Mick Jagger. Philip Norman

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      All of them were in a state of dire poverty which the few pounds from Rollin’ Stones gigs barely alleviated. Brian had just lost yet another job, as a sales assistant at Whiteley’s department store, for thievery, while Keith’s only known shot at conventional employment, as a pre-Christmas relief postal worker, lasted just one day. The sole regular income among them was Mick’s student grant from Kent County Council; as the only one with a bank account, he paid the rent by cheque and the others gave him their share in cash. Once, he jokingly wrote on a blank cheque: ‘Pay the Rolling [sic] Stones £1 million.’

      He and Keith survived mainly by adopting Brian’s little ways – stealing the pints of milk that were left on other people’s doorsteps each morning, shoplifting potatoes and eggs from the little local stores, sneaking into parties being given elsewhere in the house or in neighbouring ones, and making off with French loaves, hunks of cheese, bottles of wine or beer in the new outsize cans known as ‘pins’. Brian doctored the electric meter (a criminal offence) so that it would work without shillings and the power would remain on indefinitely, rather than plunging them into darkness at the end of the usual costly brief span. A serious source of income was collecting empty beer bottles, the sale price of which included a two-penny deposit repaid when they were returned to the vendor.

      Ian Stewart also played a part in supporting the trio he regarded as ‘very bright, highly motivated layabouts’. In Stu’s day job at ICI the perks included luncheon vouchers: certificates exchangeable for basic restaurant meals. These he would buy up cheap from dieting co-workers and pass on gratis to the layabouts. However, Mick, who had always been notably fond of his stomach (as if those large lips needed stoking with food twice as often as normal-size ones) would frequently eat alone and at a slightly higher level than his flatmates. There was, for instance, a Wardour Street café, felicitously named the Star, which offered a superior set lunch for five shillings (twenty-five pence). Mick was a regular customer, known to staff only as ‘the rhythm-and-blues singer’.

      Each morning, he would go off to LSE, and the non-musician flatmate James Phelge to a printing works in Fulham, leaving Keith and Brian to sleep late between their foetid sheets. Their afternoons were spent mainly in guitar practice, with Brian coaching Keith. Often after a gig, the teacher would tell the pupil his playing had been ‘bloody awful’ and, back at the flat, would make him go over his fretboard fluffs again and again until they were cured. Many was the night when the pair fell asleep where they sat, cigarettes still smouldering in their mouths or wedged in the top of their guitar fretboards. Brian also taught himself to play blues harp, taking only about a day to reach a level that had taken Mick months, then forging on ahead.

      It clearly could only benefit the band, and Brian was equally willing to help bring on Mick’s instrumental skills, showing him new harmonica riffs, even persuading him finally to take a few cautious steps on guitar. But Mick felt uneasy about the bond being forged between Brian and Keith during the day. In the evening when he returned he would sulk or pointedly not speak to Keith while showing overweening friendliness to Brian.

      As well as immeasurably raising the others’ musical game, Brian kept them laughing when there might not seem much to laugh about. Like Jim Dixon in Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, his response to moments of stress was to pull a grotesque face he called a Nanker. The flat’s walls being now spattered with the marks of Phelge’s ‘gobbing’, Brian gave each a name according to its colour – ‘Yellow Humphrey’, ‘Green Gilbert’, ‘Scarlet Jenkins’, ‘Polka-Dot Perkins’. He and Mick competed in coining supercilious nicknames for their fellow World’s Enders. Their flat was owned by a Welshman who operated a small grocery shop, so a Lyons Individual Fruit Pie bought (or filched) from him was known as a ‘Morgan Morgan’. Any male conspicuously devoid of their own cool and savoir faire was an ‘Ernie’. The local greasy-spoon café – whose clientele marked them down at once as gays, or ‘nancy boys’ – was The Ernie. The flat above theirs belonged to a hostile elderly couple known as ‘the Offers’ after Mick described them as ‘a bit off’. Brian discovered where the Offers kept a spare latchkey and, one day while they were out, led a raiding party into their flat to ransack the fridge.

      Despite their poverty, Mick, Brian and Keith managed to make the two-hundred-mile journey north to Manchester that October for what was billed as ‘the First American Folk-Blues Festival’, featuring Memphis Slim, John Lee Hooker, T-Bone Walker, Willie Dixon, and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. The trio made the long trip north in a beaten-up van with a group of fellow fanatics from Ealing and Eel Pie Island (including a boy guitarist named Jimmy Page, one day to become the co-godhead of Led Zeppelin). Mick took along a copy of Howlin’ Wolf’s Rocking Chair album, hoping that Wolf’s songwriter Willie Dixon would autograph it. One track in particular obsessed him: a flagrant piece of sexual imagery entitled ‘Little Red Rooster’.

      Amid the Victorian splendour of Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, he saw all his greatest idols finally made flesh: tall, austere John Lee Hooker singing ‘Boogie Chillen’’, the song that could have been describing that former well-spoken Dartford schoolboy (‘The blues is in him . . . and it’s got to come out’); dapper Memphis Slim with a skunk’s-tail streak of white through his hair; Willie Dixon, the blues’ great backroom boy, almost as big and bulky as his stand-up bass; jokey T-Bone Walker, playing his guitar behind his head in the way Jimi Hendrix would ‘invent’ a few years later. There was no security in the modern sense, and afterwards the bluesmen were freely accessible to their fans, onstage below the hall’s massive pipe organ. One of the lesser names, ‘Shaky Jake’ Harris, presented the London boys with a harmonica, which became the proud centrepiece of a blues singsong on the long drive home. Mick, Keith and Brian were supposed to reimburse the van’s owner, Graham Ackers, for petrol and other incidental costs – amounting to 10s 6d, or about 52p each – but never did.

      If the Rollin’ Stones’ gigs still paid only peanuts, there was another reward which their blues masters in Manchester had never known. Increasingly, after the night’s performance, they found themselves being mobbed by teenage girls, whose excitement their faithful interpretation of John Lee or T-Bone only partially explained. Most sought only autographs and flirtation, but a good few made it clear – clearer than young British women had done since the bawdy eighteenth century – that a deeper level of musical appreciation was on offer. Though Mick and Brian were the main objectives, Keith, Stu, Dick Taylor, even Phelge, as their occasional assistant roadie, shared in the unexpected dividends. Most nights, a bevy of these proto-groupies would accompany them back to 102 Edith Grove for what, due to space restrictions, was a largely open-plan sex session. Some were deemed worthy of a second invitation, for example a pair of identical twins named Sandy and Sarah partial to Mick and Phelge – neither of whom could tell one from the other, or bothered to try.

      He would later become legendary for his apparent callousness towards females – yet among the Edith Grove flatmates it was Mick who showed the most awareness of how young and often vulnerable many of their visitors were to be with older men so late at night. One girl, after having had sex with two of his flatmates in succession, broke the news that she’d run away from home and the police were looking for her. The others were all for getting rid of her as soon as possible, before police officers came knocking at the door. But Mick, showing himself his father’s son once again, took the trouble to talk to the runaway at length about her problems at home, finally persuading her to telephone her parents and arrange for them to come and collect her.

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