terraces cheering roughness, surliness and tonsorial anarchy. A few months earlier, schoolboys all over the country had been suspended for coming to class with Beatle cuts; now one with a Jagger hairdo was excluded until he had it ‘cut neatly like the Beatles’.

The raison d’être of all male pop stars, back through the Beatles and Elvis to Frank Sinatra and Rudy Vallee, had been sex appeal. Oldham’s greatest image coup for the Stones was to make them sexually menacing. In March, the (predominantly male) readers of Melody Maker were confronted with a banner headline he had skilfully fed the paper: WOULD YOU LET YOUR SISTER GO WITH A ROLLING STONE? The Express helpfully amplified this to WOULD YOU LET YOUR DAUGHTER MARRY A ROLLING STONE?, thereby conjuring up hideous mental pictures in respectable homes throughout Middle England. Nor did it need specifying which Rolling Stone most threatened the virtue of all those sisters and daughters. It was hard to think of a comparable bogeyman-seducer since Giacomo Casanova in eighteenth-century Italy.

On the road – travelling from gig to gig in a manner still totally law-abiding and unobtrusive – the band were publicly insulted and mocked, barred from hotels, refused service in restaurants, pubs and shops, at times even physically attacked. In Manchester, after their first Top of the Pops show, they went to a Chinese restaurant, were served pre-dinner drinks, but then sat for an hour without any food arriving. When they got up to leave, having scrupulously paid for their drinks, the chef burst out of the kitchen and chased them with a meat cleaver. On the Ronettes tour, their show at Slough’s Adelphi Theatre ended so late that the only restaurant still open in the area was the Heathrow Airport cafeteria. As they ate their plastic meals, a big American at the next table began yelling insults. Mick, impressively, went over to remonstrate and received a punch in the face that knocked him backwards. Keith tried to come to his aid, but was also felled. These being days long before airport security, Fleet Street never heard of the incident.

‘Not Fade Away’ ramped up the mayhem at Stones’ concerts – a strange outcome for Buddy Holly’s quiet little prairie hymn. It proved their best live number to date, not so much for Mick’s vocal as Brian’s harmonica playing. The former blond waxwork seemed to gain new energy, hunched over the stand mike with fringed eyes closed and shoulders grooving, as if literally blowing life into the embers of his leadership.

British pop’s notional North–South conflict reached a climax with its very own Battle of Gettysburg, a ‘Mad Mod Ball’, televised live from the Wembley Empire Pool arena and pitting the Rolling Stones against the cream of Merseybeat acts including Cilla Black, the Fourmost, the Searchers and Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas. When the Stones arrived, they found they were expected to perform on a revolving rostrum in the midst of some eight thousand already demented fans. The set-up terrified Mick, who was convinced he would be pulled off the stage before the end of his first song and that someone might actually be killed. To reach the stage, he and the others had to run through an avenue of police and stewards, implausibly miming song words while one of their tracks was played over the loudspeaker system. The cordon immediately gave way against the weight of the crowd, leaving the Stones submerged among mad Mods while their music echoed round a bare rostrum.

After their set, they were marooned onstage for a further half hour, fighting off would-be boarders, while a contingent of Rockers, the Mods’ motorbike-riding arch-foes, staged a counter-riot out in the street that resulted in thirty arrests. Unlike the real Gettysburg, it was a night of unstoppable victory for the South over those and all other rivals but one. ‘In mass popularity,’ wrote Melody Maker’s chief correspondent, Ray Coleman, ‘the Stones are second only to the Beatles.’

THAT POSITION, HOWEVER, could not be maintained simply by doing live shows. To stay ahead of Merseybeat and offer the Beatles any real challenge, the Stones had to come up with a new single as big as ‘Not Fade Away’ and – such was the rate of the pop charts’ metabolism – keep coming up with them at a rate of one roughly every twelve weeks. And the search for songs they could cover without compromising their ideals as a blues band or their carefully cultivated bad-boy image was growing ever more problematic.