Stones: Acclaimed Biography, The

by Norman, Philip

  The two songs, released on a single in 1956, became a stupendous British Top Ten hit. Haley and his group, in their plaid jackets and bow ties, owed their appeal to outlandish remoteness. But Donegan, with his nasal whine, his ex-serviceman’s haircut and backing of mundane domestic implements, made comparably exciting sounds that anyone could reproduce. Within days of Lonnie Donegan’s first appearance on national television, acolyte skiffle groups had sprung up all over Britain. The craze centred on London’s Soho, its jazz cellars and newly fashionable espresso coffee houses, into whose gloomy recesses record-company talent scouts now plunged in a hectic search for ersatz Lonnie Donegans. For the first time ever, musical talent was held to be of secondary importance to looks. Any boy who played a guitar and wore a plaid shirt with the collar turned up, if he sat around long enough in coffee bars like the Heaven and Hell, the Gyre and Gimble or the 2 I’s, could hope to follow the starry path of Lonnie Donegan or ‘Britain’s First rock ’n’ roller,’ Tommy Steele.

  All over Britain, in suburban living rooms, boys crouched together with their matchwood guitars, their mothers’ washboards and basses improvised from tea chests and wire, struggling to learn the blues songs made popular by Donegan and his successors, grateful for the easy chords and pattered tempo, blissfully unaware that the lyrics, as Woody Guthrie or Huddie Leadbetter had written them, were violent political tracts; that Midnight Special was a cotton slave’s suicidal lament or that Lonnie Johnson’s plaintively sweet Careless Love was a song about syphilis, ending with murder.

  Eva Jagger remembers that even as a very small boy her elder son would stand in front of the family wireless set, singing along to music with words made up in his head. Most of all he seemed to like Latin American rhythms, which he would accompany with a stream of Spanish-sounding nonsense. At the age of ten, on a Spanish holiday with Joe and Eva, he posed for a snapshot in a straw sombrero, playing a toy guitar. Sombrero tipped back, guitar flourished flamenco-style, the pose was, even then, self-consciously theatrical.

  The skiffle craze swept through Dartford Grammar as through almost every other British school. Two of Mike’s friends, Bob Beckwith and Alan Etherington, acquired guitars and began practising together. But Mike, though he too had a guitar, joined none of the ad hoc classroom skiffle groups that would strum together, perched on desks during break time.

  He never really liked Bill Haley, or even Elvis Presley, after the gold-suited, magical lout had superseded Haley as the corrupter of Britain’s youth. His first fan worship, significantly, was for Little Richard, the original black rock ’n’ roll star whose r & b beginnings were now camouflaged in a demented scream, a wobbling drape suit and an aura – though few perceived it then – of sexual ambiguity.

  He did succumb, as most did, to the charm of Buddy Holly and the Crickets. Holly is blessed by countless guitar demigods for having first showed them the way from skiffle to rock ’n’ roll, in simple but inventive chord sequences through G and E. As his enormous output shows, he was a stylistic chameleon, equally at home with Texas rockabilly and black r & b. Soon to die, he visited Britain on tour only once, in March 1958. Mike Jagger went with another Dartford Grammar School friend, Dick Taylor, to see the Holly stage show at the Granada Cinema, Woolwich. Buddy Holly that night played one of the more esoteric items in his repertoire – a song called Not Fade Away, set to a halting, staccato beat invented by the blues star Bo Diddley. Dick Taylor remembers what an impression that song in particular made on Mike Jagger.

  A wispy, amiable boy, son of a plumber in nearby Bexleyheath, Dick Taylor came nearer than most to penetrating the Jagger reserve. For Dick knew about American music far more exotic and exciting than Elvis and Little Richard. What Dick Taylor liked was real blues – the scratched and blurred master sketches that the rock ’n’ roll industry had turned into glib cartoons. It was at Dick Taylor’s house that Mike Jagger listened to Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed, Howlin’ Wolf, giants of the urban blues with heart-shivering voices, calling and answering their virtuoso guitars, that could change the view beyond the lace curtains from Kentish suburbia to the dark and windy canyons along Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive. From then on, the blues became Mike’s consuming passion.

  Part of the music’s attraction was its sheer unavailability. Simply hearing it was complicated enough. You could not buy blues records in the Dartford or Bexleyheath record shops. As with all truly worthwhile things, it involved a trip to London. Mike and Dick would spend their Saturday afternoons at the jazz record shops in Charing Cross Road, thumbing through the blues ‘import’ stock in sleeves already dog-eared and thumbed in their wandering journey across the cultural hemispheres. The very label logos excited them – not boring British Decca and Philips, but Okeh and Crown and Chess and Sue and Imperial and Delmark.

  If listening to blues was difficult, seeing it was virtually impossible. Though famous bluesmen like Big Bill Broonzy did perform in Britain during the late Fifties, news of their coming did not percolate down the line to Dartford. The only glimpse given to Dartford Grammar School’s secret blues caucus involved sitting through Jazz on a Summer’s Day, a film documentary about the American Newport Jazz Festival. Almost at the end, a lanky young black man got up onstage and sang through a derisive grin and played a red guitar that dangled almost to the level of his wildly knocking knees. That, for Dick Taylor, Mike Jagger and countless other British boys, was their first tantalizing sight of Chuck Berry. The film sequence ended with Berry dodging a hail of flashbulbs thrown by photographers in fury that the pure jazz had been so disrupted.

  Mike Jagger’s earliest attempt at blues singing was at the house of a boy named David Soames in Wentworth Drive, Dartford. David was trying to form a rhythm and blues group with Mike Turner, another ex-pupil of Wentworth County Primary School. Both quickly decided that Mike Jagger sang in far too strange a fashion to be their vocalist. He accepted the decision without rancour and afterwards walked home with Mike Turner, discussing their forthcoming GCE O-Level examinations.

  Dick Taylor owned a second-hand drum kit, which gained him admittance to several small amateur groups otherwise top-heavy with guitarists. By his last year at Dartford Grammar, he was practising regularly with Bob Beckwith, Alan Etherington and Mike Jagger. It was hardly a group at all, since they had no equipment – only the Etheringtons’ radiogram to amplify the guitars – and because Mike Jagger, their singer, refused to play a guitar himself, as was customary. He just stood or sat there and sang, diffidently until his powers as a mimic came to his aid. ‘The first song I remember him doing was Richie Valens’s La Bamba,’ Dick Taylor says. ‘Mick used to come out with this stream of words that sounded just like Spanish. He’d just make them up as he went along.’

  The group was called Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys, in order that there be no mistake concerning their musical intentions. From first to last in their two-year history, Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys never played to an audience other than Dick Taylor’s mum. ‘She dug Mick right from the start,’ Taylor says. ‘She always told him he’d got something special.’

  Their repertoire was limited to the precious store of blues import discs Dick Taylor had collected – Howlin’ Wolf’s Smokestack Lighting; Don and Bob’s Good Morning Little Schoolgirl; Dale Hawkins’s Susie Q. ‘We never even thought of playing to other people,’ Dick Taylor says. ‘We thought we were the only people in England who’d ever heard of r & b.’

  After Jazz on a Summer’s Day, Chuck Berry dominated their thoughts. It was Mike Jagger who found out you could get Berry records by writing direct to the Chess record company in Chicago. Berry’s voice, light and sharp and strangely white-sounding, had a pitch not dissimilar to his own. Singing along with Sweet Little Sixteen or Reelin’ and Rockin’, he suddenly felt something more than just a mumbling impersonator. And Chuck Berry was the first intimation that rhythm and blues might be an expression of youth. Each Berry song was a novel in miniature about American teenage life, teeming with brand-name cars, sassy
high-school queens and anarchic exhortations to forsake the classroom in favour of car-driving, singing and dancing.

  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 decid
ed 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.’