The Stones: The Acclaimed Biography

Practice sessions took place at Alan Etherington’s house – because of the radiogram – or in Dick Taylor’s bedroom at Bexleyheath, seated on the bed around a big old-fashioned tape recorder. Dick remembers an anxious moment when Mike turned up to rehearse for the first time after accidentally biting a piece out of his tongue in the school gymnastics class. ‘He was terrified it was going to affect the way he sang. We all kept telling him it made no difference. But he did seem to lisp a bit and sound more bluesy after that.’

His own home, though welcoming to his friends, did not suggest itself as a practice place for Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys. Eva Jagger was not discouraging. She had nothing against their music, she told them – it was just that the neighbours might mind the noise. Joe Jagger’s main concern, as always, was keeping his son up to the mark in physical education. Once, when Mike was going off with Dick Taylor, his father called out, ‘Michael – don’t forget your weight training.’ Mike turned back obediently, went into the garden and exercised with barbells for a conscientious quarter of an hour.

He had passed his GCE O-Levels in a respectable enough seven subjects, and had qualified for entry into the Sixth Arts form to do Advanced Level English, History and French. He also became a school prefect, despite the headmaster’s manifest disapproval. The head, Mr Hudson, had never quite forgiven him for leading what seemed like an organized insurrection by lower-school boys against compulsory enrolment in the school Army Cadet Force.

He stuck out the two-year A-Level course with no idea what he was working for, beyond a vague notion that journalism might be interesting. For a brief time, too, he toyed with the idea of becoming a radio disc jockey. A London record producer named Joe Meek was currently advertising for would-be deejays to submit demonstration tapes. Robert Wallis remembers copying out Meek’s address from a newspaper and passing it on to Mike Jagger. But the project languished, apparently under parental discouragement.

His A-Level passes in English and History were only mediocre but by then it did not matter. He had already secured himself a place at the London School of Economics, to follow a two-year course in the subject that seemed best suited to his indecisive talents. ‘I wanted to do arts but thought I ought to do science,’ he says now. ‘Economics seemed about halfway in between.’

So, each morning, from the autumn of 1961, Mike Jagger, in his striped student scarf, joined the daily crowd of business people at Dartford railway station, his face turned towards a future that still seemed to lie only a little way up the commuter line to Victoria.

Each morning, from the top deck of the green Kentish bus, Dick Taylor would see the same thin, slouching figure trailing reluctantly up the long hill to Sidcup Art College. Winter or summer, Keith Richards wore the same tight blue jeans, Italian pointed shoes, denim jacket and the violet-coloured shirt that never seemed to be given a rest or a wash. In summer as well as winter, he contrived to look pinched and cold, his bullet head accentuating protuberant ears, his nose red raw, his mouth specked with teenage pimples. In one hand, he held a Player’s Weights cigarette; in the other, his only possession, a guitar. Dick Taylor knew it would be another day of abandoned study, and of rock ’n’ roll practice in the college lavatories.

Guitars, and loving them, are among Keith’s earliest memories. His mother’s father, Theodore Augustus Dupree – the family were originally Huguenots from the Channel Islands – led a small semi-professional dance band in the 1930s and himself played several instruments including saxophone, violin and guitar. The guitar still stood in ‘Grandfather Gus’s’ house, in a corner of the sitting room. Keith remembers with what excitement, even as a tiny boy, he would approach it and draw his hands with a soft thrum across its untuned strings.

‘He was a great character, my grandfather Gus. At that time, when I was small, he had a job in some tailoring sweatshop – he’d always be bringing little squares of felt out of his pocket and showing us. He carried on playing music, too, right up to the Sixties – touring the American air force bases with a country band. He’d got a job as janitor at Highgate School where Yehudi Menuhin’s son was a pupil. My grandfather, in the end, got to know Yehudi; they’d even have a bit of a scrape together on their violins. What a fantastic hustler!’

Bert Richards, Keith’s father, was a very different character, quiet and cautious with a reserve that – his son thinks now – was created largely by overwork and exhaustion. Bert worked as a supervisor at Osram’s light bulb factory in Hammersmith. He got up each day at 5 a.m. and did not come home in the evening until six. ‘He’d have something to eat, watch TV for a couple of hours, then go to bed, absolutely knackered,’ Keith says. ‘He must have been horrified to see what a thug he’d produced in me.’

The boy born in December 1943 thus grew up closest to his mother, Doris, a warm and jolly woman who had inherited the Dupree fondness for music and romance. Keith remembers how, as Doris did the housework, the radio would constantly pour out American big band music. When he first started school and was too nervous to walk there, Doris carried him all the way, bundled lovingly in her arms. From his earliest childhood, she encouraged him to do, and be, exactly what he wanted.

As a small boy, Keith had a beautiful soprano voice, good enough to be heard in Westminster Abbey itself. ‘Only three of us, in our white surplices, used to be good enough to do the hallelujahs. I was a star then – coming up by coach to London to sing in the inter-schools competition at the Albert Hall. I think that was my first taste of show business: when my voice broke and they didn’t want me in the choir any more. Suddenly it was “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.” I think that was when I stopped being a good boy and started to be a yob.’

Doris and Bert Richards lived in Chastillian Road, Dartford, just a street or two away from the Jaggers in Denver Road. Keith attended Wentworth County Primary School and was taught by Ken Llewellyn. He had met Mike Jagger, too, briefly, in the scream and jostle of the infants’ playground. Jagger, who customarily affects to remember nothing past, can none the less recall what a strong impression Keith made on him. ‘I asked him what he wanted to do when he grew up. He said he wanted to be a cowboy like Roy Rogers and play a guitar. I wasn’t that impressed by Roy Rogers, but the bit about the guitar did interest me.’

That first acquaintance was to be short-lived. Doris and Bert moved soon afterwards from Chastillian Road to a house on a new council estate on the other side of Dartford. Thereafter, Keith Richards became the very last kind of companion Joe and Eva Jagger could have wished for their elder son.

The Richardses lived on the Temple Hill Estate, in a small semi-detached house, 6 Spielman Road, the estate was brand new, dumped down on raw new tarmac roads without amusements or amenities. Bert Richards, as before, got up at five each morning to go to work at Osram’s in Hammersmith. Doris worked part-time in a Dartford baker’s shop. And Keith, between his father’s indifference and his mother’s over-indulgence, began to go resolutely to the bad.

It was not that he lacked ability – even talent. He could be, Ken Llewellyn remembers, a bright, attentive boy, responsive especially to words and language. He enjoyed cricket, swimming and – most surprisingly – tennis. He was, besides, good-natured and open, with a mischievous wit that made even schoolmasters unbend towards him.

What he could not do was accept discipline in any form. It was a lawlessness partly compounded of running wild on the estate; partly of his mother’s soft-hearted pampering. Doris did not mind if he failed to do his homework or went AWOL from cross-country runs or – as increasingly happened – if he failed to turn up for school altogether. She would leave him money at home to buy fish and chips for his lunch. Even when he dumped the fish and chip leavings in the kitchen sink, newspaper and all, Doris cleared up after him without complaint.

By the time he was thirteen, ordinary teachers despaired of educating him. It was decided he should go straight to Dartford Technical School, where his father hoped he might succumb to learning a useful trade.

Now, however, the long-suffering Bert Richards faced an additional vexation. ‘Every time the poor guy came in at night,’ Keith says, ‘he’d find me sitting at the top of the stairs with my guitar, playing and banging on the wall for percussion. He was great about it, really. He’d only mutter, “Stop that bloody noise.”’

Doris had bought Keith his first guitar, for seven pounds, from her wages at the baker’s shop. ‘I never knew what make it was,’ Keith says. ‘The name had been painted out.’ The only stipulation Doris made, supported by Grandfather Gus, was that he must learn to play properly. Soon afterwards, she gave him more money for a record player, from Dartford Co-Op shop, so he could learn by listening to the skiffle and rock ’n’ roll hits.

Now was the time of British rock ’n’ roll – of Tommy Steele and Terry Dene and the ‘cover’ versions of American songs put out on a label called Embassy that was sold only at Woolworth’s. Embassy records were the first that Keith Richards tried to copy, sitting at the top of the stairs at 6 Spielman Road. ‘I always sat on the top stair to practise. You could get the best echo that way – or standing in the bath.’

He soon realized that what made British rock ’n’ roll so tinny and false was not the vocal so much as the backing – the staid guitars played by bored ‘session men’, and sounding just as plumply complacent. Better by far to scrape up the full six shillings and fourpence for the original American version with guitars that shrilled and echoed as from a separate universe. Keith’s next idol, after his grandfather Gus, was Scotty Moore, Elvis Presley’s session guitarist. He still thinks Moore’s solo on Presley’s I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone the most exciting thing ever recorded. ‘I could never work out how he played it, and I still can’t. It’s such a wonderful thing that I almost don’t want to know.’

His guitar, allied with the life of a Dartford Teddy boy, became the final, irresistible temptation to play truant. In 1958, he was expelled from Dartford Technical School. A sympathetic teacher suggested there might be one last hope in the art college in the neighbouring dormitory town of Sidcup.

Sidcup Art College sounds immeasurably grander than it ever was. It existed, in fact, to give just such last chances to those whose inglorious school careers had fitted them for nothing better than what was then belittingly called ‘commercial art’. Sidcup’s art college was remarkably similar to the one in Hope Street, Liverpool, which – also in 1958 – admitted a similar habitual truant named John Lennon.

For Keith, Sidcup Art College was a first introduction to authentic blues music, never captured on a Woolworth’s Embassy label. A group of students – including Dick Taylor – would meet in an empty room next to the principal’s office, and play Little Walter and Big Bill Broonzy songs among the drawing boards and paste pots. It was from one of them Keith acquired his first electric guitar, swapping it for a pile of records in a hasty transaction in the college ‘bogs’.

So far as Dick Taylor was concerned, Keith Richards was just an incorrigible and hilarious distraction from the business of studying graphic design. ‘When I think of Keith at college, I think of dustbins burning. We used to get these baths of silk-screen wash, throw them over the dustbins and then throw on a match. The dustbins used to explode with a great “woomph”.

‘We were all popping pills then – to stay awake without sleep more than to get high. We used to buy these nose inhalers called Nostrilene, for the benzedrine, or even take girls’ period pills. Opposite the college, there was this little park with an aviary that had a cockatoo in it. Cocky the Cockatoo we used to call it. Keith used to feed it pep pills and make it stagger around on its perch. If ever we were feeling bored, we’d go and give another upper to Cocky the Cockatoo.’

One morning, on his railway journey from Dartford to Sidcup, Keith happened to get into the same dreary commuter carriage as Mike Jagger, en route to the London School of Economics. They recognized each other vaguely from Wentworth County Primary School and a subsequent meeting when Mike had a holiday job selling ice cream outside Dartford Library. This meeting might have been as casual as the previous ones were it not that Mike had under his arm a pile of import blues albums he had got from America by mail order. Keith noticed the sacred names of Chuck Berry and Little Walker, and, with some incredulity, asked the striped-scarfed LSE student if he liked that kind of music, too.

Chatting further, they discovered they had a common friend in Dick Taylor. Dick had already mentioned to Keith that he was rehearsing with a group sworn to play nothing but blues and r & b. By the time their train reached Sidcup, it was half-arranged that Keith Richards should come along and try rehearsing with Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys.

He brought with him his semi-solid Hofner cutaway guitar and what seemed to the others a stunning virtuosity. Sitting on the stairs at home, he had managed to master nearly all Chuck Berry’s introductions and solos, even the swarm of notes running through the Berry classic Johnny B. Goode that created an effect like two guitars at once. He understood that even this complex break, like two guitars in unison, required something more than simply playing notes fast. ‘Keith sounded great – but he wasn’t flash,’ Dick Taylor says. ‘When he came in, you could feel something holding the band together.’

Keith’s arrival, even so, did not advance the fortunes of Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys. They continued to practise as before, with no thought of any audience beyond Dick Taylor’s mum – no inkling that r & b music was a secret vouchsafed to anyone in Britain but themselves. The nearest they came to a public performance was playing together for a snapshot outside the Taylors’ back door. The snap shows Dick and Keith with their guitars parodying Chuck Berry’s duck walk, and Mike Jagger, in his student’s button-up cardigan, striking a dramatic pose against the background of drainpipe and pebbledashed council house wall.

Music in that era forged many friendships between personalities that might otherwise have remained polar opposites. It had happened three years earlier between cynical, trouble-prone John Lennon and cautious, conservative Paul McCartney in Liverpool. It happened now, when Keith Richards, the ‘Ted’ from a council flat on the wrong side of Dartford, started to go around with Mike Jagger, the economics student from middle-class Denver Road.

Though the LSE in 1961 was not the political hotbed it later became, a mild radicalism was as de rigueur among its students as the prevailing ‘bohemian’ look. For Mike Jagger it was to be little more than a look, expressed in his new leather tie and knitted cardigan. Just the same, armed with new words like ‘capitalism’ and ‘proletariat’, he seemed intent on rejecting his careful upbringing and sliding down to the class his mother so abhorred.

At the LSE, he dropped the ‘Mike’, which now seemed redolent of bourgeois young men with sports cars. ‘Mike Jagger’ would henceforward be a creature only in the memory of his earliest friends. It was Mick Jagger who hung around with Keith Richards, talking in broad Cockney and affecting some of Keith’s chaotic nonchalance and street-tough recklessness.

The mimicry was not completely one-sided. Keith on occasion could become thoughtful, self-effacing, even shy. It was as if each provided the other with a role he had desired but never dared assume before. Dick Taylor noticed what was to become a regular interchange of identities. ‘One day, Mick would become Keith. But then on another day, Keith could go all like Mick. You never knew which way round it would be.

‘But from then on, Mick and Keith were together. Whoever else came into the band or left, there’d always be Mick and Keith.’

Before Alexis Korner and his wife Bobbie went to bed in their flat in Moscow Road, Bayswater, they would be careful to leave the kitchenette window slightly ajar at the bottom. Next to the window was a table positioned in such a way that the late-arriving or unexpected guest could enter by rolling sideways across it. When Alexis and Bobbie got up next morning, four or five sleeping figures might be peacefully disposed under the table, against the cooker legs or among the food bowls of the Korners’ several cats.

The sleepers were American blues musicians on tour, for whom Alexis and Bobbie Korner provided refuge and hospitality in an otherwise bewildering land. Big Bill Broonzy, Muddy Waters, T-Bone Walker, the guitar giants so often visualized by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in their windy and harsh Chicago heaven, might be sitting barely twenty miles from Dartford in that Bayswater kitchenette, eating the Southern-style ham hocks that Bobbie Korner had learned to cook.

Alexis Korner’s antecedents were as richly cosmopolitan as the syllables of his name suggest. His father was Austrian, a former cavalry officer, and his mother was Greco-Turkish. By his father’s first marriage he had a Russian step-grandmother. He himself was born in Paris and spent his early childhood in Switzerland and North Africa. There was something more than a little Moroccan in his dark skin and tightly curled hair, and the vibrant, husky voice which only accidental circumstance was to bend into the brogue of suburban West London.

His father, the former cavalry officer, was an autocratic, distant figure, vaguely connected with high finance and – Alexis later thought – international espionage. ‘I know he lost a lot of money in the Twenties, when Britain went off the gold standard, and he couldn’t live as well as he had before. He was also supposed to have had something to do with the scandal surrounding the Zinoviev Letter. I’m sure he’d done something pretty major to earn the gratitude of the British government. When war broke out in 1939, we were living in England; my father could have expected to be interned as an enemy alien. Instead, he got his naturalization papers as a British subject virtually overnight.’

One Saturday in 1940, Alexis, a pupil of St Paul’s School, went from his home in Ealing to nearby Shepherd’s Bush market to indulge in the boyish pastime of pilfering from the stalls. His haul that morning included a record by the blues pianist Jimmy Yancey. ‘From that moment,’ he remembered later, ‘I only wanted to do one thing. I wanted to play boogie-woogie piano.’

When he attempted to do so on the family piano, his father would come along in a fury and slam down the lid. Nor was the elder Korner any better pleased when Alexis brought home his first guitar. ‘My father used to say the guitar was a “woman’s instrument”. He imagined it in operettas, tied with pink ribbon.’

Two years’ military service brought relief from this parental prejudice. Alexis served with the British Army in West Germany and – as well as playing football for his regiment – became a part-time announcer over the Forces’ radio network. He could saturate himself, not only in the music played to British troops, but also in the far more exciting output of AFN, the American Forces Network. As surreptitiously listening German boys already knew, AFN broadcast the very best in jazz and swing and even types of black music not available to civilians back home in the States. So the blues took root, on NATO bases and, later, in local clubs, amid pornographic bookshops, strip joints and mud-wrestling pits.

Back in London, working in the shipping firm owned by his mother’s Greek family, Alexis gravitated naturally to that first postwar ‘younger generation’, which haunted the Soho cellars, avid for politics and traditional jazz. ‘We were elitist – and highly political. We used to speak quite seriously in those days of founding a “fourth class”. There’d be the upper class, the middle class, the working class and us. That was how the blues came into it. When we heard a Leadbelly song or a Woody Guthrie song, we knew we were listening to a powerful political protest.’

The principal jazz bandleaders of the period did what they could to bring blues to the larger Dixieland audience. Humphrey Lyttelton, trumpeter, Old Etonian and friend of royalty, had brought Big Bill Broonzy to Britain as early as 1953. Ken Colyer, most pure of all the jazz and folk purists, featured some of the greatest American bluesmen at his London club, Studio 51, just off Leicester Square.

Chris Barber remained the music’s most passionate, consistent champion – the only one, in Korner’s words, to ‘put his money where his mouth was’ and plough actual cash into keeping blues alive. Barber, in the early Fifties, had been the moving spirit behind a formal conservation body, the National Jazz League. The league flourished, acquiring sufficient capital to buy its own Soho club, the Marquee in Wardour Street.

Alexis Korner joined the Barber band as banjoist during Lonnie Donegan’s absence on National Service. When Donegan returned and Rock Island Line became a hit, Korner was well placed, had he desired, to participate in the nine days’ skiffle wonder. He almost joined another successful skiffle group, the Vipers, signed up at the 2 I’s coffee bar by a then obscure EMI-label executive called George Martin. Instead, he formed his own group, bowing to commercial pressure with the word ‘skiffle’ only for its first extended-play record. Thereafter, the group was to be known as Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated.

The first band in Britain to play nothing but blues was a curious amalgam of fervent fantasy wedded to unlikely and incongruous human shapes. Its chief member, after Korner himself, was Cyril Davies, a fifteen-stone panel beater from South Harrow, a virtuoso on blues harmonica and twelve-string guitar, whose every waking moment was clouded by chagrin that he had not been born a black man. On saxophone there was Dick Heckstall-Smith, who in aspect and manner bore a passing resemblance to Lenin. On double bass there was the future bass guitar maestro, Jack Bruce. The drummer – when Alexis could persuade him to sit in – was a sad-faced boy called Charlie Watts. ‘I’d met Charlie at the Troubadour in Brompton Road, and always liked his playing. I’d said to him, “If I ever form a blues group, would you come in as drummer?” But he’d only do it part-time. He was too busy, studying commercial art in Harrow.’

It was Korner’s plan from the beginning to start his own club, as Ken Colyer and other musicians had, to protect their chosen music from the jibes or hostility of rival factions. Soho cellars or pub backrooms in those days could be hired for a few shillings a night. Alexis Korner’s first such venture, grandly styled the London Blues and Barrelhouse Club, was a room at the Round House pub in Wardour Street. The residency was sometimes interrupted by disputes between Korner and Cyril Davies, which led one or other to storm off and play in some rival club like the Troubadour.

As Blues Incorporated became more established, they started to receive bookings further and further outside London. One night, towards the end of 1961, Alexis found himself playing the blues to a rapturous crowd at a municipal hall in the genteel spa town of Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.

After the performance, a boy came up to Alexis in the pub across the road and talked to him earnestly – but with evident authority – about the blues and bluesmen. The boy was short but broadly built, and looked well-to-do in his smart Italian suit, white tab-collar shirt and Slim Jim tie. He spoke in a soft, well-mannered voice, lisping slightly. He said his name was Brian Jones. He was a musician himself, playing saxophone semi-professionally in a rock group called the Ramrods. What he really wanted to do, he told Alexis, was play Delta-style slide guitar with a band like Blues Incorporated. Alexis said – as Alexis always did – that if Brian Jones ever came to London, he was welcome to sleep on the Korners’ kitchen floor.