The Stones: The Acclaimed Biography. Philip Norman

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СКАЧАТЬ alterations did not stop there. Keith Richards, to his eternal mystification, was told to drop the ‘s’ from his surname to give it a ‘more pop sound’, like Cliff Richard. And Ian Stewart, the Stones’ piano player, chauffeur and provider of luncheon vouchers, was dropped from the stage line-up. Six in one group was too many, Andrew Loog Oldham had decided. And Stew, with his short hair, beefy arms and pugnaciously sensible face, looked ‘too normal’ for what Oldham’s mental movie camera was already starting to run.

      ‘It wasn’t done very nicely,’ Stewart remembered. ‘I just turned up one day to find the others had stage suits and there was no stage suit for me. None of them even mentioned it to me – apart from Brian. “You’re still a full member of the group, Stew,” he kept telling me. “You’ll still get a sixth share, I promise you.’”

      The Stones, however, did not ditch Stew with the amnesiac finality with which the Beatles had ditched their first drummer, Pete Best, in favour of Ringo Starr. Oldham’s request was that Stew should stay on as their roadie, driver and packhorse and occasional back-up pianist. He agreed, though his pride was badly hurt. ‘I thought, “I can’t go back to ICI after this. I might as well stay with them and see the world.”’

      Thank Your Lucky Stars on June 7, 1963, offered Britain’s teenagers the customary spectacle of records mimed by their artists, not always accurately, dwarfed by elaborate stage sets and half-drowned by pre-recorded female screams. Top of the bill was Helen Shapiro, a sixteen-year-old got up to look forty, in bouffant hair and flouncy petticoats. The Viscounts, an English close-harmony trio, sang their cover version of the American novelty hit Who Put the Bomp? Two disc jockeys, Pete Murray and Jimmy Henney, delivered judgement on new singles with all the fatuous disinterest of men in their late thirties, aided by a local girl named Janice Nicholls, whose invariable adjudication, ‘I’ll give it five’ – or, in Birmingham dialect, ‘Oi’ll give eet foive’ – had become a national catch phrase.

      The Stones were bottom of the bill and, as such, merited only a simple, two-sided set, decorated with cut-out playing-card shapes. Mick stood on a low plinth, just to the rear of Brian and Bill. Keith, seated on a stool, and Charlie at his drums were seen in profile. Their spot in all lasted barely a minute and a half. As the cameras moved up and back, and pre-recorded screams raged around them, the houndstooth-checked, velvet-collared Rolling Stones tried as hard as they could, or ever would again, to be a conventional pop group.

      A minute and a half proved enough for many viewers, when the recorded show was broadcast the following weekend. Afterwards, ABC-TV’s Birmingham switchboard was jammed with calls protesting that such a scruffy group had appeared on Lucky Stars, and hoping they would not be invited back.

      First review of Come On in the trade press new release columns were not much better. Record Mirror, the most enthusiastic, commended ‘a bluesy, commercial group which could make the charts in a small way’. For the pop-oriented Disc and New Musical Express, Come On fell between two stools, being neither ‘Mersey Sound’ nor imported American ballad. What little radio play the single received made it sound thin and anaemic. A month after its release, the New Musical Express chart showed it at number twenty-six, only one place higher than the Beatles’ From Me to You, issued almost three months earlier.

      The only significant piece of publicity, apart from Thank Your Lucky Stars, came about thanks to Giorgio Gomelsky’s good nature. Giorgio bore the Stones no ill will for his peremptory squeezing out, and had gone on plugging them enthusiastically to his friends in Fleet Street. Patrick Doncaster, the Daily Mirror’s rather elderly pop columnist, was at length persuaded to come to Richmond and write about the Crawdaddy Club, the Stones and a new young group, the Yardbirds, whom Giorgio now promoted.

      Doncaster’s full-page Mirror piece on June 13 set the scene only too well. The Ind Coope brewery – which had not previously been aware of the frolics conducted on its property – summarily evicted Giorgio Gomelsky from the Station Hotel’s back room. Thereafter, the Crawdaddy Club convened in the open air at Richmond Athletic Ground. The Stones, the Yardbirds, Cyril Davies and Long John Baldry played on a rugby pitch in front of the main grandstand, to promenading audiences of up to a thousand.

      Eric Easton, meanwhile, laboured to set the Stones on the path ordained for an aspiring beat group – the dreary round-Britain path of the pop package show. It was no mean achievement, after the poor chart performance of Come On, for Easton to book them into a nationwide tour beginning on September 29, headed by America’s famous Everly Brothers and featuring the Stones’ own r & b hero, Bo Diddley.

      The prospect was one alluring enough to make up Mick Jagger’s mind, at last, about the direction he wanted his life to take. Even after the Stones had signed with Decca, he had continued to hover between music and the London School of Economics, keeping all options open to a point where the other Stones became irritated hardly less than Joe and Eva Jagger, and even threatened to drop him as vocalist if he were not available to go on tour. So Mick Jagger went to the LSE registrar and announced he would not be completing his economics course. To his surprise, and relief, no obstacle was put in his way. ‘The registrar said I could go back later if I wanted. It was all surprisingly easy.’

      On August 12, the Stones made their last appearance on their Richmond home turf, playing at the Evening News-sponsored National Jazz and Blues Festival with Acker Bilk, Cyril Davies and Long John Baldry. It was to be almost their only London booking prior to leaving on tour with the Everly Brothers. The next step in Eric Easton’s strategy was to launch them into a practically non-stop schedule of one-nighters at ballrooms in remote East Anglian towns like Wisbech, Soham, Whittlesey and King’s Lynn.

      For most of Britain throughout that unseasonably wet summer, interest had centred on the developing scandal of John Profumo, a Conservative cabinet minister, Christine Keeler, his twenty-two-year-old mistress, and the subsequent lurid press exposures which had revealed Britain’s High Tory establishment to be sexually linked with an underworld of call girls, Mayfair pimps, property racketeers and even – it was suggested – Russian spies. For once, Britain suspended disapproval of its renegade young to contemplate the possibility that senior government ministers indulged in public fellatio; that ‘up to eight’ High Court judges had been involved in a single sex orgy; that at a fashionable London dinner party, another eminent politician had waited at table naked and masked and wearing a placard which read ‘If my services don’t please you, whip me.’

      By contrast with Profumo, Christine Keeler, Stephen Ward and Mandy Rice-Davies, the preoccupations of teenagers seemed positively wholesome. The exact nature of that preoccupation was earnestly sought by London’s commercial TV company, Associated-Rediffusion, in planning a new weekend pop music show to pre-empt Thank Your Lucky Stars. The A-R show was to be called Ready, Steady, Go and be introduced – unprecedentedly – by people the same age as its audience. The producer, Elkan Allan, auditioned each applicant for the job by asking one question: ‘What do you think young people in this country care about most?’ A girl named Cathy McGowan was hired for answering, simply, ‘Clothes.’

      It was the clothes of its audience – not confined to seats as before in such shows, but thronging a large, high-ceilinged, multi-level studio – which established Ready, Steady, Go as the epitome of a new pop style, a fashion changing almost as quickly as did the Top Ten sounds. Hipster trousers, flared jeans, leather jackets, op-art dresses, the girls’ Quant crops, the boys’ Beatle cuts, seethed all around Cathy McGowan and the deliberately exposed TV hardware. The atmosphere was that of a King’s Road party where the performers themselves had just chanced to drop by. It was an atmosphere powerfully established by the show’s Friday-night slogan ‘The weekend starts here’; a feeling projected to millions that all belonged to the same quintessentially fashionable club whose only qualification was that you must be under twenty-one.

      The Stones, СКАЧАТЬ