Mick Jagger

Deeply unattractive to begin with, the place quickly descended into epic squalor that would later be unwittingly re-created in the classic British film Withnail and I. Beds stayed permanently unmade; the kitchen sink overflowed with dirty dishes and empty milk bottles encrusted with mould. The ceilings were blackened by candle smoke and covered with drawings and graffiti, while the windows were so thick with grime that casual visitors thought they had heavy curtains, permanently closed. When an extra flatmate materialised in a young printer named James Phelge, his surname proved curiously anagrammatic: he won the others’ approval by his skill at ‘gobbing’, or spitting gobbets of phlegm up the wall to form a horrible pattern in lieu of wallpaper.

It might be wondered how the famously fastidious Mick could ever have endured such conditions. But in most nineteen-year-olds, the urge to react against parental values tends to be overwhelming. There was also the sense of roughing it like a real bluesman, even though few of these might have been spotted in the vicinity of Chelsea’s Kings Road. Besides, while enthusiastically joining in the trashing of the flat, he was never personally squalid but – like Brian – remained conspicuously neat and well groomed, just as young officers in the Great War kept their buttons bright amid Flanders mud. Brian somehow managed to wash and dry his fair hair every single day, while Mick (so Keith would later recall in one of their recurrent periods of mutual bitchiness) went through ‘his first camp period . . . wandering around in a blue linen housecoat . . . He was on that kick for about six months.’

All of them were in a state of dire poverty which the few pounds from Rollin’ Stones gigs barely alleviated. Brian had just lost yet another job, as a sales assistant at Whiteley’s department store, for thievery, while Keith’s only known shot at conventional employment, as a pre-Christmas relief postal worker, lasted just one day. The sole regular income among them was Mick’s student grant from Kent County Council; as the only one with a bank account, he paid the rent by cheque and the others gave him their share in cash. Once, he jokingly wrote on a blank cheque: ‘Pay the Rolling [sic] Stones £1 million.’

He and Keith survived mainly by adopting Brian’s little ways – stealing the pints of milk that were left on other people’s doorsteps each morning, shoplifting potatoes and eggs from the little local stores, sneaking into parties being given elsewhere in the house or in neighbouring ones, and making off with French loaves, hunks of cheese, bottles of wine or beer in the new outsize cans known as ‘pins’. Brian doctored the electric meter (a criminal offence) so that it would work without shillings and the power would remain on indefinitely, rather than plunging them into darkness at the end of the usual costly brief span. A serious source of income was collecting empty beer bottles, the sale price of which included a two-penny deposit repaid when they were returned to the vendor.

Ian Stewart also played a part in supporting the trio he regarded as ‘very bright, highly motivated layabouts’. In Stu’s day job at ICI the perks included luncheon vouchers: certificates exchangeable for basic restaurant meals. These he would buy up cheap from dieting co-workers and pass on gratis to the layabouts. However, Mick, who had always been notably fond of his stomach (as if those large lips needed stoking with food twice as often as normal-size ones) would frequently eat alone and at a slightly higher level than his flatmates. There was, for instance, a Wardour Street café, felicitously named the Star, which offered a superior set lunch for five shillings (twenty-five pence). Mick was a regular customer, known to staff only as ‘the rhythm-and-blues singer’.

Each morning, he would go off to LSE, and the non-musician flatmate James Phelge to a printing works in Fulham, leaving Keith and Brian to sleep late between their foetid sheets. Their afternoons were spent mainly in guitar practice, with Brian coaching Keith. Often after a gig, the teacher would tell the pupil his playing had been ‘bloody awful’ and, back at the flat, would make him go over his fretboard fluffs again and again until they were cured. Many was the night when the pair fell asleep where they sat, cigarettes still smouldering in their mouths or wedged in the top of their guitar fretboards. Brian also taught himself to play blues harp, taking only about a day to reach a level that had taken Mick months, then forging on ahead.

It clearly could only benefit the band, and Brian was equally willing to help bring on Mick’s instrumental skills, showing him new harmonica riffs, even persuading him finally to take a few cautious steps on guitar. But Mick felt uneasy about the bond being forged between Brian and Keith during the day. In the evening when he returned he would sulk or pointedly not speak to Keith while showing overweening friendliness to Brian.

As well as immeasurably raising the others’ musical game, Brian kept them laughing when there might not seem much to laugh about. Like Jim Dixon in Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, his response to moments of stress was to pull a grotesque face he called a Nanker. The flat’s walls being now spattered with the marks of Phelge’s ‘gobbing’, Brian gave each a name according to its colour – ‘Yellow Humphrey’, ‘Green Gilbert’, ‘Scarlet Jenkins’, ‘Polka-Dot Perkins’. He and Mick competed in coining supercilious nicknames for their fellow World’s Enders. Their flat was owned by a Welshman who operated a small grocery shop, so a Lyons Individual Fruit Pie bought (or filched) from him was known as a ‘Morgan Morgan’. Any male conspicuously devoid of their own cool and savoir faire was an ‘Ernie’. The local greasy-spoon café – whose clientele marked them down at once as gays, or ‘nancy boys’ – was The Ernie. The flat above theirs belonged to a hostile elderly couple known as ‘the Offers’ after Mick described them as ‘a bit off’. Brian discovered where the Offers kept a spare latchkey and, one day while they were out, led a raiding party into their flat to ransack the fridge.

Despite their poverty, Mick, Brian and Keith managed to make the two-hundred-mile journey north to Manchester that October for what was billed as ‘the First American Folk-Blues Festival’, featuring Memphis Slim, John Lee Hooker, T-Bone Walker, Willie Dixon, and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. The trio made the long trip north in a beaten-up van with a group of fellow fanatics from Ealing and Eel Pie Island (including a boy guitarist named Jimmy Page, one day to become the co-godhead of Led Zeppelin). Mick took along a copy of Howlin’ Wolf’s Rocking Chair album, hoping that Wolf’s songwriter Willie Dixon would autograph it. One track in particular obsessed him: a flagrant piece of sexual imagery entitled ‘Little Red Rooster’.

Amid the Victorian splendour of Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, he saw all his greatest idols finally made flesh: tall, austere John Lee Hooker singing ‘Boogie Chillen’’, the song that could have been describing that former well-spoken Dartford schoolboy (‘The blues is in him . . . and it’s got to come out’); dapper Memphis Slim with a skunk’s-tail streak of white through his hair; Willie Dixon, the blues’ great backroom boy, almost as big and bulky as his stand-up bass; jokey T-Bone Walker, playing his guitar behind his head in the way Jimi Hendrix would ‘invent’ a few years later. There was no security in the modern sense, and afterwards the bluesmen were freely accessible to their fans, onstage below the hall’s massive pipe organ. One of the lesser names, ‘Shaky Jake’ Harris, presented the London boys with a harmonica, which became the proud centrepiece of a blues singsong on the long drive home. Mick, Keith and Brian were supposed to reimburse the van’s owner, Graham Ackers, for petrol and other incidental costs – amounting to 10s 6d, or about 52p each – but never did.

If the Rollin’ Stones’ gigs still paid only peanuts, there was another reward which their blues masters in Manchester had never known. Increasingly, after the night’s performance, they found themselves being mobbed by teenage girls, whose excitement their faithful interpretation of John Lee or T-Bone only partially explained. Most sought only autographs and flirtation, but a good few made it clear – clearer than young British women had done since the bawdy eighteenth century – that a deeper level of musical appreciation was on offer. Though Mick and Brian were the main objectives, Keith, Stu, Dick Taylor, even Phelge, as their occasional assistant roadie, shared in the unexpected dividends. Most nights, a bevy of these proto-groupies would accompany them back to 102 Edith Grove for what, due to space restrictions, was a largely open-plan sex session. Some were deemed worthy of a second invitation, for example a pair of identical twins named Sandy and Sarah partial to Mick and Phelge – neither of whom could tell one from the other, or bothered to try.

He would later become legendary for his apparent callousness towards females – yet among the Edith Grove flatmates it was Mick who showed the most awareness of how young and often vulnerable many of their visitors were to be with older men so late at night. One girl, after having had sex with two of his flatmates in succession, broke the news that she’d run away from home and the police were looking for her. The others were all for getting rid of her as soon as possible, before police officers came knocking at the door. But Mick, showing himself his father’s son once again, took the trouble to talk to the runaway at length about her problems at home, finally persuading her to telephone her parents and arrange for them to come and collect her.

THE WINTER OF 1962–3 turned into Britain’s worst for one hundred years, with arctic temperatures setting in long before Christmas and London hit as heavily by snow as the remotest Scottish Highlands. At 102 Edith Grove, it was almost as cold inside as out. Mick could escape to centrally heated lecture theatres and libraries at LSE, but Brian and Keith had to spend all day huddled over one feeble electric fire in skimpy ‘shorty’ overcoats, rubbing their hands and blowing their fingernails like penurious Dickensian clerks. The household was further enlarged by a Cheltenham friend of Brian’s named Richard Hattrell, a simple soul who did everything Brian told him and believed everything he said. One night when the Stones were out on a gig, Hattrell crept into Brian’s bed to snatch a little warmth and rest. Brian awoke him, brandishing two amplifier leads and threatening to electrocute him. The credulous Hattrell fled into the snow wearing only underpants. Not until he started to turn blue from exposure would the others let him back inside.

At the end of each week, Mick, Brian and Keith bought, borrowed or stole the music trades and scanned the pop charts, never thinking for one second they might ever figure there. America’s immemorial dominance was maintained by white solo singers like Neil Sedaka, Roy Orbison and Del Shannon. Black artists scored mainly by pandering to the white audience, as in novelty dance numbers like Chubby Checker’s ‘Let’s Twist Again’ and Little Eva’s ‘The Locomotion’. Britain seemed capable of producing only limp cover versions and wildly uncool Trad jazz. The one exception was an oddball minor hit called ‘Love Me Do’ by a Liverpool group with funny, fringed haircuts and the almost suicidally bizarre name of the Beatles. Rather than the usual slick studio arrangement, it had a rough R&B feel, with harmonica riffs very much like those Brian and Mick played in the clubs every night. They felt like their pockets had been picked by these insectoid upstarts from the unknown far north.

In October, Dick Taylor, the last of Mick’s old school friends still playing with him, had won a place at the Royal College of Art and decided to leave the band. There was some idea that Richard Hattrell might take over on bass guitar, but a course of lessons with their Ealing Club colleague Jack Bruce showed Hattrell to be totally unmusical. He returned to Tewkesbury and, worn down by his life with the Stones (a syndrome to be oft-repeated in the future) suffered a burst appendix and almost died. At the same time, their latest temporary drummer, Carlo Little, moved on to a better gig with Screaming Lord Sutch’s backing band, the Savages. There were thus two vacancies to be filled, this time with Mick and Keith as Brian’s co-judges. Auditions took place on a cold, slushy December day at a Chelsea pub called the Wetherby Arms.

The first spot was quickly filled by Tony Chapman, an experienced drummer with a successful semi-pro band called the Cliftons, who’d become bored by their conventional rock repertoire. Having got the gig, Chapman suggested that the Cliftons’ bass guitarist should also come and audition at the Wetherby Arms. He was a hollow-cheeked, unsmiling Londoner, even shorter and bonier than Mick, who held his instrument at an odd near-vertical angle. He had been born William Perks but used the stage name Bill Wyman.

Here, the fit seemed more problematic. At twenty-six, Bill was seven years older than Mick and Keith, a married man with a small son and steady day job on the maintenance staff of a department store. Furthermore, he lived in Penge, a name which British sophisticates find eternally amusing, along with Neasden, Wigan and Scunthorpe. Added to his seeming advanced age, archaic backswept hairstyle and south London accent, it instantly condemned him in Mick and Brian’s eyes as an Offer and an Ernie. He possessed one major saving grace, however, in the form of a spare amplifier, roughly twice as powerful as the band’s existing ones, which he told them they were free to use. So, notwithstanding the satirical nudges and Nanker grimaces of the ex-grammar school duo behind his back, working-class Wyman was in.

He for his part had serious misgivings about joining a group of scruffy arty types so much his junior – especially after seeing their domestic arrangements. ‘[The flat] was an absolute pit which I shall never forget – it looked like it was bomb-damaged,’ he would recall. ‘The front room overlooking the street had a double bed with rubbish piled all round it [and] I’ve never seen a kitchen like it . . . permanently piled high with dirty dishes and filth everywhere . . . I could never understand why they carried on like this . . . It could not just have been the lack of money. Bohemian angst most likely.’

Despite having left school at the age of sixteen, Bill was just as intelligent and articulate as Mick or Brian. He soon realised that although the Rollin’ Stones might not be going anywhere in particular, their singer definitely was – if not necessarily in music. While Keith merely seemed like ‘a Teddy Boy who’d spit in his beer to ensure nobody drank it’ and had ‘no plans to work’, and Brian regarded music as an irreplaceable vocation, Mick talked often of becoming a lawyer or perhaps a journalist, as the LSE graduate Bernard Levin had done with spectacular success. At times, he did not even seem quite comfortable with his new first name. ‘He hated being called Mick,’ Bill remembers. ‘In his own eyes he was still Mike.’

He was keeping up his LSE studies despite the late nights and distractions, and that previous June had sat part one of his BSc degree, achieving just-respectable C grades in the compulsory subjects of economics, economic history and British government and the optional ones of political history and English legal institutions. Behind the mask of coolness and indifference, he worried that he was not making the most of his opportunities or justifying the investment that Kent County Council had made in him. His vague hankering for some kind of literary career was sharpened, that autumn, when his father became the Jagger family’s first published author. As the country’s leading authority on the sport, Joe edited and partially wrote a manual entitled Basketball Coaching and Playing in a series of how-to books issued by the prestigious house of Faber & Faber (which Mick’s fellow economics student Matthew Evans would one day run). B. Jagger’s opening chapter, ‘The Basketball Coach’, written in simple but forceful prose, set out principles his son would later employ in a somewhat different context. The successful coach, wrote B. Jagger, ‘must definitely possess . . . a sense of vocation, a dedication to the game, faith in his own ability, knowledge and enthusiasm’. Without these qualities, the team would be ‘an ordinary run-of-the-mill affair, rising to no great heights and probably keeping warm the lower half of some league table . . .’ The coach must train himself to develop ‘a keen analytical sense’ and view each game as ‘an endless succession of tactics’ dictated solely by him. ‘The players are for the whole time examples of [his] skill and ability . . . He must quickly eradicate weaknesses and use to the full the strong points of his players . . .’

The greatest pressure on Mick, as always, came from his mother. Eva Jagger still could not take his singing seriously, and protested with all her considerable might at its deleterious effect on his studies – and the high-level professional career that was supposed to follow. The Edith Grove flat so appalled her that she couldn’t bear to set foot inside it (unlike Keith’s down-to-earth mum, who came in regularly to give it a good clean-up). When Mick remained obdurate about continuing with the Stones, Eva telephoned Alexis Korner and in her forthright way demanded whether ‘Michael’, as she firmly continued to call him, really was anything special as a singer. Korner replied that he most definitely was. The unexpectedly public-school voice at the other end of the line pacified Eva but still did not convince her.

At LSE, Mick’s absences from lectures and tutorials were becoming more frequent, his need to copy fellow student Laurence Isaacson’s notes more urgent. Though only dimly aware of his other life with the Rollin’ Stones, Isaacson could not but notice the changes coming over that once-typical middle-class student. ‘He was still very quiet and unobtrusive when he did appear at college. But one day when he turned up, he’d had his hair streaked. He was the first bloke I ever knew who did that.’

WHEN CLEOPATRA SYLVESTRE caught Mick’s eye at the Marquee Club, she was seventeen and still attending Camden School for Girls. The paradox of these clubs dedicated to black music was that very few actual black people frequented them – and those who did tended to be predominantly male. More often than not, Cleo would find herself the only young black woman in the Marquee’s audience. Anyway, she was an eye-catcher: tall and lovely in an American rather than British or Caribbean way, and always wearing something outrageous like a pink leather miniskirt she had made for herself, or a bright orange wig.

Though she lived in a council flat in Euston, Cleo’s background was richly cosmopolitan. Her mother, Laureen Goodare, a well-known West End cabaret dancer during the Second World War, had had a long-time affair with the composer Constant Lambert. Her godfathers were Lambert and the MP, journalist and notorious homosexual Tom Driberg. Her close friend and frequent companion around the blues clubs was Judith Bronowski, daughter of the mathematician, biologist and television pundit Dr Jacob Bronowski.

Cleo had first seen Mick when he was still with Blues Incorporated; he would smile and say hello, but it wasn’t until after the Rollin’ Stones started that he came over and spoke to her. Still experimenting with their sound and look, the band had thought of using black female back-up singers like Ray Charles’s Raelettes and Ike and Tina Turner’s Ikettes. Mick asked Cleo if she could find two black friends and audition as a backing trio, to be known as the Honeybees.

The audition, at the Wetherby Arms pub in Chelsea, was a disaster. Cleo could find only one other candidate for the trio, a clubbing companion named Jean who proved to be tone-deaf. Though Cleo herself had a good voice, the idea of a nine-strong, mixed-race-and-gender Rollin’ Stones progressed no further. But from then on she became a special friend to the band and, increasingly, a very special one to Mick.

She and Jean were their most faithful followers – groupies would be too crude – trailing them from places they now easily packed, like the Ealing Club, to those where they still struggled against anti-rock ’n’ roll prejudice, like Ken Colyer’s Studio 51 Club in Great Newport Street. ‘Sometimes when they played to only about nine people, Brian would literally be in tears,’ Cleo recalls. ‘But Mick was always the optimistic one, who said they had to keep going and they’d win everyone over in the end.’

She and Mick began dating with all the conventionality – and chasteness – that word used to imply, during the brief intervals between his college hours, her school ones and the Stones’ nightlife. ‘We’d go to the cinema,’ Cleo remembers. ‘Once, Mick got tickets for the theatre, but for some reason we never made it there. He rang me up one day and asked me to join Keith and him in a boat on the lake in Regent’s Park. A few times, I met him at LSE, where he used to work in the library.’ Unluckily, she already had a boyfriend, who could not but know what was going on since he shared a flat with Mick’s sometime stage colleague, Long John Baldry. Their break-up was an early example of the threat Mick would later pose to so many men’s masculinity. When Cleo went to her ex’s flat to collect some records she’d left there, he was pressing clothes on an ironing board. He thrust the hot iron into her face so it burned her forehead, and hissed, ‘When you next see Mick, give him that for me.’

Cleo was formidably bright as well as beautiful, and remembers ‘quite heavy’ discussions with Mick about politics and current affairs. He even suggested that when she left school, as she was soon to do, she should try to get into LSE so that they could see more of each other. She remembers his sense of humour and love of mimicking people, like the West Indian staff on the Underground shouting ‘Mind the doors!’ ‘Bill Wyman had just joined the band, and Mick used to laugh about him coming from Penge.’ The later stories of his stinginess are baffling to Cleo. ‘He was always so generous to me. Once, he bought me a huge box of chocolates that he’d spent all his money on, even his bus fare, so he had to walk all the way home to Chelsea.’

He was also welcomed into the Euston council flat where Cleo lived with her mother, Laureen, the Blitz-era cabaret dancer, and their fluffy black-and-white cat. ‘My mum thought he was great, even though the neighbours used to mutter about his long hair. I’d come home to find the two of them nattering away together. Mick used to practise his stage moves in front of our mirror.’ Cleo, on the other hand, paid only fleeting visits to 102 Edith Grove – and never stayed overnight. Her main memory of his domicile is ‘trying to scrape the laboratory cultures out of the milk bottles’.

Cleo’s home became a refuge for the whole band, with Brian making himself at home in his usual way and competing with Mick for the fascinating Laureen’s attention. ‘Brian used to love having our cat on his knees and stroking it,’ Cleo recalls. ‘When he left, his velvet suit used to be covered in white hairs, so my mum would run the Hoover over him as he stood there. One morning after an all-nighter, I took Mick and Brian back to our place for breakfast and my friend took Keith to hers. But my friend’s dad was a Nigerian and a bit militant. He said, “Get outa my house, white man,” took a spear down from the wall, and chased Keith with it.’

Chronically hard up as they were, the Rollin’ Stones never turned down any job, however low-paying and hard to reach through the snow and slush. One night their Marquee audience included a Hornsey School of Art student named Gillian Wilson (in later life to become curator of the Getty Museum in California). ‘At the interval,’ she recalls, ‘I went up to this character with outsize lips and asked if they’d play at our Christmas dance. “’Ow much?” he said. I offered fifteen bob [seventy-five pence] each and Mick – though I didn’t know his name then – said “Okay.”’

The Stones’ performance at Hornsey School of Art – which Gillian Wilson remembers lasting ‘something like four hours’ – featured yet another drummer. Tony Chapman had gone and Charlie Watts, the dapper jazz buff with the Buster Keaton face, had yielded to Brian and Mick’s pleas and joined what he still regarded as just an ‘interval band’ (leaving a vacancy in Blues Incorporated that was filled by a carroty-haired wild man named Ginger Baker). Despite his large wardrobe and impressive day job with a West End advertising agency, Charlie still lived at home with his parents in a ‘prefab’ rented from the local council in Wembley, Middlesex. With Bill Wyman on bass, this made the rhythm section solidly working class, in contrast with the middle-class, upwardly mobile tendency of the two main front men. At the time such things seemed of small importance compared with scoring an extra amp and a drum kit.