Mick Jagger. Philip Norman

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СКАЧАТЬ Reviews in the music trades were no more than tepid. ‘A bluesy, commercial group who could make the charts in a small way,’ commented Record Mirror. Writing as guest reviewer in Melody Maker, fellow singer Craig Douglas was scathing about Mick’s vocal: ‘Very ordinary. I can’t hear a word [he’s] saying. If there were a Liverpool accent it might get somewhere.’

      The national press failed to pick up on the Thank Your Lucky Stars furore and would have ignored the Stones altogether but for the unflagging generosity of the manager they had just rudely dumped. Giorgio Gomelsky knew the tabloid Daily Mirror’s rather elderly pop correspondent, Patrick Doncaster, and persuaded Doncaster to devote his whole column to the Crawdaddy Club, the Stones and a new young band named the Yardbirds whom Gomelsky had found to take his ungrateful protégés’ place. The good turn backfired when the beer brewery that owned the Station Hotel read of the wild rites jeopardising its mirror-lined function room and evicted the Crawdaddy forthwith.

      In 1963, the procedure for getting a single into the Top 20 charts published by the half-dozen trades, and broadcast each Sunday on the BBC Light Programme and Radio Luxembourg, was quite straightforward. The listings were based on sales by a selection of retailers throughout the country. Undercover teams would tour these key outlets and buy up the 10,000 or so copies needed to push a record into the charts’ lower reaches and to pole position on radio playlists. At that point, in most cases, public interest kicked in and it continued the climb unaided.

      Decca being unwilling to activate this mechanism for ‘Come On’, Andrew Oldham had no choice but to do it himself. To help him, he brought in a young freelance promotion man named Tony Calder who had worked on the Beatles’ first single, ‘Love Me Do’, and who, as a former Decca employee, knew the whole hyping routine backwards. But even with Calder’s bulk-buying teams behind it, ‘Come On’ could be winched no higher than No. 20 on the New Musical Express’s chart. To blues-unaware pop-record buyers, the name ‘Rolling Stones’, with its echo of schoolroom proverbs, struck almost as bizarre a note as ‘the Beatles’ initially had. And Mick’s over-accelerated vocal removed the crucial element of danceability.

      He was never to make that mistake again.

      OUTSIDE OF MUSIC, Chrissie Shrimpton occupied Mick’s whole attention. They had been going out for more than six months and were now ‘going steady’, in this era the recognised preliminary to engagement and marriage – though steady was the least appropriate word for their relationship.

      Chrissie, now eighteen, had left secretarial college and moved up to London, ostensibly to work but really to provide a place where she and Mick could find some privacy. With her friend Liz Gribben, she lived in a succession of bed-sitting-rooms which, though ‘very grim’, were still more conducive to romance than 102 Edith Grove. However, she still could not break it to her parents that she was sleeping with Mick; on their visits home to Buckinghamshire to stay with Ted and Peggy Shrimpton, they continued virtuously to occupy separate bedrooms.

      One of Chrissie’s first secretarial jobs was at Fletcher & Newman’s piano warehouse in Covent Garden – at that time still the scene of a raucous daily fruit and vegetable market. ‘It was only a few minutes’ walk from the London School of Economics and Mick would come and meet me for lunch. One day as we walked through the market, a stallholder threw a cabbage at his head and shouted, “You ugly fucker.”’

      In fact, he hugely enjoyed showing Chrissie off to his fellow LSE students, not only as a breathtakingly beautiful ‘bird’ but as sister of the famous model Jean. Only Matthew Evans, the future publisher and peer, went out with anyone on the same level, a girl named Elizabeth Mead. ‘That amused Mick,’ Evans recalls. ‘We used to sit and discuss how similar Elizabeth and Chrissie were.’

      When Andrew Oldham first saw Mick, in the passageway to the Crawdaddy Club, he was with Chrissie and the pair were having a furious argument – this only a couple of weeks after they met. ‘We were always together,’ Chrissie says, ‘and we rowed all the time. He’d get upset about something that hadn’t been my fault – like I’d been meant to turn up at a gig and then the bouncers wouldn’t let me in. I always stood up for myself, so we did have huge rows. They’d often end in physical fights – though we never hurt each other. Mick would cry a lot. We both would cry a lot.’

      Though she found him ‘a sweet, loving person’, his evolution from club blues singer to pop star began to create a barrier between them. ‘We’d be walking down the street . . . and suddenly he’d see some Stones fans. My hand would suddenly be dropped, and he’d be walking ahead on his own.’ Yet their rows were always devastatingly upsetting to him, especially when – as often happened – Chrissie screamed that she never wanted to see him again, stormed out of the house and disappeared. Peggy Shrimpton grew accustomed to late-night phone calls and Mick’s anguished voice saying, ‘Mrs Shrimpton . . . where is she?’

      With the Stones now launched as a pro band, however precariously, there clearly could no longer be two members with parallel occupations. Charlie Watts must leave his job with the advertising agency Charles, Hobson & Grey, and Mick his half-finished course at LSE. In truth, his attendance at lectures was by now so erratic that Andrew Oldham’s new associate, Tony Calder, barely realised he went there at all. ‘I knew Charlie had a day job that sometimes affected his getting to gigs,’ Calder remembers. ‘But with Mick, it was never an issue.’

      By all the logic of the time, it seemed pure insanity to sacrifice a course at one of the country’s finest universities – and the career that would follow – to plunge into the unstable, unsavoury, overwhelmingly proletarian world of pop. The protests Mick faced from his parents, especially his voluble, socially sensitive mother, only articulated what he himself already knew only too well: that economists and lawyers were sure of well-remunerated employment for life, while the average career for pop artists up to then had been about six months.

      One afternoon, when the Stones were appearing at Ken Colyer’s club in Soho, he told Chrissie that his mind was made up and he was leaving the LSE. ‘I didn’t get the feeling that he’d agonised very much about it,’ she remembers. ‘He certainly didn’t discuss it with me – but then my opinion wouldn’t have meant that much. I do remember that it was very upsetting to his father. To his mother, too, obviously, but the way it was always expressed was that “Joe is very upset.”’

      The decision became easier when it proved not irrevocable. For all his recent lack of commitment, the LSE had clearly marked him down as something special and, with its traditional broad-mindedness, was prepared to regard turning pro with the Stones as a form of sabbatical or, as we would now say, gap year. After a ‘surprisingly easy’ interview with the college registrar, he would later recall, he was allowed to walk without recrimination or financial penalty, and reassured that if things didn’t work out with the Stones he could always come back and complete his degree.

      It was not the best moment to be competing for British pop fans’ attention. That rainy summer of 1963 saw the Beatles change from mere teenage idols into the objects of a national, multi-generational psychosis, ‘Beatlemania’. Their chirpy Liverpool charm a perfect antidote to the upper-class sleaze of the Profumo Affair – for now, Britain’s most lurid modern sex scandal – they dominated the headlines day after day with their wacky (but hygienic) haircuts, the shrieking hysteria of their audiences and the ‘yeah yeah yeah’ chorus of their latest and biggest-ever single, ‘She Loves You’. Politicians mentioned them in Parliament, psychologists analysed them, clerics preached sermons on them, historians found precedents for them in ancient Greece or Rome; no less an authority than the classical music critic of ‘top people’s paper’ The Times dissected the emergent songwriting talent of John Lennon and Paul McCartney with a seriousness normally devoted to Mozart and Beethoven.

      For the national press, which hitherto had virtually ignored pop music and its constituency СКАЧАТЬ