Mick Jagger

Since their discussion about cowboys and guitars as seven-year-olds, they had remained vaguely in each other’s orbit without being friends. When the Jaggers lived on Denver Road in the centre of Dartford, Keith’s home had been on Chastillian Road, literally one street away. Their mothers were on casually friendly terms, and would exchange family news if ever they chanced to meet around town. But after Wentworth their only further encounter had been one summer day outside Dartford Library when Mike had a holiday job selling ice cream and Keith, recognising him, stopped and bought one. That time, their conversation had been even briefer, albeit punctuated by a prophetic lapping tongue.

As eighteen-year-olds, waiting among the diurnal wage slaves at Dartford Station, they could not have looked more different. Mike was a typical middle-class student with his beige wool cardigan and black-, purple- and yellow-striped LSE scarf. Keith, though also technically a student, did his utmost not to resemble one with his faded blue denim jeans and jerkin and lilac-coloured shirt. To 1961 eyes, that made an unpleasing cross between a Teddy Boy and a beatnik.

Keith instantly recognised Mike by the lips, as Mike did Keith by the almost skull-bony face and protruding ears that had barely changed since he was in short trousers. It also happened that Mike was carrying two albums he had just received from the Chess label in Chicago, The Best of Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry’s Rockin’ at the Hops. ‘To me,’ Keith would recall, ‘that was Captain Morgan’s treasure. I thought, “I know you. And what you got under your arm’s worth robbing.”’

The upshot was that when their train pulled in, they decided to travel together. Rattling through the Kentish suburbs, they found they had other idols in common, a crowd almost as dense as the newspaper-reading, strap-hanging one around them: Sonny Boy Williamson . . . John Lee Hooker . . . Howlin’ Wolf . . . Willie Dixon . . . Jimmy Reed . . . Jimmy Witherspoon . . . T-Bone Walker . . . Little Walter . . . Never one to stint on melodrama, Keith would afterwards equate the moment with the blues’ darkest fable – young Robert Johnson keeping a tryst with the devil and, Faust-like, bartering his soul to be able to play like an angel. ‘Just sitting on that train . . . it was almost like we made a deal without knowing it, like Robert did.’ When the train pulled into Sidcup, he was so absorbed in copying down the serial numbers on Mike’s albums that he almost forgot to get off.

Keith not only had music in his blood (where it was destined to be severely jostled by other, more questionable additives) but guitar wood almost in his bones. Once again, Kent could claim little of the credit. On his mother’s side, he was descended from French Huguenots, Protestants who had fled Catholic persecution in their own country and found asylum in the Channel Isles. The music was infused largely through his maternal grandfather, Theodore Augustus Dupree, who led a succession of semi-professional dance bands and played numerous instruments, including piano, saxophone, violin and guitar. One of Keith’s great childhood treats – all in all somewhat fewer than Mike Jagger enjoyed – was to accompany his ‘Grandfather Gus’ to the Ivor Mairants music store in London’s West End, where guitars were custom-built on the premises. Sometimes he would be allowed into the workshops to watch the fascinating silhouettes take shape and inhale the aromas of raw rosewood, resin and varnish; despite stiff competition, the headiest narcotic he would ever know.

An only child, he had been raised by parents who in every way were the opposite of Mike’s. His father, Bert Richards, a dour, introverted character, worked punishingly long shifts as a supervisor in a lightbulb factory and so had little energy left over to be an authority figure and role model like Joe Jagger. In equal contrast with Eva Jagger, Keith’s mother, Doris, was a sunny-natured, down-to-earth woman who spoiled him rotten, loved music, and had an eclectic taste ranging from Sarah Vaughan to Mozart. As she washed up his dirty dishes with the radio blaring, she’d call out to him to ‘listen to that blue note!’

Doris’s refusal ever to make Keith toe the line had withstood every sanction of mid-fifties state schooling and resulted in an intelligent, perceptive boy being branded an irredeemable dunce. By the age of thirteen, he was regarded as an academic no-hoper and had been consigned to Dartford Technical School, hopefully to acquire some honest artisan trade. The school was in Wilmington, which meant he unknowingly crossed paths with Mike every morning and evening as Mike went to and from Dartford Grammar. At Dartford Tech, he was as inattentive and disruptive as at school, and was expelled after two years without a single plumbing or bricklaying certificate to his name.

Sidcup Art College was the bottom of the heap. In this era, even the smallest British town usually had its own college or school of art built in Victorian mock-Gothic style, a civic amenity as familiar as the library or the swimming baths. All were open to school leavers with the faintest artistic bent, which as a rule meant misfits who had not reached university standard but lacked the drive to go out and find a job. Since the fifties, a secondary role of art schools had been giving shelter to young men whose obsession with rock ’n’ roll music seemed destined to take them nowhere. Keith had joined an unwitting brotherhood that also included, or would include, John Lennon, Peter Townshend, Eric Clapton, Ronnie Wood, Ray Davies, Syd Barrett and David Jones, later Bowie.

As a working-class teenager, he felt the full impact of rock ’n’ roll’s first wave, rather than waiting around like bourgeois Mike for it to clean up its act. The national guitar fever unleashed by Elvis Presley had infected him long ago, thanks to Grandfather Gus and the craftsmen at Ivor Mairants’s. His adoring mum bought him his first guitar for seven pounds, out of her wages from working in a Dartford baker’s shop. Though he could sing – in fact, had sung soprano in the massed choirs at the Queen’s coronation – his ambition was to be like Scotty Moore, the solo guitarist in Presley’s backing trio, whose light and jaunty rockabilly riffs somehow perfectly set off the King’s brooding sexual menace.

At Sidcup Art College he did little on a creative level, apart from developing what would become a near genius for vandalism. Musically speaking, however, the college provided an education which he devoured like none before. Among its students was a clique of hard-core blues enthusiasts, as usual acting like a resistance cell in an occupied country. Their moving spirit, Dick Taylor, had lately arrived from Dartford Grammar School, where he had belonged to an identical underground movement with Mike Jagger. Dick converted Keith to the blues just as he’d converted Mike a year earlier. In the process, he sometimes mentioned playing in a band, but so vaguely that Keith never realised his old primary schoolmate was also a member. He had in fact been longing to join but, says Taylor, was ‘too shy to ask’.

After their chance reunion on that morning commuter train, Mike and Keith met up again at Dartford’s only cool place, the Carousel coffee bar, and were soon regularly hanging out together. Keith brought along his guitar, an acoustic Hofner cello model with F-holes, and Mike revealed that, despite his college scarf and well-bred accent, he sang blues. They began making music together immediately, finding their tastes identical – blues, with some pop if it was good – and their empathy almost telepathic. ‘We’d hear something, we’d both look at each other at once,’ Keith would later write in his autobiography, Life. ‘We’d hear a record and go “That’s wrong. That’s faking it. That’s real.”’ As with two other total opposites, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who had met in Liverpool four years earlier, their character differences only seemed to cement the friendship. ‘[Mike] liked Keith’s laid-back quality, his tough stance, his obsession with the guitar,’ says Taylor, ‘and Keith was attracted to Mike’s intelligence, his dramatic flair.’

Mike was all for bringing Keith into the unnamed blues band that still somehow struggled along. But aside from Taylor, there were two other members to convince. Although Bob Beckwith and Alan Etherington had also now left Dartford Grammar School, both still lived at home, in circumstances as irreproachably middle class as the Jaggers’. Keith was not simply their social inferior, but hailed from very much the wrong side of the tracks: he lived in a council house on the definitely rough Temple Hill estate in east Dartford, and was known to hang out with the town’s most disreputable ‘Teds’. However, one band practice session was enough for Beckwith and Etherington to agree with Taylor’s estimate of Mike’s mate as ‘an absolute lout . . . but a really nice lout’. The line-up obligingly rearranged itself so that Keith could alternate on lead guitar with Beckwith.

Chuck Berry was Keith’s real passport into their ranks. For Berry had done what no schoolteacher or college lecturer could – made him pay attention and apply himself. The gymnastic electric riffs with which Berry punctuated his vocals were still way beyond most of his young British admirers. But Keith, by listening to the records over and over, had nailed every last note and half chord in ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’, ‘Memphis, Tennessee’, even the complex intro and solo to ‘Johnny B. Goode’, where Berry somehow single-handedly sounded like two lead guitarists trying to outpick each other. Mike’s voice, if it resembled anyone’s, had always sounded a bit like Berry’s; in this authentic instrumental setting, he now became Chuck almost to the life.

With Keith’s arrival, the band finally acquired a name, Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys. His guitar had the name ‘Blue Boy’ inside it, and ‘Little Boy Blue’ was a pseudonym of the blues giant Sonny Boy Williamson. There was also a hint of giggle-making double entendre (‘Little Boy Blue, come blow up your horn’) and an ironic nod to The Blue Boy, Thomas Gainsborough’s eighteenth-century portrait of an angelic youth in sky-coloured satin. In other words, they could not have dreamed up anything much worse.

Away from the band, not all Mike’s friends were quite so accepting of Keith. Alan Etherington recalls that in their wider ex-Dartford Grammar School circle, there would sometimes be parties to which Mike’s Teddy Boy friend was pointedly not invited. That used to upset Mike, showing his bandmates a more sensitive, caring person than they previously had taken him for. He adopted a protective attitude towards Keith – who was not nearly as tough as he pretended, and in many ways a rather sensitive, vulnerable soul – while Keith, in return, followed him with almost dog-like devotion.

Mike, for his part, crossed over to Keith’s side of the tracks without any problem. The Richardses’ cosy, untidy council house on Spielman Road was the pleasantest possible contrast to the spotless and regimented Jagger home in The Close. Keith had no vigorous dad around to insist on weight training or team washing up, and Doris was motherly and easygoing in a way that Eva Jagger, for all her sterling qualities, had never been. When the Richardses went away for the weekend to Beesands in Devon that summer, Mike accompanied them in their battered old Vauxhall car. Keith took his guitar, and the two friends entertained customers at the local pub by playing Everly Brothers songs. Otherwise, Doris Richards remembered Mike being ‘bored to tears’ and repeatedly moaning, ‘No women . . . no women.’ On their marathon return journey, the car battery failed and they had to drive without lights. When finally they drew up outside the Jagger house four or five hours late, a tight-lipped Eva showed little sympathy.

Mike had always soaked up other people’s accents and mannerisms, usually in a mocking spirit, sometimes in an admiring one. Now, outside of college – and home – he abandoned his rather goody-goody, stripe-scarfed student persona and began to dress and carry himself more like Keith, no longer speaking in the quiet, accentless tone of a nicely brought-up middle-class boy, but in brash Kentish Cockney. Around Keith, he ceased to be known as ‘Mike’, that name so redolent of sports cars, Harris-tweed jackets, and beer in pewter mugs at smart roadhouses on Sunday mornings. Now, instead, he became ‘Mick’, its defiantly proletarian butt end, redolent only of reeking public bars and mad-drunk Irishmen. It was the tough-nut prefix for which ‘Jagger’ seemed to have been waiting all these years; joined together, the three syllables were already practically smashing windows.

While Keith’s arrival in the band widened their repertoire and gave their sound an extra bite, it did not make them any more ambitious or purposeful. They continued to practise together in a vacuum, still not trying to find live playing gigs or acquire a manager who might do so for them. Early in 1962, at Alan Etherington’s house, they used the Philips ‘Joystick’ recorder to tape Mike’s – or Mick’s – better Chuck Berry take-offs with Keith on lead guitar: two versions apiece of ‘Beautiful Delilah’, ‘Little Queenie’ and ‘Around and Around’, and one each of ‘Johnny B. Goode’ and ‘Down the Road Apiece’, plus Billy Boy Arnold’s ‘I Ain’t Got You’ and Ritchie Valens’s ‘La Bamba’. The tape was not submitted to a record company or talent agent, however, but simply analysed for instrumental and vocal faults, then forgotten – until thirty years later, when it was put up for auction as a unique glimpse of a superstar and supergroup in embryo, and sold for a fortune.

*

ON 15 MARCH 1962 Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys discovered they were not alone after all. Scanning that Thursday’s edition of Melody Maker, they lit on an advertisement for what was described – wholly justifiably, in their view – as ‘The Most Exciting Event of This Year’. In two evenings’ time, a club dedicated to blues music would open in the west London suburb of Ealing.

The club’s founder, Alexis Korner, was the first in a succession of characters from exotic regions far outside Kent who would assist Mike’s transfiguration into Mick. Born in Paris of an Austro-Russian father and a Greco-Turkish mother, Korner spent his infancy in Switzerland and North Africa before growing up in London and attending one of its most exclusive schools, St Paul’s. He became addicted to the blues as a schoolboy, rejecting all his various heritages to learn boogie-woogie piano, banjo and guitar, and feeling – much like our Dartford schoolboy in later years – an almost sacred mission to keep the music alive.

As a result, thirty-three-year-old Korner, a genial man with a shock of Afro hair before its time and an uneroded public school accent, now led Britain’s only full-time blues band, Blues Incorporated. The name had no twenty-first-century big-business associations, but had been inspired by Murder Inc., a Humphrey Bogart film about American gangsters – which, indeed, was very much how Korner’s musical contemporaries viewed him.

In 1962, any popular musician who wanted to make it in Britain had first to make it in Soho. The maze of narrow Georgian streets at the heart of London’s West End contained what little music industry the capital could yet boast, harbouring song publishers, pluggers, talent scouts, agents and recording studios – plus almost all the live venues that mattered – among its French restaurants, Italian groceries, cigar shops and seedy strip clubs. Rock ’n’ roll and skiffle had each been launched on the nation from Soho, and anyone in search of pop stardom, as well as of a flash of naked breasts, an espresso or coq au vin, instinctively headed there.

Since the Trad jazz boom, however, Soho was no longer a centre of musical pioneering but of entrenchment and prejudice. It was now where ‘pure’ jazz enthusiasts gathered – nowhere more fervently than at the National Jazz League’s own Marquee Club, a cellar designed (by the surrealist photographer Angus McBean) to resemble the interior of a tent. In this siege atmosphere, the blues was no longer recognised as a first cousin to jazz, but looked down on as disdainfully as was Trad, or even rock. Alexis Korner had formerly played banjo with the Barber band, which made his decision to put syncopated music behind him, and form a band essentially playing only twelve bars and three chords, all the more reprehensible.

Despite repeated rejections from Soho club managements – the brusquest from the Marquee’s manager, Harold Pendleton – Korner remained convinced there was an audience for blues who were at present totally excluded from London’s live music scene and would beat a path to Blues Incorporated’s door, if he could just provide them with one. Hence his decision to open his own club in the hopefully friendlier environs of the suburb where he’d grown up.

Like Dartford, Ealing had never previously been regarded as a crucible for the blues. It was an affluent, sedate and almost wholly ‘white’ residential area, best known for its eponymous film studios – maker of British screen classics like Kind Hearts and Coronets and Passport to Pimlico – and for having a ‘Broadway’ rather than just an ordinary High Street. Korner’s Ealing Club (a name more suggestive of golf or bridge than visceral music) was situated almost directly opposite Ealing Broadway tube station, underneath an ABC bakery and tea shop. Local matrons being served afternoon tea by frilly-aproned waitresses little suspected what was brewing beneath their feet.

Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys’ excitement over the new club was somewhat dampened by the inaccessibility of its location, twenty-odd miles to the north west of Dartford and a tricky journey, whether by road or public transport. Owing to prior commitments, they were not present at Korner’s opening night on 17 March. But the following Saturday the five of them set off for Ealing, packed into Alan Etherington’s father’s car, an appropriately named Riley Pathfinder.

First impressions were hardly promising. The club premises consisted of a shabby staircase and a single room, smelling dankly of the adjacent River Thames, with a central bar and a makeshift stage at one end. The kindred spirits waiting for showtime, no more than a couple of dozen strong, were equally uninspiring. Mick of the future would remember them as ‘trainspotters who needed somewhere to go . . . just a bunch of anoraks . . . and the girls were very thin on the ground’.

Excitement barely quickened when Blues Incorporated took the stage. The three main figures in the line-up, all men in their early thirties (advanced middle age by 1962 standards), were attired conventionally in white shirts with sober ties, baggy grey flannel trousers and black lace-up shoes, and had a serious, preoccupied air better suited to some chamber orchestra. But when they started playing, none of that mattered. The music was Chicago-style instrumental blues, a leisurely tag match between guitar, saxophone and harmonica that by rights should only have worked on a Roy Brown or Champion Jack Dupree live album soaked in the rotgut gin and cheap neon of the Windy City’s South Side. Yet astonishingly here it was, conjured up with near-perfect fidelity by a clump of square-looking Englishmen under a cake shop on Ealing Broadway.

The band was jointly fronted by Korner on guitar – usually seated on a chair – and his long-time playing partner, Cyril Davies, a burly metalworker from Harrow (the suburb, not the illustrious school) who had somehow turned himself into a virtuoso on blues piano, harmonica and twelve-string guitar. Their only other regular sideman was the tenor-sax player Dick Heckstall-Smith, a black-bearded agriculture graduate from Cambridge University. Otherwise, Korner used a roster of much younger musicians, mostly not yet even semi-pro, who looked up to him as a teacher and mentor and so required mercifully little payment. Among this floating population were nineteen-year-old classically trained double bassist Jack Bruce, one day to play bass guitar with the supergroup Cream, and a twenty-one-year-old drummer and erstwhile art student from Wembley named Charlie Watts.

It was Korner’s reputation for giving newcomers a break that awoke the first definite glimmer of ambition in Mick. He found out Korner’s address and, a few days later, posted him a tape of Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys performing Chuck Berry’s ‘Reelin’ and Rockin’ ’ and ‘Around and Around’, Jimmy Reed’s ‘Bright Lights, Big City’ and ‘Go on to School’ and Bobby Bland’s ‘Don’t Want No Woman’. Korner heard nothing of compelling interest on the tape (then lost it, to his eventual huge regret) but, as ever, was willing to give a chance on the bandstand to anyone. Without prior audition, Mick was offered a spot the next Saturday, backed by Keith and Korner himself on guitars and Jack Bruce on double bass.

Mick took the stage looking the picture of respectability in his chunky student cardigan, white shirt and Slim Jim tie. As an opener, he and Keith picked what they thought was their best Chuck Berry impersonation, ‘Around and Around’, one of Berry’s several hymns of praise to music itself (‘Well, the joint was rockin’ . . . goin’ round and round . . .’). Even for the broad-minded Korner, it was a bit too perilously close to rock ’n’ roll: after the first jarring chords, he conveniently broke a guitar string and remained preoccupied with changing it until the song was safely over. He later recalled being struck less by Mick’s singing than by ‘the way he threw his hair around . . . For a kid in a cardigan, that was moving quite excessively.’

It was not in any way what the club was supposed to be about, and the performance met with frigid silence from the men of Korner’s age whom he had previously regarded as his target audience. ‘We’d obviously stepped over the limit,’ Mick would remember. ‘You couldn’t include Chuck Berry in the pantheon of traddy-blues-ists.’ But Korner, glancing up at last from that troublesome guitar string, saw a different reaction from the younger men present – and a very different one from their girlfriends, wives and sisters. Until now, women had never been considered a significant factor in blues appreciation. The kid in the cardigan, with his flying hair, had suddenly changed that.

When Mick came offstage, certain he had blown his big chance, Korner was waiting for him. To his astonishment, he was offered another spot next week, this time with Blues Incorporated’s full heavyweight line-up of Korner, Cyril Davies and Dick Heckstall-Smith. Blues Incorporated remained predominantly an instrumental band and to start with Mick was only a brief, walk-on feature, rather like megaphone-toting crooners in 1920s orchestras. ‘It was a bit of a scramble to get onstage with Alexis,’ he would recall. ‘For anyone who fancied themselves as a blues vocalist, that was the only showcase, that one band. I wouldn’t ever get in tune, that was my problem, and I was often very drunk, ’cause I was really nervous.’ As Korner recalled, he seldom sang more than three songs in a night. ‘He learned more, but was only really sure of three, one of which was Billy Boy Arnold’s “Poor Boy” – and he used to sing one of Chuck’s songs and a Muddy Waters.’

Some time before the Ealing revelation, he had accepted that an authentic bluesman couldn’t just stand there but had better play some kind of instrument. Feeling it too late to start learning guitar or piano, he had settled for harmonica – what musicians call a ‘harp’ – and had been struggling to teach himself from records by American virtuosi like Jimmy Reed, Little Walter and Sonny Boy Williamson.

Fortuitously, Blues Incorporated had Britain’s finest blues harp player in Cyril – aka ‘Squirrel’ – Davies, who carried his collection of harmonicas around in a bag like a plumber’s tools. When the band played sans Jagger, Mick would haunt the stage front as avidly as any future Mick worshipper, watching the big, ungainly man coax the most delicate melodies as well as the most wickedly rousing rhythms from his tiny silver mouthpiece. However, the prickly, insecure and fiercely anti-rock ’n’ roll ‘Squirrel’ felt none of Korner’s zeal to help younger musicians. ‘He was very gruff, almost to the point of rudeness,’ his would-be pupil would recall. ‘He told me to fuck off, basically. I’d ask, “How do you bend a note?” and Cyril would say, “Well, you get a pair of pliers . . .”’