The Stones: The Acclaimed Biography. Philip Norman

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      Brian Jones’s double life as a reluctant family man and fancy-free London bachelor took on a new complexity, late that summer, when he, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards rented a flat together in Edith Grove, Chelsea. The three shared two rooms halfway up a shabby house racked by the noise of lorries thundering through to Fulham Road. The flat was squalid even by London bedsitter standards, with its damp and peeling wallpaper, grubby furniture, filthy curtains and naked light bulbs that functioned at the behest of a single, iron-clad electric coin meter. The lavatory was communal, on the staircase to the flat above. Those who visited it after dark did so with a supply of newspaper, matches and a candle. Keith spoke of buying a revolver, so that he could sit there and shoot at the rats.

      The minuscule rent was paid by the pooling of Mick Jagger’s student grant with Brian’s wage as a shop assistant at Whiteley’s. Keith – apart from one brief stint as a Christmas relief postman – contrived to remain unencumbered by any job but playing his guitar. His contribution was a supply of food parcels sent up from Dartford by his mother. Doris Richards would also descend on the flat once a week and take away mounds of dirty underwear and shirts to wash.

      To help with the rent, they found a fourth tenant – a young printer whom they knew only as ‘Phelge’. ‘He was the sort of madman you’d meet around Chelsea then,’ Keith says. ‘You’d walk in through the front door and there would be Phelge, standing at the top of the stairs with his underpants on his head.’

      For Mick, the Edith Grove flat was a chance to break free of the constraints of home and his mother’s reproaches for the opportunities he was wasting. He remained, even so, primarily an economics student, tacitly acknowledging that he must one day give up blues singing to work for his degree. Up all night at the Marquee, and Chelsea’s perpetual bottle parties, he would still go off next morning to the London School of Economics in Aldwych. His father’s waning influence could not altogether remove the habit of exercise. The pale, languid Chelsea layabout still turned out at regular intervals to play soccer in the LSE second eleven.

      Keith, jobless and almost penniless, spent most of his days at the flat with no other company than the coin meter and his guitar. Brian, at the outset, still had a job at Whiteley’s and, it was presumed, an alternative home with Pat Andrews and the baby. The Whiteley’s job vanished when Brian was caught pilfering from the cash register. The link with Pat and the baby was similarly broken – although his friend, Dick Hattrell, remained a faithful follower. After that, Brian also had nothing to do, and would sit around the Edith Grove flat all day with Keith, practising their guitar duets, working out on the harmonica he had almost mastered and plotting where their next meal was coming from. He taught Keith the trick, learned in his Oxford wanderings, of creeping into neighbours’ flats on the morning after bottle parties, collecting all the empty beer bottles and returning them to a pub or off-licence to collect the twopence deposits.

      A tiny trickle of money came from dates arranged by Brian at venues he had already reconnoitred on his travels outside London. The venues were mostly weekend dances, put on in church halls or suburban sports pavilions. The fee – seldom more than a couple of pounds a night – would be received by Brian, then shared among the other five. They did not know, since Brian thought it not worth mentioning, that he had invariably obtained an extra payment for himself as their leader and – he would also say – their manager and booking agent. Brian, in those days, was always ahead by a tiny, surreptitious percentage.

      One of their regular dates was at St Mary’s Parish Hall, in Hotheley Road, Richmond, playing in alternation with a group from Shepherd’s Bush called the High Numbers, later transfigured into The Who. Another was in a dilapidated wooden dance hall on Eel Pie Island in the River Thames at Twickenham, crossed by a footbridge that levied a sixpenny toll. They would go there by public transport, by bus or by tube, accompanied by Dick Hattrell, whom Brian seemed able to persuade to do almost anything. Hattrell acted as their road manager until he left London for a stint of part-time soldiering in the Territorial Army.

      At the Marquee, meanwhile, Harold Pendleton’s sarcasm continued unabated. Even Cyril Davis, who had liked the Stones at first, now joined the jazzers against them, brusquely sacking them from a bill on which his band was headlining. No one in those days knew Keith Richards well enough to recognize the warning signs. One evening, late that autumn, after carefully considering something Harold Pendleton had said to him, Keith picked up his guitar like a caveman’s club and swung it at Pendleton’s head.

      After that, there could be no more Marquee dates for a while. There was even less hope at Ken Colyer’s Studio 51 or Giorgio Gomelsky’s Piccadilly Club, where they had had one disastrous flop. The Rolling Stones therefore decided to do what Alexis Korner had when snobbery and prejudice were threatening to extinguish Blues Incorporated. They set out to start a club and a following of their own.

      The club was a peripatetic one, convened on Saturday nights or Sunday afternoons in a succession of pubs in Sutton, Richmond, Putney and Twickenham. Each date along the meridian would display the same laconic poster: ‘Rhythm and Blues with the Rollin’ Stones [sic]. Admission 4s.’ Fortunately, Ian Stewart owned a van as well as his racing bike, and could chauffeur them and their equipment to pubs in places even further distant, like Windsor, Guildford and Maidenhead. Stew proved a sterling hand at unloading guitar cases and amps, even though he might not himself always get the chance to play. ‘If there was no piano, I’d just settle down in the van and go to sleep. I did have to be up the next morning to go to work at ICI.’

      The lack of a permanent drummer continued to be vexing. Mick Avory, who sat in with them most often, had little natural feel for r & b. Carlo Little, from Cyril Davies’s group, whom they liked much better, had more pressing extra-curricular work with Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages. Unable to approach Charlie Watts, they reluctantly settled for a boy called Tony Chapman, who had played in several semi-pro rock ’n’ roll groups. But Chapman, a commercial traveller, wasn’t always reliable and was frequently out of town on business trips.

      Just before Christmas came another setback. Dick Taylor, their bass player, announced he was quitting to begin a course at the Royal College of Art. The others asked Tony Chapman if he knew any bass guitarists looking for work. Chapman said he might know someone, an ex-colleague of his in a conventional pop group called the Cliftons. It was arranged that Tony Chapman’s friend should come for an audition with Brian, Keith and Mick at their local Chelsea pub, the Wetherby Arms, one cold, snowy day in December.

      Bill Perks had always hated his family name, and wished he could change it to something more in keeping with his nature and ambitions. His grandfather Perks, he knew, had done the same thing fifty years earlier when fighting illegally as a bare-fist pugilist. ‘And when he got older and used to breed racing pigeons, he still went on using another name,’ the metamorphosed Bill Wyman says. ‘He always raced his pigeons under the name of Jackson.’

      The son born to William and Kathleen Perks on October 24, 1936, showed little sign of his ultimate destiny for almost the first quarter of his life. As a child, he was thoughtful, steady, quiet, rather pious. His mother remembers how he would spend hours in his bedroom, in Blenheim Road, Penge, just reading the Bible. At Beckenham Grammar School he was proficient in art and mathematics and a useful athlete. With his precise mind and prodigious memory, he would have been natural university material if born just one decade later. Then, amid Britain’s post-war and class-ridden chill, the best a bright working-class boy could hope for was respectable clerkship. His father, a bricklayer out of doors in all weathers, was delighted to think Bill might get a comfortable office job.

      His first employment was with the City Tote, a firm of multiple bookmakers in London’s West End. He was then called up for two years’ service as a clerk in the Royal Air Force. Some of that time he spent in West Germany, at an RAF station near Bremen, where he heard rock ’n’ roll music for the first time over the American Forces Network. He remembers, too, what a liking he developed for a fellow СКАЧАТЬ