by Nick Kent
None of us were happy in our new surroundings. My father soon found himself in daily conflict with the higher-ups at the studio and the accumulated stress caused his various physical ailments to further flare up. My mother felt out of place, and I became lonely and withdrawn, uncertain of how and where to fit in with everyone around me.
The hearty ‘welcome in the hillsides’ that the Welsh were always promising to shower on all foreigners entering their borders had been mysteriously withheld from me. At school, I was mocked for my English accent, which I refused to modulate in order to blend in with the blocked-sinus cadences of the South Wales resident. I was useless at sports too - apart from cross-country running - and as soon as I’d entered grammar school at eleven, I found my place amongst the stragglers and the underdeveloped lurking in the shadow-dimmed corners of the playground.
One of my fellow outsiders at school was a youth with a facial defect who seemed at first glance to be ever so slightly mentally challenged. We got to talking one day and he mentioned that his father was a leading promoter of wrestling events and pop concerts in the South Wales area. I then talked up my dad’s role as TV studio controller and the boy became excited. He immediately proposed a deal: if I could get my father to agree to take him for a guided tour around his studio, he’d coerce his dad to let me attend one of his pop concerts. He’d even take me backstage to meet the acts.
A few days later, I was formally invited to witness a concert that was booked into Cardiff’s Sophia Gardens on February 28th 1964. It was a package tour of recent UK hit pop acts, headlined by an actor called John Leyton then renowned for his role as ‘Ginger’ in the TV series Biggles who’d also scored a no. 1 hit of late with his overwrought rendition of ‘Tell Laura I Love Her’. The rest of the bill were similarly old-school Tin Pan Alley chancers and prancers with one marked exception: nestled well below Leyton’s name and likeness on the marquee poster were five hirsute faces belonging to a Richmond-based quintet of young white R & B purists who called themselves the Rolling Stones. They’d already started getting publicity for themselves and had so far released two singles - the second, ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, being a Lennon-McCartney composition - but neither had penetrated the top 10. They were still something of an unknown quantity outside of the South of England as a concert attraction and had been placed low on the bill in case their act failed to take off in the British provinces.
At around 5 p.m. on the evening in question, I entered the premises and was duly introduced to the acts that were already secluded in the backstage area. They were all surprisingly cordial with me, considering the fact that I was a pre-pubescent twelve-year-old dressed up like the quintessential spare prick at a wedding. Harold Wilson’s Labour government had recently been brought into power after years of Conservative misrule and my parents being good socialist thinkers had celebrated by buying their only child an overcoat made in a material called ‘Gannex’ that one of Wilson’s closest supporters and business cronies had begun manufacturing. It was supposed to be the fabric of the future but it looked and felt like a cheap bath mat with sleeves. It was a hideous material and was doomed to become extinct just as soon as Wilson had left power, but not before I’d been rendered sartorially challenged at this landmark occasion in my life.
Still, no one said anything untoward about my catastrophic fashion sense. The early-sixties UK pop breed were an approachable bunch if nothing else. They knew all about the devious nature of pop success and were fastidious about always presenting a smiling face and friendly word or two to any potential fan crossing their paths. Jet Harris-a hopeless alcoholic and one of UK rock’s first-ever bona fide casualties who’d been booked on the tour even though he was so plastered all the time someone else had to play his guitar parts behind a curtain - was even nice to me. His girlfriend-a singer named Billie Davis - let me play with her dog. I felt accepted by all of them and liked being in their company. But as soon as the lights dimmed and each of them slipped under the spotlight to reveal their stagecraft, I could sense that they were all living in the past and only a few heartbeats away from becoming instant entertainment-industry relics.
All these acts basically looked the same. Thin lips, prominent cheekbones, pompadoured Everly Brothers hair, shark-white teeth clenched in winning smiles, tight shiny suits with spaghetti stains on the lapels, loud shirts and skinny little ties. They sounded identical also. Twanging guitars played at docile, non-feedback-inducing volumes, drumming you could gently tap your foot along with, singers clumsily attempting to reproduce the husky-voiced drama of Elvis Presley’s recent recordings. In fact what we the audience were seeing that night was the timely ending of an era - the dreary watershed years separating the fifties from this new decade we were now living in and the beginning of true sixties culture as an oasis of unbridled hedonism. It occurred at the very moment the Rolling Stones entered the building.
The group had been delayed on the motorway and had arrived just in time to literally walk on stage for their spot. Suddenly the mood in the hall became more charged and disruptive. The predominantly female audience had been polite in their reception of the other acts but now they were becoming distinctly agitated. Screams started erupting in the hall followed by a succession of adolescent females leaving their seats and rampaging around the building in fierce packs.
I was seated in the front row just as the lights went down to herald the group’s onstage arrival and was suddenly confronted by a demented young woman who angrily demanded that I vacate my place for her. When I refused, she took off one of her shoes and positioned the stiletto heel against my neck like a shiv forcing me to acquiesce to her demand. One of the bouncers saw what was going on and pulled her off me, but by that time complete pandemonium had set in everywhere I looked. I was surrounded on all sides by young women in a collective state of extremely heightened sexual psychosis. They were touching themselves in inappropriate places and letting forth primeval howls. My eyes were popping out of my head.
This was the first time I’d ever come face to face with ‘sex’ - never mind raging mass sexual hysteria - so you can understand that the moment had more than a lingering impact on my naive little psyche. They were scary broads too but I instinctively understood the root cause of their dementia because the Rolling Stones’ presence in the room had also sucked me into something equally life-scrambling. The Rolling Stones never smiled and physically they were the polar opposite of everyone else on the bill. No ties, no Brylcreemed hair slicked back to better define the young male forehead. The Rolling Stones didn’t have foreheads. Just hair, big lips and a collective aura of rampaging insolence.
They slouched onto the stage and stared witheringly at the crowd before them as they donned their instruments. The house compère hastily announced them only to have his utterances drowned in screams. Then they began playing. It could have been ‘Not Fade Away’, the Buddy Holly song they’d release a week later, thus securing their first top-10 placing and their full-on ascension to the status of rebel-prince youth phenomenon.
All I can recall in my mind now is a vibrant, irresistibly all-embracing sonic churn - ‘the very churn of sedition itself’, I’d later come to call it. It was raucous and primordial and it sent young women into an instant state of full-on demonic possession. Something that had previously been forbidden in white culture was being let loose here: a kind of raw tribal abandoning of all inhibitions that held the key to a new consciousness still emerging. Within the space of their twenty-minute-long performance, my childhood’s end was preordained and the door to adulthood held tantalisingly ajar. I remember it now like someone reaching into my brain and turning a switch that suddenly changed my fundamental vision of life from grainy black and white into glorious Technicolor.
They played ‘Route 66’, ‘Road Runner’ and ‘Walking the Dog’ and they were right at the top of their game. Brian Jones hadn’t yet fallen by the wayside as a musical contributor and he, Jagger and Keith Richards presented a unique three-pronged attack
as live performers. Jones - the most conventionally good-looking - minced menacingly on the left whilst Keith perfected a kind of big-eared borstal strut to his far right, endlessly winding and unwinding his coiled frame around the guitar rhythms he was punching out.
The two of them perfectly bookended Jagger, who at that point in time was one scary motherfucker to behold. No one had seen features quite like his before: the pornographic lips, the bird’s nest hair. The Stones had a disturbing ‘Village of the Damned’ quality about their combined physical presence but Jagger had the most radically alien looks of the quintet.
And his was by far the most overtly malevolent presence in the house. At one point in the set, a spectator-I couldn’t tell if it was male or female - rushed the stage and attempted to grab Jagger’s legs in a sort of rugby tackle manoeuvre. The singer responded by calmly driving his mike stand into the interloper’s face, causing blood and several teeth to arc across the spotlight. It was shocking to behold but also somehow perversely appropriate. We were all in the grip of something that was completely out of control, a sort of mass delirium, a voodoo ceremony for the white adolescent libido to come alive to.
By the end, all the barriers had come tumbling down. When they left the stage, they’d obliterated every performer and every note that had preceded them. I saw the other acts leaving the building with their instruments and suitcases at the end of the evening and they had to run a gauntlet of rabid female Stones fans outside the stage door who were only too willing to call attention to their various musical and image shortcomings.
The rules were all changing. ‘Tame’ was out. ‘Audacious’ was in. The Zeitgeist pendulum had moved to the other end of the culture spectrum, the one diametrically opposed to notions of conformism and bourgeois uniformity. And the Rolling Stones were at the centre of this cultural youth quake, its designated dam-busters.
I actually got to meet them that night too. The promoter took me and his son into their dressing room, which wasn’t much bigger than a toilet cubicle, about a quarter of an hour after they’d vacated the stage. ‘Why is that little cunt getting to meet them and not us?’ screamed an enraged female, one of many being blocked from entering through the adjacent stage door. But hey, I couldn’t help it if I was lucky.
At first glimpse the group looked utterly shattered, wrung dry by the exhausting routine of travelling around the British Isles in a cramped and underheated Transit van night and day. Keith Richards was stretched out on a makeshift sofa, eyes closed, mouth slightly agape, an open bottle of brown ale balanced precariously on his lower torso. Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman were towelling the sweat from their hair and necks and staring blankly at their dressing-room walls as if under hypnosis. They didn’t exactly radiate approachability but when I timidly offered them a piece of paper to autograph, they obliged without complaint, even though I had to gently nudge Keith in order to wake him up.
Mick Jagger was the one I was wariest of. I’d just seen him literally smash someone’s face in and now he was standing directly before me looking extremely angry about something or other. For an insecure second, I thought he might be experiencing an allergic reaction to my overcoat but then I noticed that his livid expression was aimed squarely in the direction of Brian Jones. Jones was surrounded by three young female fans, all of whom were clearly captivated by his genteel Cheltenham-bred manners and blond-haired pretty-boy insouciance. I could tell these girls were attracted by Jagger too - they kept shooting awed glances his way - but he frightened them with his contemptuous eyes and sullen expression so much that they never dared actually approach him. This set off a tense dynamic in the room: Jones swanning around these girls like the cat who stole the cream and Jagger staring at him with murder in his eyes.
Of course, Brian Jones had started out as the undisputed ringleader of the Rolling Stones and was certainly acting as though this continued to be the case. He was still physically strong and mentally focused: the drugs and alcohol hadn’t yet diminished him. In fact, he was possibly at his all-time happiest at this precise juncture of his life. All his dreams were coming true and the Stones were still fundamentally ‘his’ creation. The Jagger- Richards songwriting partnership had yet to reach commercial fruition and so he could still kid himself that he held the reins and was directing the whole operation. It would take only two or three months for this to end all too dramatically. From then on, he was a lost boy, a dead fop walking.
In later years, I would talk at length to many of Brian Jones’s closest acquaintances and they would almost always depict him as a ruinously flawed specimen of humanity. Some called him ‘sadistic’, others ‘pathetic’. In his defence though I have to say - he was incredibly nice to me. He was the only member of the Stones that night who bothered to engage me in conversation. He wasn’t condescending in the least; he told me he thought it was ‘fantastic’ that someone so young was coming to their shows. He said ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ repeatedly. He took his self-appointed role as the Stones’ good-will ambassador so seriously it was almost quaint to behold. He was so clean, courteous and daintily expressive it seemed unthinkable that he might be harbouring dark intentions under all that golden hair. He had me smitten anyway. Suddenly I had my future adult agenda mapped out before me. This was exactly the kind of person I was determined to grow up and become.
It was providential indeed then that my parents hadn’t actually heard of the Rolling Stones when they reluctantly agreed to let me attend the concert I’ve just described. If they had, I would never have been allowed near the venue. In the following months, however, they became aware of the group’s existence and began loudly regretting the fact that I’d been exposed to their worrisome influence.
Things reached a head in early ’65 when three group members were brought to court in order to answer charges that they’d urinated all over the forecourt of a garage somewhere out in the provinces. ‘These people you seem to idolise - they’re nothing but degenerates,’ my mother scolded. My father went even further, invoking a word I’d never heard before. ‘There’s something decadent about that bunch of animals,’ he said one evening as images of the group exiting their trial were broadcast on a TV news report. He was ahead of his time with that evaluation: the Stones’ decadent phase wouldn’t kick off for another four years.
There was one incident where my dad truly freaked out. We were both watching the television one evening in 1965 when Ready, Steady, Go!, the London-based weekly pop show, came on. That week, James Brown was the special guest: he and the Famous Flames performed live throughout its entire half-hour-long duration. It was Brown’s first-ever TV exposure in the British Isles and he rose to the occasion with a performance that gave new meaning to the word ‘torrid’. The cameras couldn’t help but linger on the predominantly female audience, who were experiencing the same kind of shared sexual psychosis that I’d witnessed first-hand with the Stones. After about twenty minutes, steam started spouting from out of my father’s ears. He bolted out of his chair, turned the TV off and told me in no uncertain terms that I was henceforth forbidden from watching Ready, Steady, Go! ever again. I still watched it though because it was usually broadcast at 6 p.m. on a Friday-a time when he was returning from work and I was alone in the house. Sometimes he’d arrive back just a minute or two after its conclusion and he’d always feel to see if the valves at the back of the TV were still warm. If they were, there was hell to pay.
In 1966, I saw Bob Dylan live backed by what became the Band on his seminal electric tour of Britain that spring. They played a single show at Cardiff’s Capitol Cinema. A friend at public school bought me the ticket so that I could tell him what transpired by phone the next day. It was the first time I’d ever seen another human being under the influence of drugs. Dylan rambled a lot between songs and his speech was seriously impaired. And the music was so loud that it was impossible to take in on any kind of aesthetic level. It was like standing in a relatively small room whilst a jet-aircraft engine was set into motion. ‘Tu
multuous’ doesn’t even begin to cover it. I couldn’t hear properly for a week afterwards.
In 1967, another epiphany: I attended a special ‘psychedelic’ package tour - once again at Sophia Gardens - that featured the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd, the mighty Move from the Black Country and prog-rock pioneers the Nice. Best bill I’ve ever witnessed. Four mind-boggling performances. Seeing Syd that night ignited something within me that I’ve been obsessed with all my adult life. The sense of mystery he projected from that stage was something I felt an overwhelming compulsion to solve. His story - however it developed - was mine to tell.
He was also the second person I’d ever witnessed who was clearly in a chemically altered state. He was so out of it he couldn’t sing or even play his guitar coherently. Jimi Hendrix - who followed the Floyd ten minutes later - was the third. But Hendrix was a pro. Being on acid didn’t prevent him from pulling out all the stops in his voluminous trick-bag of guitar wild man theatrics - it only emboldened him to take the whole shtick further until he’d incited mass hysteria in the house. There was a sexual bravado about Hendrix live that night that was so palpable it made my jaw drop. I was even more thunderstruck when I witnessed several young girls surrounding him at the lip of the stage who had become so aroused they were trying to fondle his genitalia whilst he played. I’d seen these same girls week after week timidly accompanying their parents to Llandaff Cathedral throughout my early teens.
In 1968, glad tidings. Harlech’s contract with ITV expired and my dad moved us back to the South of England, close to London. I left Wales that summer with a spring in my step and nine O levels under my belt. My folks were well chuffed. And I was happy to be closer to the heart of the counter-cultural revolution. London was abuzz with magical concerts, many of them held for free in Hyde Park. I saw Traffic, Fleetwood Mac, the Pretty Things and the Move give great shows in an idyllic setting.