Mick Jagger. Philip Norman

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СКАЧАТЬ he should also leave a tip. Finally, he put down a pre-decimal ten-shilling (or ‘ten-bob’) note, equivalent to fifty pence today, with a 1964 purchasing power of £10. But as they left, Bailey saw him slip it back into his pocket.

      Bailey soon picked up on Andrew Oldham’s influence over Mick, one that reminded him of a worldly-wise older brother with an awestruck younger one, and made his own moulding of Jean Shrimpton as a couture icon seem superficial by comparison. At the few Stones gigs he attended, he also found himself an uncomfortable witness to Brian Jones’s decreasing influence in the band and continual attempts to claw some power and status back. The photographer’s eagle eye for nuances noted that, while Mick was happy to zoom around with Jean and him in an unpretentious Mini-Minor, Brian drove a bulky Humber saloon, ‘the kind of car a vicar would use’. At the end of a gig, Bailey recalls, Mick and Keith would be like unkind children, playing an obviously habitual game of ‘let’s get away from Brian’.

      Chrissie Shrimpton, too, recognised Oldham’s power over Mick, although at her tender age – she was still not yet nineteen – it represented unfathomably deep waters. Chrissie now spent most nights with Mick at 33 Mapesbury Road while officially sharing a bedsit with her friend Liz Gribben for the sake of appearances with her parents. When Jacqui Graham or other schoolgirl fans rang up the flat, a terse female voice would answer, discouraging them from further surprise appearances on the front doorstep.

      For all the Stones’ growing fame, Mick still felt it a huge feather in his cap to be going out with Jean Shrimpton’s sister, even though Chrissie refused to capitalise on her surname or her own spectacular looks, and continued to work as a secretary, now at the Stones’ record company, Decca. ‘I still wanted to be with him all the time,’ she remembers. ‘The trouble was that my life was going on mostly in the daytime and Mick’s mostly went on at night.’ And Oldham’s rival stake in him was something she could only characterise as ‘powerful and frightening’.

      The explosive, sometimes physically violent quarrels she and Mick had always had increased exponentially as the Stones’ fame did and he became more aware of himself as their star attraction and more prone to shove her out of sight whenever female fans materialised. Mortifyingly, to someone who valued coolness and self-possession above all, the blow-ups with Chrissie increasingly tended to happen in front of other people, at gigs, parties or new clubs like the Ad Lib. ‘They once had a terrible one at Eric Easton’s office,’ Shirley Arnold remembers. ‘It ended with Chrissie kicking Mick down the stairs.’

      The fans who thought him so untouchable would have been astonished by his distress after Chrissie had stormed off into the night, and repeated phone calls to her mother could not locate her. Andrew Oldham would receive an anguished SOS and would go and meet him, usually at a bench on the Thames Embankment as far as possible from other prying eyes and ears. As Oldham recalls in Stoned, Mick would pour out his side of the story and almost tearfully recount how Chrissie had gone for him with her fists. (She herself now says firmly that she never used fists and ‘he wasn’t a victim of domestic abuse’.) The heart-to-hearts with Oldham would often last the rest of the night, ending at dawn with a walk through the deserted West End and breakfast at a taxi drivers’ café.

      Oldham writes in Stoned that during this period he and Mick were ‘as close as two young men could probably become’ – and there has been endless speculation ever since about the extent of that closeness. Oldham certainly was not homosexual – indeed, had lately begun going out with a Hampstead girl named Sheila Klein (a surname to have large resonance in another context later in this story) whom he was soon to marry. At the same time, with his homing spirit for all outrage, he sought out the company of notable gay men in the music business – in particular the composer of Oliver!, Lionel Bart – and added their gestures and speech mannerisms to his repertoire of devices for amusing his friends and disconcerting his foes.

      At all events, rumours began to fly around that in the extremely crowded quarters of 33 Mapesbury Road Mick and Oldham’s closeness extended to sharing the same bed. One must hasten to add that, in purer-minded 1964, that did not necessarily signify what it would today. Young men could still have platonic friendships in the Victorian mode, sharing flats, rooms and even beds (as pop band members often did on tour) without the slightest homoerotic overtones. Oldham’s own memoirs recall a night when the two of them ended up at his mother’s flat in Netherhall Gardens, Hampstead, and, rather than struggle home to Willesden, decided to crash out there. When Mrs Oldham looked into his room the next afternoon, she found them both squeezed into his single bed, still dead to the world.

      According to Chrissie, Oldham’s soon-to-be fiancée, Sheila Klein, was also vexed by these rumours and – on a different occasion, at Mapesbury Road – suggested that the two of them should investigate for themselves. ‘[Sheila] got me to wait all night with her to see if Andrew and Mick slept in the same bed and they did . . . We found them asleep, facing the same way, and I can remember thinking how sweet they looked. Sheila said, “There, I knew they were!” and I still didn’t know what she meant.’

      ON 7 FEBRUARY 1964 the Beatles had crossed the Atlantic for the first time, touching down in New York amid scenes of juvenile hysteria that made European Beatlemania seem muted by comparison and ending American dominance of pop music with a single appearance on the nationwide Ed Sullivan TV show. They were Britain’s most successful export since Shakespeare and Scotch whisky, ambassadors of seemingly boundless charm and good manners whose once-controversial hair was now regarded back home as a precious national asset. During a reception for them in Washington, DC, a woman guest produced some nail scissors and playfully snipped a lock or two from the back of Ringo Starr’s neck. For the attendant British media, it was an outrage tantamount to defacing the Crown Jewels.

      While the Beatles conquered America, the Rolling Stones had to be content with conquering the American act meant to have headlined their second UK package tour. This was Phil Spector’s black female vocal trio the Ronettes, whose tumultuous ‘Be My Baby’ was a UK hit single currently far outselling ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’. They were also sexy in a way no female pop group had ever been, with their beehive hair, brazen eye makeup and slinky, chiffon-sleeved trouser suits. Even that could not save them from the same fate as the Everly Brothers, two months previously. Before the tour even began, the Stones replaced them as top of the bill.

      Spector, the trio’s manager as well as record producer, was already fixated on lead singer Veronica – ‘Ronnie’ – Bennett (whom he would later subject to a gothic horror story of a marriage). Having received an advance character sketch of the top three Stones from his would-be British counterpart, Andrew Oldham, he sent them a stern collective telegram saying ‘Leave my girls alone’. This did not stop both Mick and Keith from making a beeline for Ronnie’s beehive at a party at deejay Tony Hall’s Mayfair flat which John Lennon and George Harrison also attended on the eve of their departure for America. Boyfriend magazine’s correspondent, Maureen O’Grady, remembers the atypical tension between the Dartford chums as they competed for Ronnie’s attention, and Mick’s sulky pique when she proved immune to his charms and went off with Beatle George.

      With ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ barely out of the Top 10, the insatiable pop music machine was already slavering for a third Rolling Stones single. And this time there would be no friendly Beatles to help out. Instead, the Stones looked beyond the over-ransacked R&B back catalogue to the one white American performer who counted as an equal influence on them all. The unanimous choice was ‘Not Fade Away’, the B-side to Buddy Holly’s 1957 hit ‘Oh Boy’, which Mick had seen Holly play live at the Woolwich Granada cinema during the one British tour he managed before his premature death. Serendipitously, the Stones–Ronettes show would appear at the same venue.

      ‘Not Fade Away’ was recorded at Regent Sound Studios during a brief interlude between early tour dates. To lighten an initially rather tired, grumpy atmosphere, Oldham turned the session into a booze-fuelled party, inviting various other pop personalities along to lend a hand. The American СКАЧАТЬ