Mick Jagger. Philip Norman

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СКАЧАТЬ young East End Cockney named David Bailey.

      Only in popular music did excitement seem to be dwindling rather than growing. The ructions that rock ’n’ roll had caused among mid-fifties teenagers were a distant, almost embarrassing memory. Elvis Presley had disappeared into the US army for two years, and then emerged shorn of his sideburns, singing ballads and hymns. The American music industry had been convulsed by scandals over payola and the misadventures of individual stars. Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran were dead; Little Richard had found God; Jerry Lee Lewis had been engulfed in controversy after bigamously marrying his thirteen-year-old cousin; Chuck Berry had been convicted on an immorality charge involving a teenage girl. The new teenage icons were throwbacks to the crooner era, with names like Frankie and Bobby, chosen for prettiness rather than vocal talent, and their manifest inability to hurt a fly (or unbutton one). The only creative sparks came from young white songwriters working out of New York’s Brill Building, largely supplying black singers and groups, and from the black-owned Motown record label in Detroit: all conclusive proof that ‘race’ music was dead and buried.

      Such rock idols as Britain had produced – Tommy Steele, Adam Faith, Cliff Richard – had all heeded the dire warnings that it couldn’t possibly last and crossed over as soon as possible into mainstream show business. The current craze was ‘Trad’, a homogenised version of traditional jazz whose bands dressed in faux-Victorian bowler hats and waistcoats and played mainstream show tunes like Cole Porter’s ‘I Love You, Samantha’ and even Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘March of the Siamese Children’. The wild, skirt-twirling rock ’n’ roll jive had given way to the slower, more formal Stomp, which involved minimal bodily contact between the dancers and tended to come to a respectful halt during drum solos.

      In short, the danger seemed to have passed.

      BARELY A MONTH into Mike’s first term at LSE, he met up with Keith Richards again and they resumed the conversation that had broken off in the Wentworth County Primary playground eleven years earlier.

      The second most important partnership in rock music history might never have happened if either of them had got out of bed five minutes later, missed a bus, or lingered to buy a pack of cigarettes or a Mars bar. It took place early one weekday on the ‘up’ platform at Dartford railway station as they waited for the same train, Mike to get to Charing Cross in London and Keith to Sidcup, four stops away, where he was now at art college.

      Since their discussion about cowboys and guitars as seven-year-olds, they had remained vaguely in each other’s orbit without being friends. When the Jaggers lived on Denver Road in the centre of Dartford, Keith’s home had been on Chastillian Road, literally one street away. Their mothers were on casually friendly terms, and would exchange family news if ever they chanced to meet around town. But after Wentworth their only further encounter had been one summer day outside Dartford Library when Mike had a holiday job selling ice cream and Keith, recognising him, stopped and bought one. That time, their conversation had been even briefer, albeit punctuated by a prophetic lapping tongue.

      As eighteen-year-olds, waiting among the diurnal wage slaves at Dartford Station, they could not have looked more different. Mike was a typical middle-class student with his beige wool cardigan and black-, purple- and yellow-striped LSE scarf. Keith, though also technically a student, did his utmost not to resemble one with his faded blue denim jeans and jerkin and lilac-coloured shirt. To 1961 eyes, that made an unpleasing cross between a Teddy Boy and a beatnik.

      Keith instantly recognised Mike by the lips, as Mike did Keith by the almost skull-bony face and protruding ears that had barely changed since he was in short trousers. It also happened that Mike was carrying two albums he had just received from the Chess label in Chicago, The Best of Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry’s Rockin’ at the Hops. ‘To me,’ Keith would recall, ‘that was Captain Morgan’s treasure. I thought, “I know you. And what you got under your arm’s worth robbing.”’

      The upshot was that when their train pulled in, they decided to travel together. Rattling through the Kentish suburbs, they found they had other idols in common, a crowd almost as dense as the newspaper-reading, strap-hanging one around them: Sonny Boy Williamson . . . John Lee Hooker . . . Howlin’ Wolf . . . Willie Dixon . . . Jimmy Reed . . . Jimmy Witherspoon . . . T-Bone Walker . . . Little Walter . . . Never one to stint on melodrama, Keith would afterwards equate the moment with the blues’ darkest fable – young Robert Johnson keeping a tryst with the devil and, Faust-like, bartering his soul to be able to play like an angel. ‘Just sitting on that train . . . it was almost like we made a deal without knowing it, like Robert did.’ When the train pulled into Sidcup, he was so absorbed in copying down the serial numbers on Mike’s albums that he almost forgot to get off.

      Keith not only had music in his blood (where it was destined to be severely jostled by other, more questionable additives) but guitar wood almost in his bones. Once again, Kent could claim little of the credit. On his mother’s side, he was descended from French Huguenots, Protestants who had fled Catholic persecution in their own country and found asylum in the Channel Isles. The music was infused largely through his maternal grandfather, Theodore Augustus Dupree, who led a succession of semi-professional dance bands and played numerous instruments, including piano, saxophone, violin and guitar. One of Keith’s great childhood treats – all in all somewhat fewer than Mike Jagger enjoyed – was to accompany his ‘Grandfather Gus’ to the Ivor Mairants music store in London’s West End, where guitars were custom-built on the premises. Sometimes he would be allowed into the workshops to watch the fascinating silhouettes take shape and inhale the aromas of raw rosewood, resin and varnish; despite stiff competition, the headiest narcotic he would ever know.

      An only child, he had been raised by parents who in every way were the opposite of Mike’s. His father, Bert Richards, a dour, introverted character, worked punishingly long shifts as a supervisor in a lightbulb factory and so had little energy left over to be an authority figure and role model like Joe Jagger. In equal contrast with Eva Jagger, Keith’s mother, Doris, was a sunny-natured, down-to-earth woman who spoiled him rotten, loved music, and had an eclectic taste ranging from Sarah Vaughan to Mozart. As she washed up his dirty dishes with the radio blaring, she’d call out to him to ‘listen to that blue note!’

      Doris’s refusal ever to make Keith toe the line had withstood every sanction of mid-fifties state schooling and resulted in an intelligent, perceptive boy being branded an irredeemable dunce. By the age of thirteen, he was regarded as an academic no-hoper and had been consigned to Dartford Technical School, hopefully to acquire some honest artisan trade. The school was in Wilmington, which meant he unknowingly crossed paths with Mike every morning and evening as Mike went to and from Dartford Grammar. At Dartford Tech, he was as inattentive and disruptive as at school, and was expelled after two years without a single plumbing or bricklaying certificate to his name.

      Sidcup Art College was the bottom of the heap. In this era, even the smallest British town usually had its own college or school of art built in Victorian mock-Gothic style, a civic amenity as familiar as the library or the swimming baths. All were open to school leavers with the faintest artistic bent, which as a rule meant misfits who had not reached university standard but lacked the drive to go out and find a job. Since the fifties, a secondary role of art schools had been giving shelter to young men whose obsession with rock ’n’ roll music seemed destined to take them nowhere. Keith had joined an unwitting brotherhood that also included, or would include, John Lennon, Peter Townshend, Eric Clapton, Ronnie Wood, Ray Davies, Syd Barrett and David Jones, later Bowie.

      As a working-class teenager, he felt the full impact of rock ’n’ roll’s first wave, rather than waiting around like bourgeois Mike for it to clean up its act. The national guitar fever unleashed by Elvis Presley had infected him long ago, thanks to Grandfather Gus and the craftsmen at Ivor Mairants’s. His adoring mum bought him his first guitar for seven pounds, out of her wages from working in a Dartford baker’s shop. Though he could sing – in fact, had sung soprano in the massed СКАЧАТЬ