Johnson's Life of London

by Boris Johnson

For the next few minutes I fixed my gaze on my prey until he turned his head to show his famous profile, a magnificent Roman profile. A Roman profile? Wait a mo: that wasn’t Keef. That was Sir Tom Stoppard, another man with a grey heron’s nest on his head.

  Where was Keef? But the girl had gone, and as I kept trying to pick him out, I ran through the options. In my experience they are very hard to pull off, these impromptu interviews with an überceleb. I once spent three days tailing Jacques Chirac across France, after one of his staff assured me that he would give an interview “in the margin” of one of his campaign visits. After repeated disappointments, I had managed to put myself in his path as he swept out of a rally towards his vast Citroën.

  “President Chirac,” I cried, holding out my hand. “Boris Johnson, from London!” He paused for a nanosecond; he gripped; he beamed. “Jacques Chirac, from Paris!” he said, and then I felt like a quarterback being hit from both sides as a pair of bodyguards terminated the conversation, and Chirac was gone. I tried it all sorts of ways, but I couldn’t make much of that quote.

  So I knew that if I was to make the most of my time I had better boil it down to one single, overwhelming question. As the awards ceremony churned on into the night, I thought about what I knew, and what I wanted to know.

  I am a keen student of Life, the autobiography that has earned Keith his award for writing. On reading it over and again, I reckon I have an inkling about how it all happened. The Rolling Stones are landmarks of our culture, as weatherbeaten and venerable—and central to the story of modern London—as the lions of Trafalgar Square.

  As I say, they are still rocking at the age of about sixty-eight, even if Bill Wyman seems to have opted out a bit lately. They have generated billions in revenue streams of all kinds (not much of which, thanks to adroit planning, has come the way of the UK taxpayer). Their lolling tongue is recognised by admen as one of this country’s most powerful brands. I am serious. I have seen presentations in which this fat-lipped symbol is rated one of the strengths of UK marketing.

  More important, they have created an imperishable anthology of great rock/pop songs, and you don’t produce so much work over so many years without some mania that impels creativity. It is obvious that this fertility is all about Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and their avowed love–hate relationship. To find the defining moment of that friendship, you have to go back more than half a century; before their 1962 gig at Alexis Korner’s club in Ealing; before the historic December 1961 encounter at Sidcup railway station, where Keith found Mick on his way to study at the London School of Economics with a bunch of records by Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters under his arm.

  To understand what is going on between Mick and Keith, you need to go right back to their primary school in what is virtually the London suburb of Dartford—Wentworth—and what happened when they both hit the age of eleven. The critical fact is that Mick Jagger passed his Eleven plus exams and went to Dartford Grammar School, on the glide path to university. Keith failed, and might have gone to a secondary modern if he had not shown some aptitude for drawing and music.

  So he went to a technical school in Dartford, and even there his work was deemed to be so bad that he was forced—to his fury—to repeat a year. You only have to watch him being interviewed, or read Life, to see that Keith is a very thoughtful and intelligent man; not only one of the top ten guitarists in history (says Rolling Stone magazine) but a reader of military history with a handsome library in Connecticut. And yet at the tender age of eleven, he was informed by the emanations of the British educational establishment that he was made of different intellectual timber than his little chum and neighbour.

  Under the shaming sheep-and-goats separation of the 1944 Butler Act—against which the British middle classes were soon to rebel—he was deemed to be less capable of abstract thought, less suitable for a bourgeois profession than Michael Philip Jagger. He was the one who supplied the riffs that made the hordes of teenage girls begin to moan like maenads, and yet Jagger was officially the clever one.

  It was this unresolved issue—of intellectual and creative primacy—that was the motor of the Rolling Stones. At the heart of the group are two colossal talents, competing and collaborating at the same time. It was a competition that took many forms, and in some ways, after fifty years, it is Sir Michael who has emerged ahead.

  Take the battle for female company, the primal struggle of life. In a sense it began by being even steven, and Keith makes clear that he was quite capable of getting girly action, if I can use the blatantly sexist language of their first number one.

  He does not spare us in his account of how he snaffled Anita Pallenberg from Brian Jones (it took place, if you want to know, on the backseat of his “Blue Lena” Bentley during the watershed summer of 1967, as they were being chauffeur-driven down through Spain towards Morocco); and though Keith accuses Mick of having his way with Anita sometime after the filming of the bath scene in Performance (an allegation I think the lady still denies), Keith gets the ball back over the net by going to bed with Marianne Faithfull at a time when she was meant to be faithfull to Mick; and at one point, he tells us, he was forced by Mick’s return to make such a rapid leap from the bedroom window that he forgot his socks—still the subject, we gather, of a running gag between himself and Marianne.

  Again, both men seem to have gone to bed with brooding Bavarian bombshell Uschi Obermaier, who then does Keith a favour by announcing her verdict to an expectant planet. Mick is the “perfect gentleman,” but Keith is adjudged the better lover because he knows a woman’s anatomy. Of course there was also Bill Wyman, who was earning a reputation for his metronomic success with groupies, and though Keith acknowledges this reputation, he also observes a bit disparagingly that most of the young women who were ushered into Wyman’s room were treated to nothing more than a cup of milky tea.

  The point is that Keith is competitive and wants us to know that he has had more than his fair share of women of all shapes and sizes, and yet most casual observers would think—probably rightly—that Mick has been the final winner in this crazed marathon exhibition match of heterosexuality. In the end it is Mick whose name is linked with the longer and more glamorous list of women, and who seems to inspire the most uncalled-for behaviour in the female sex.

  Many years ago a girl I was going out with came back from a party (to which I had not been invited) and said that she had met Mick Jagger. “Of course I kissed him,” she said. “Why?” I asked. “Only on the cheek. It just seemed the right thing to do.” It isn’t clear that Keef would have produced the same instinctive reaction. And so throughout his discussion of this kind of thing, he makes plain in Life that this is not a contest he particularly wanted to win, and that he was actually pretty bashful with girls (it was Anita who made the running in the backseat of the Bentley); and unlike the ancient satyr Jagger, he has spent the last few decades in happy monogamy with Patti.

  Nor did he try to compete with Jagger in what you might loosely call social climbing. Both of them were in fact pretty middle class: Jagger the son and grandson of teachers, Keith the grandson of the Lady Mayoress of Walthamstow (who was almost certainly at the dog track to hear Churchill get booed in 1945). Cool London in the 1960s was meant to be a mixture of the “new aristocracy” and the old. There was the soaring cockney talent—film stars, designers, gobby photographers; there were suburban rock stars and models; then there was a bunch of effete and more or less aristocratic Old Etonian drug fiends and art dealers.

  It was Mick, who once considered a career as a politician, who seems on the whole to have liked the company of toffs. The pair of them were asked in a magazine questionnaire to name their heroes. Mick put down “Dukes.” Keith put down “the Great Train Robbers.” In 2003 there came the moment of ultimate betrayal, when Mick rang Keith to say that he had accepted a knighthood from Tony Blair. He didn’t really see how he could turn it down. “You can turn
down anything you like, pal,” said Keith brutally.

  The award was “ludicrous,” Richards later complained. He wasn’t going on stage with someone “wearing a coronet and sporting the old ermine,” he raved.

  Jagger fired back by saying that Richards was “an unhappy man.” What do you mean, he’s unhappy? asked the interviewer. “What I say,” said Mick. “He’s unhappy. If you can’t understand that you can’t understand anything.”

  You can see why Keith might have been unhappy about this lopsided tribute to the Stones. It wasn’t as if Mick could be held up as a shining example to young people, with Keith the old drug-fuelled reprobate.

  They had both been busted for drugs. They had both been (briefly) imprisoned. As for their contributions to society, let’s face it, Mick got his knighthood because Blair venerated him, in the manner of so many ex–public school wannabe rockers, and his director of communications, Alastair Campbell, probably decided they needed some stardust for the honours list.

  Whatever he claimed, Keith must have felt hacked off not even to be offered parity of recognition. In Life, Keith is full of praise for Mick’s talents as a musician and as a fast and highly effective writer of lyrics. He can do bawdy, decadent, satirical, sentimental, soulful, mock-soulful and satanic. He writes with terrific punch and economy and some times absurdity. Think of “Brown Sugar,” which involves a “scarred old slaver” who apparently enjoys whipping some women “just around midnight,” to a chorus of “Ah, brown sugar, how come you taste so good, uh-huh.”

  The reason this verging-on-the-racist and sexist material is not more widely denounced is that frankly most of us spend our lives barely able to work out what he is saying. I have met all sorts of gin-soaked barroom queens at Tory gatherings, but it was only after decades of listening to “Honky Tonk Women” that someone put me out of my misery and explained that the singer begins by claiming to have met a gin-soaked bar-room queen in Memphis.

  I always thought the opening line of “Wild Horses” was “Tired of living,” though I now discover that it is “Childhood living.” What I am getting at is that the words are certainly important in creating the general climate of emotion, but it is the tune that always gives the words their potency. It is the tune you hum and dance to, and most of the ideas for the tunes seem to have come from Keith.

  Mick may have sung “Satisfaction” and written the words, but Keith discovered the tune when he woke up one morning and turned on his cassette recorder to find that the Muse had imparted it to him in a dream, and that he had got up in the middle of the night and cracked it out. To a nonexpert like me there is something spine-tingling about reading his disquisitions on the right way to play and tune a guitar and the open “G system” (or whatever it is) that he pioneered. He talks about his toil to make the instrument produce exactly the sound he has in his head, and you feel in the presence of a connoisseur.

  It is like the privilege of hearing a top-class artist talk about his technique, as you watch the first enigmatic lines of the sketch. There is something dotty-professorish about the way he hooks up amps and extension leads and cassette recorders in the hope of capturing some elusive effect. Sometimes he spends so long in the recording studio, striving to perfect a song, that everyone else has conked out on the floor and it is just drug-fuelled Keith chuntering on through the night until he has got it.

  In other words, there is something a little bit paradoxical about Keith’s self-portrait. In an interview in 2005 he tried again to suggest that Mick was the swot, and that he was relatively unambitious. “Me I wake up, praise the Lord, and then make sure that all the phones are turned off. Mick has to get up in the morning with a plan.” This strikes me as classic British false modesty and pretence of amateurism.

  It is absolutely clear that Keith is not some laid-back loon-panted druggie. He is a creative Stakhanovite. There is a message in the long technical expositions in Life, the confident analysis of how the blues evolved into rock and roll, and the place of the Stones in the story. The message is that Keith is at least the intellectual equal of Mick, and that the verdict of the Eleven plus was wrong.

  It is the rubbing of two sticks that makes the flame. It was the constant competitive urge—to impress the other guy—that produced the flash of genius. That was the internal dynamo that powered the Stones; and as if that was not enough, there was the immense external pressure from their rivals. Just as there is a Mick faction and a Keith faction, so the human race is divided into those who go for the Beatles and those who prefer the Stones (with a large chunk of us prepared to support both of them, depending on our mood).

  Both groups were all-male; both benefited from the creative tension between the lead pair. Both set out to conquer America and triumphantly succeeded; and though they collaborated on some of their songs—and even coordinated their releases so as to avoid spoiling the other’s publicity—the idea from the outset was that they were avowed rivals.

  The peculiar Andrew Loog Oldham was a former Beatles publicist who somehow made himself the manager of the Stones, and he saw that if Mick and Keith were to make it big they couldn’t just cover Chuck Berry records. They would have to follow the lead of John and Paul. So he locked them in a room and made them write their own stuff, and for the whole of that glorious decade the Beatles and the Stones were in a kind of semi-official competition. Loog Oldham saw that it was vital to distinguish his acts, so the suggestion was that the Beatles were the wholesome ones while the Stones were leering, troglodytic and more overtly sexual.

  The Beatles went out with nice girls like Cynthia Lennon or Jane Asher. The girlfriends of the Rolling Stones were busted for drugs wearing nothing but fur coats, with semi-eaten Mars bars arranged nearby—leading the police to make prurient but unfounded suggestions to the media. The Beatles did psychedelia; the Stones did psychedelia with more than a hint of devil worship.

  The Beatles produced Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The Stones aped it with Their Satanic Majesties Request. If artistic success is to be judged by public approval, it is clear the Beatles are still some way ahead. Though they had broken up before 1970, they produced more top-ten hits, more number ones, more top-ten albums and more number-one albums than any other band, including the Rolling Stones. But even the Beatles were the product of their time, and insofar as they wrote hits they were at least spurred by the knowledge that others were capable of beating them to the top of the charts.

  By the end of that decade the suburbs of London were blooming with talent of all kinds. A new generation had emerged, nurtured by the NHS, free dentistry, good drains, higher per capita incomes and above all decent publicly funded education in grammar schools and art colleges. In bedrooms and garages across the city, acnoid teenagers twanged and morphed into gaudy apparitions with silk bandanas and leather vests and dirty sheepskin coats.

  Of the remaining Stones, Bill Wyman came from Lewisham, Ronnie Wood from an old family of canal bargees in Hillingdon, Charlie Watts from Islington, and Brian Jones, never let it be forgotten, began his career as a sales assistant at Whiteleys in Queensway.

  Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin came from Wallington near Croydon. The Who were almost all educated at Acton County Grammar School. Ray Davies and the Kinks came from Hornsey. The Dave Clark Five came from Tottenham. The Small Faces came from East Ham.

  The clubs they played in were suburban clubs, with a notable emphasis on the southwest of London. There was the Crawdaddy club in Richmond, as well as the Station Hotel and the Richmond Athletics Club; and of course there was Eel Pie Island and Ealing and many others. London is 607 square miles, by far the most extensive city in Europe, a vast network of well-connected villages and urban centres, and it was the sheer scale and diversity of the available talent that helped to produce the rock/pop boom.

  Americans were certainly the pioneers of rock and roll—Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Elvis. But to understand the unique c
ontribution of London, you must remember that very few American cities were anything like as big. There were many American centres of musical revolution: New Orleans, Nashville, Memphis, Detroit, L.A., San Francisco, New York and so on. And yet there was no single metropolis in which so much talent was concentrated.

  To get back to our nuclear metaphor: there were just more uranium rods in the nuclear pile of London than there were in any single American city. When the thing went bang, it was more likely to produce a flash that lit up the world, as it did in the case of the Beatles and the Stones. There is a final reason why London played a pivotal role. Young white Londoners could play black music—the twelve-bar blues—in a way that young white Americans might have found embarrassing.

  You only have to look at a video of Chuck Berry singing “Johnny B Goode” to see where the whole thing began. But for decades black American jazz and blues musicians had accused white musicians of effectively ripping off their ideas and using them to make more money; and since this accusation was well-founded, white American musicians came to be hesitant about simply taking a piece of blues music and playing it in the style of a black performer.

  White middle-class Londoners such as Richards and Jagger, on the other hand, had no such hang-ups. They saw nothing ridiculous or disrespectful about singing how they woke up this morning and their woman done gone left them, etc. It was just a tribute to the music they loved. So what happened with rock and roll in London was really the supreme example of the import-export process that made the city great.

  People like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards got their hands on records by Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry. They sat listening to them in their bedrooms and art college lavatories. They imitated them with religious devotion, singing and playing in (what they hoped was) a plausibly black way. After a while—about 1964—they started branching out into psychedelia and pop and, then, with “Jumping Jack Flash,” pure rock music. But when they went to America, and played those blues-derived songs, the Rolling Stones were effectively introducing a mass American audience to a musical genre that originated in America.