Mick Jagger

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.

Their options had been further reduced by using up four potential singles at once on an EP (extended play) record: Chuck Berry’s ‘Bye Bye Johnny’, the Coasters’ ‘Poison Ivy’, Barrett Strong’s ‘Money’ and Arthur Alexander’s ‘You Better Move On’, the latter always introduced by Mick as ‘our slow one’ and sung in atypically soulful, even plaintive mode, though its underlying message was still ‘piss off’. Produced in small 45-RPM format, with a glossy picture sleeve, EPs were as important a UK market as albums, and had their own separate chart. The Stones’ first not only went straight to the top of this but also made No. 15 on the singles charts.

The obvious solution was to give up covering other artists’ songs and write their own, as the two main Beatles did with such spectacular success. Thanks to John Lennon and Paul McCartney, songwriting was no longer the sacred preserve of Moon-and-June-rhyming Tin Pan Alley hacks, but something at which all young British pop musicians, however untrained, were entitled to have a shot. If it worked, it was insurance against that seemingly inevitable day when the pop audience tired of them as performers and they could fall back on writing full-time. Even Lennon and McCartney, at their America-conquering apogee, drew comfort from that safety net.

Until now, Mick had never for one moment visualised himself as a songwriter, let alone as one half of a partnership that would one day rival Lennon– McCartney’s. The idea came from Andrew Oldham and was not motivated by a desire to advance Mick. The fact was that, while Oldham’s management-PR side remained absorbed in the daily challenge of maintaining the Stones’ disreputability, his would-be Phil Spector side was growing bored by working in the recording studio with just a ‘covers band’ – and resentful of having to pay copyright fees and royalties to the composers whose songs were covered.

In February, he had informed Record Mirror that by autumn he would be ‘Britain’s most powerful independent record producer’. Since the Stones alone did not justify his assuming that title, he was actively scouting round for other artists to shape in the recording studio à la Spector – and had already found one. This was Cleo Sylvestre, who had auditioned as a back-up singer with the Stones eighteen months earlier, then gone on to have a platonic love affair with Mick which he took with so much the greater seriousness. Mick, in fact, recommended her to Oldham as a potential talent, even though he was still too upset by their break-up to be friends with her.

Oldham recorded Cleo singing the old Teddy Bears’ hit ‘To Know Him Is to Love Him’, which had been Phil Spector’s first writing and producing success. The B-side was an instrumental entitled ‘There Are but Five Rolling Stones’, played by the Stones but grandiosely credited to ‘The Andrew Oldham Orchestra’. Cleo’s pop-singing career failed to take off, but she went on to an award-winning career as an actress, notably with a one-woman show about Mary Seacole, the Crimean War’s ‘black Florence Nightingale’.

The domestic arrangements at 33 Mapesbury Road – and Brian’s absence in Windsor – meant that the songwriters within the Stones more or less had to be Mick and Keith. Likewise, Keith’s skill at playing hypnotic chords – as on ‘Not Fade Away’ – and Mick’s verbal fluency dictated which of them would write the lyrics and which the tune. Both agreed it was a good idea, but were too much intimidated by the competition all around to sit down and try. Oldham exerted every fibre of PR persuasiveness to change their minds, insisting that it could not be that difficult – witness the speed at which John and Paul had dashed off ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ that afternoon at Ken Coyler’s club – and spinning extravagant visions (hugely underestimated, it would turn out) of the publishing royalties they could earn. Even that could not tempt Mick to have a go.

Finally, one November night in 1963, Oldham resorted to simple coercion, locking the pair in the flat’s kitchenette, having previously removed all food and drink from it, then going off to spend the evening with his mother in Hampstead. If they wanted to eat that night, he shouted, they’d better have written a song when he came back. Returning a couple of hours later, he opened the front door quietly, tiptoed halfway upstairs and heard them hard at work. He went down again, slammed the door, and shouted ‘What have you got?’ A resentful, hungry Mick – those lips long-unstoked – ‘told me they’d written this fucking song and I’d better fucking like it’.

That first effort, unconsciously reflecting Oldham’s pressure, was entitled ‘It Should Be You’ and sounded enough like a real song to make them try again – and again. Fortuitously, the Stones were just leaving on a third national tour – this one including British pop’s only other ex–college student, Mike Sarne – which provided live models to copy and hours of boredom, backstage or in Stu’s van, when thinking up tunes and lyrics came as a positive relief. In a short time, Mick and Keith had accumulated around half a dozen songs, the most promising of which they recorded as rough demos at Regent Sound during quick trips back to London. The whole batch showed a romantic, even feminine side to the composers which made them quite unsuitable as Stones tracks, some indeed being specifically targeted at female artists: ‘My Only Girl’, ‘We Were Falling in Love’, ‘Will You Be My Lover Tonight?’ To hold their copyrights and receive any royalties they might earn, Oldham set up a publishing company called Nanker Phelge Music, a name as deliberately grotesque as the Beatles’ Northern Songs company was quietly traditional. A Nanker was Brian Jones’s name for his Lucky Jim facial contortions while Phelge was the Edith Grove flatmate who used to ‘gob’ so colourfully up the walls.

Oldham’s search for artists to cover these first Jagger– Richard songs was confined to the lower reaches of British pop and even there met with only modest success. ‘Will You Be My Lover Tonight?’ was recorded by a mutual friend of Oldham and the Stones named George Bean and released on Decca in January 1964, sinking without a trace. ‘Shang a Doo Lang’, an unashamed knock-off of the Crystals’ ‘He’s Sure the Boy I Love’, went to a sixteen-year-old newcomer named Adrienne Posta and was produced by Oldham with Spectoresque Wall of Sound effects. By far the most prestigious catch was Gene Pitney, a major American name whose fondness for London pop low life had led him to play back-up percussion at the boozy ‘Not Fade Away’ session. Pitney, it so happened, needed a follow-up to his recent massive hit with Bacharach and David’s ‘24 Hours from Tulsa’. Oldham persuaded him to make it Jagger and Richard’s ‘My Only Girl’, retitled ‘That Girl Belongs to Yesterday’. Though Pitney substantially rewrote the song, Mick and Keith’s credit survived when it made the UK Top 10 and even sneaked into the US Hot 100.

Adrienne Posta was the daughter of a wealthy furniture manufacturer who intended to make her a pop star by hook or by crook. When Decca released Adrienne’s version of Jagger and Richard’s ‘Shang a Doo Lang’ in early March, Oldham persuaded Mr Posta to hold a launch party at his flat in Seymour Place, Bayswater. The party was to witness a momentous meeting, though not the one Oldham originally had in mind. Deciding it was time Keith Richard ‘started going out with something other than a guitar’, Oldham asked his girlfriend Sheila Klein to bring along someone for Keith. She chose a friend with the happily coincidental name of Linda Keith, a former assistant at Vogue who had progressed to modelling.

Launch parties for records were unusual in 1964, and an impressive posse of Swinging London insiders turned up to wish Adrienne’s single Godspeed and partake of her father’s hospitality. They included Peter Asher from the singing duo Peter and Gordon, the latest act to benefit from Lennon– McCartney songs. Asher brought his actress sister Jane and her boyfriend, Paul McCartney, who lodged at the Asher family home in Wimpole Street, Marylebone. With them came an old Hampstead friend of Oldham’s named John Dunbar and his seventeen-year-old girlfriend, Marianne Faithfull.

The name that always seemed too perfect for the young woman it adorned – ‘Faithfull’ with two l’s, suggesting a double portion of innocent steadfastness – was not a publicist’s invention, as many people later assumed. Marianne’s father was an academic named Robert Glynn Faithfull who served with British intelligence during the Second World War, then went on to receive a doctorate in psychology from Liverpool University. Nothing about this seemingly quintessential English rose hinted at a background that was also more exotically foreign than any of the crucial people in Mick’s life had been, or would be.

Her mother, Eva, was an Austro-Hungarian aristocrat, Baroness Erisso, whose family, the Sacher-Masochs, dated back to Emperor Charlemagne. Eva’s great-uncle Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was the author of the nineteenth-century novel Venus im Pelz in which he gave his own name, ‘masochism’, to pleasure derived from self-inflicted pain. Brought up in Hapsburg grandeur, Eva had become an actress and dancer with the Max Reinhardt company in Vienna during the 1930s and, but for the war, might have followed Reinhardt to America and a career in Hollywood. Instead, she married the British intelligence officer Robert Faithfull and settled with him in Britain, where Marianne, their only child, was born in 1946.

The couple separated in 1952 and the Austrian baroness relocated to – of all places – Reading, the unexciting Berkshire town best known for Huntley & Palmer’s biscuits and Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol. Here she acquired a small house in the poorest district and worked variously as a shop assistant, coffee-bar server and bus conductress while still managing to imbue her daughter with a sense of patrician superiority. Marianne was educated on semi-charity terms at a Catholic convent school, St Joseph’s, under a regime so strict that the girls had to bathe in underslips to avoid the sin of looking at their own nude bodies.

She grew up to be a stunning combination of beauty and brains, mistily innocent-looking, yet with a voluptuous figure; shyly and refinedly spoken, yet with an inquiring intellect and a rich mezzo-soprano singing voice. She had no doubt that life would lead her into the theatre or music – possibly both – and by the age of sixteen was already working as a folk singer around Reading coffee bars. Early in 1964, she visited Cambridge to attend an undergraduates’ ball, and met Andrew Oldham’s friend John Dunbar, then studying fine arts at Churchill College. Oldham was looking to expand his managerial empire beyond the Stones, and asked Dunbar if he knew any girl singers. ‘Well, actually, yes,’ Dunbar replied.