The Stones: The Acclaimed Biography

It’s All Over Now was released in Britain on June 26. Advance orders of 150,000 copies put it instantly into every trade paper’s Top Ten. Within a week it had risen through the Merseybeat barrier, to challenge and then displace that summer’s big surprise hit single, the Animals’ House of the Rising Sun.

The organizers of the Magdalen College ball were therefore not a little astonished when, halfway through the night’s open-air junketings, it was reported that the Stones had turned up as arranged and were bringing in their equipment. Even the Beatles, generally honourable about bookings, had, the previous year, accepted £500 to play at Christ’s College May Ball and had then failed to appear. The Stones’ fee had likewise been settled months earlier when they were still only semi-famous. None the less – for reasons never fully apparent – they insisted they must keep their word. It doubtless weighed with them that a major blues artist, Howlin’ Wolf, was also due to appear at the Magdalen event, and that they ought not to give ground to its other main pop attraction, Freddie and the Dreamers.

The writer John Heilpern was one of Oxford University’s few dedicated Stones fans who purposely crossed the floodlit college lawns, uproarious with patrician cries and steel-band music, to the marquee where the Stones were setting up their equipment in a mood of evident disenchantment. ‘They were all deeply pissed off about having to play,’ Heilpern remembers. ‘They’d been booked to do an hour, so they managed to spend at least the first forty minutes tuning up. Brian Jones already looked zonked out of his mind. There was a sense of vague leadership from Mick Jagger. When he started, everyone did. At first, they didn’t try; they were hissed and booed, which obviously delighted them. Then, all of a sudden, they all snapped into it.’

It was a moment, for Heilpern and many others, signifying the start of what would one day be termed ‘the counterculture’ but what, that night at Oxford, seemed more a question of class turned upside down. The surly, middle-class boys, playing American r & b, were patently a new aristocracy, just as the dinner-jacketed throng, jigging up and down before them, would become part of a willing new proletariat. The noise spread, through the canvas walls, across grass strewn with debs and duckboards, drowning the steel band. More and more young men in tailcoats, clutching girlfriends and champagne bottles, came in to hear the Stones, and dance.

PART TWO

FIVE

‘MY CLIENT HAS NO FLEAS’

Until the 1960s, the Berkshire industrial town of Reading was one of the quietest, most boring places to be found in the entire British Isles. Its only notable architectural feature was the grim Victorian prison where Oscar Wilde was incarcerated and wrote his famous Ballad of Reading Gaol

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