Mick Jagger. Philip Norman

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СКАЧАТЬ as important a UK market as albums, and had their own separate chart. The Stones’ first not only went straight to the top of this but also made No. 15 on the singles charts.

      The obvious solution was to give up covering other artists’ songs and write their own, as the two main Beatles did with such spectacular success. Thanks to John Lennon and Paul McCartney, songwriting was no longer the sacred preserve of Moon-and-June-rhyming Tin Pan Alley hacks, but something at which all young British pop musicians, however untrained, were entitled to have a shot. If it worked, it was insurance against that seemingly inevitable day when the pop audience tired of them as performers and they could fall back on writing full-time. Even Lennon and McCartney, at their America-conquering apogee, drew comfort from that safety net.

      Until now, Mick had never for one moment visualised himself as a songwriter, let alone as one half of a partnership that would one day rival Lennon– McCartney’s. The idea came from Andrew Oldham and was not motivated by a desire to advance Mick. The fact was that, while Oldham’s management-PR side remained absorbed in the daily challenge of maintaining the Stones’ disreputability, his would-be Phil Spector side was growing bored by working in the recording studio with just a ‘covers band’ – and resentful of having to pay copyright fees and royalties to the composers whose songs were covered.

      In February, he had informed Record Mirror that by autumn he would be ‘Britain’s most powerful independent record producer’. Since the Stones alone did not justify his assuming that title, he was actively scouting round for other artists to shape in the recording studio à la Spector – and had already found one. This was Cleo Sylvestre, who had auditioned as a back-up singer with the Stones eighteen months earlier, then gone on to have a platonic love affair with Mick which he took with so much the greater seriousness. Mick, in fact, recommended her to Oldham as a potential talent, even though he was still too upset by their break-up to be friends with her.

      Oldham recorded Cleo singing the old Teddy Bears’ hit ‘To Know Him Is to Love Him’, which had been Phil Spector’s first writing and producing success. The B-side was an instrumental entitled ‘There Are but Five Rolling Stones’, played by the Stones but grandiosely credited to ‘The Andrew Oldham Orchestra’. Cleo’s pop-singing career failed to take off, but she went on to an award-winning career as an actress, notably with a one-woman show about Mary Seacole, the Crimean War’s ‘black Florence Nightingale’.

      The domestic arrangements at 33 Mapesbury Road – and Brian’s absence in Windsor – meant that the songwriters within the Stones more or less had to be Mick and Keith. Likewise, Keith’s skill at playing hypnotic chords – as on ‘Not Fade Away’ – and Mick’s verbal fluency dictated which of them would write the lyrics and which the tune. Both agreed it was a good idea, but were too much intimidated by the competition all around to sit down and try. Oldham exerted every fibre of PR persuasiveness to change their minds, insisting that it could not be that difficult – witness the speed at which John and Paul had dashed off ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ that afternoon at Ken Coyler’s club – and spinning extravagant visions (hugely underestimated, it would turn out) of the publishing royalties they could earn. Even that could not tempt Mick to have a go.

      Finally, one November night in 1963, Oldham resorted to simple coercion, locking the pair in the flat’s kitchenette, having previously removed all food and drink from it, then going off to spend the evening with his mother in Hampstead. If they wanted to eat that night, he shouted, they’d better have written a song when he came back. Returning a couple of hours later, he opened the front door quietly, tiptoed halfway upstairs and heard them hard at work. He went down again, slammed the door, and shouted ‘What have you got?’ A resentful, hungry Mick – those lips long-unstoked – ‘told me they’d written this fucking song and I’d better fucking like it’.

      That first effort, unconsciously reflecting Oldham’s pressure, was entitled ‘It Should Be You’ and sounded enough like a real song to make them try again – and again. Fortuitously, the Stones were just leaving on a third national tour – this one including British pop’s only other ex–college student, Mike Sarne – which provided live models to copy and hours of boredom, backstage or in Stu’s van, when thinking up tunes and lyrics came as a positive relief. In a short time, Mick and Keith had accumulated around half a dozen songs, the most promising of which they recorded as rough demos at Regent Sound during quick trips back to London. The whole batch showed a romantic, even feminine side to the composers which made them quite unsuitable as Stones tracks, some indeed being specifically targeted at female artists: ‘My Only Girl’, ‘We Were Falling in Love’, ‘Will You Be My Lover Tonight?’ To hold their copyrights and receive any royalties they might earn, Oldham set up a publishing company called Nanker Phelge Music, a name as deliberately grotesque as the Beatles’ Northern Songs company was quietly traditional. A Nanker was Brian Jones’s name for his Lucky Jim facial contortions while Phelge was the Edith Grove flatmate who used to ‘gob’ so colourfully up the walls.

      Oldham’s search for artists to cover these first Jagger– Richard songs was confined to the lower reaches of British pop and even there met with only modest success. ‘Will You Be My Lover Tonight?’ was recorded by a mutual friend of Oldham and the Stones named George Bean and released on Decca in January 1964, sinking without a trace. ‘Shang a Doo Lang’, an unashamed knock-off of the Crystals’ ‘He’s Sure the Boy I Love’, went to a sixteen-year-old newcomer named Adrienne Posta and was produced by Oldham with Spectoresque Wall of Sound effects. By far the most prestigious catch was Gene Pitney, a major American name whose fondness for London pop low life had led him to play back-up percussion at the boozy ‘Not Fade Away’ session. Pitney, it so happened, needed a follow-up to his recent massive hit with Bacharach and David’s ‘24 Hours from Tulsa’. Oldham persuaded him to make it Jagger and Richard’s ‘My Only Girl’, retitled ‘That Girl Belongs to Yesterday’. Though Pitney substantially rewrote the song, Mick and Keith’s credit survived when it made the UK Top 10 and even sneaked into the US Hot 100.

      Adrienne Posta was the daughter of a wealthy furniture manufacturer who intended to make her a pop star by hook or by crook. When Decca released Adrienne’s version of Jagger and Richard’s ‘Shang a Doo Lang’ in early March, Oldham persuaded Mr Posta to hold a launch party at his flat in Seymour Place, Bayswater. The party was to witness a momentous meeting, though not the one Oldham originally had in mind. Deciding it was time Keith Richard ‘started going out with something other than a guitar’, Oldham asked his girlfriend Sheila Klein to bring along someone for Keith. She chose a friend with the happily coincidental name of Linda Keith, a former assistant at Vogue who had progressed to modelling.

      Launch parties for records were unusual in 1964, and an impressive posse of Swinging London insiders turned up to wish Adrienne’s single Godspeed and partake of her father’s hospitality. They included Peter Asher from the singing duo Peter and Gordon, the latest act to benefit from Lennon– McCartney songs. Asher brought his actress sister Jane and her boyfriend, Paul McCartney, who lodged at the Asher family home in Wimpole Street, Marylebone. With them came an old Hampstead friend of Oldham’s named John Dunbar and his seventeen-year-old girlfriend, Marianne Faithfull.

      The name that always seemed too perfect for the young woman it adorned – ‘Faithfull’ with two l’s, suggesting a double portion of innocent steadfastness – was not a publicist’s invention, as many people later assumed. Marianne’s father was an academic named Robert Glynn Faithfull who served with British intelligence during the Second World War, then went on to receive a doctorate in psychology from Liverpool University. Nothing about this seemingly quintessential English rose hinted at a background that was also more exotically foreign than any of the crucial people in Mick’s life had been, or would be.

      Her mother, Eva, was an Austro-Hungarian aristocrat, Baroness Erisso, whose family, the Sacher-Masochs, dated back to Emperor Charlemagne. Eva’s great-uncle Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was the author of the nineteenth-century novel Venus im Pelz in which he gave his own СКАЧАТЬ