The Stones: The Acclaimed Biography. Philip Norman

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СКАЧАТЬ Doris worked part-time in a Dartford baker’s shop. And Keith, between his father’s indifference and his mother’s over-indulgence, began to go resolutely to the bad.

      It was not that he lacked ability – even talent. He could be, Ken Llewellyn remembers, a bright, attentive boy, responsive especially to words and language. He enjoyed cricket, swimming and – most surprisingly – tennis. He was, besides, good-natured and open, with a mischievous wit that made even schoolmasters unbend towards him.

      What he could not do was accept discipline in any form. It was a lawlessness partly compounded of running wild on the estate; partly of his mother’s soft-hearted pampering. Doris did not mind if he failed to do his homework or went AWOL from cross-country runs or – as increasingly happened – if he failed to turn up for school altogether. She would leave him money at home to buy fish and chips for his lunch. Even when he dumped the fish and chip leavings in the kitchen sink, newspaper and all, Doris cleared up after him without complaint.

      By the time he was thirteen, ordinary teachers despaired of educating him. It was decided he should go straight to Dartford Technical School, where his father hoped he might succumb to learning a useful trade.

      Now, however, the long-suffering Bert Richards faced an additional vexation. ‘Every time the poor guy came in at night,’ Keith says, ‘he’d find me sitting at the top of the stairs with my guitar, playing and banging on the wall for percussion. He was great about it, really. He’d only mutter, “Stop that bloody noise.”’

      Doris had bought Keith his first guitar, for seven pounds, from her wages at the baker’s shop. ‘I never knew what make it was,’ Keith says. ‘The name had been painted out.’ The only stipulation Doris made, supported by Grandfather Gus, was that he must learn to play properly. Soon afterwards, she gave him more money for a record player, from Dartford Co-Op shop, so he could learn by listening to the skiffle and rock ’n’ roll hits.

      Now was the time of British rock ’n’ roll – of Tommy Steele and Terry Dene and the ‘cover’ versions of American songs put out on a label called Embassy that was sold only at Woolworth’s. Embassy records were the first that Keith Richards tried to copy, sitting at the top of the stairs at 6 Spielman Road. ‘I always sat on the top stair to practise. You could get the best echo that way – or standing in the bath.’

      He soon realized that what made British rock ’n’ roll so tinny and false was not the vocal so much as the backing – the staid guitars played by bored ‘session men’, and sounding just as plumply complacent. Better by far to scrape up the full six shillings and fourpence for the original American version with guitars that shrilled and echoed as from a separate universe. Keith’s next idol, after his grandfather Gus, was Scotty Moore, Elvis Presley’s session guitarist. He still thinks Moore’s solo on Presley’s I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone the most exciting thing ever recorded. ‘I could never work out how he played it, and I still can’t. It’s such a wonderful thing that I almost don’t want to know.’

      His guitar, allied with the life of a Dartford Teddy boy, became the final, irresistible temptation to play truant. In 1958, he was expelled from Dartford Technical School. A sympathetic teacher suggested there might be one last hope in the art college in the neighbouring dormitory town of Sidcup.

      Sidcup Art College sounds immeasurably grander than it ever was. It existed, in fact, to give just such last chances to those whose inglorious school careers had fitted them for nothing better than what was then belittingly called ‘commercial art’. Sidcup’s art college was remarkably similar to the one in Hope Street, Liverpool, which – also in 1958 – admitted a similar habitual truant named John Lennon.

      For Keith, Sidcup Art College was a first introduction to authentic blues music, never captured on a Woolworth’s Embassy label. A group of students – including Dick Taylor – would meet in an empty room next to the principal’s office, and play Little Walter and Big Bill Broonzy songs among the drawing boards and paste pots. It was from one of them Keith acquired his first electric guitar, swapping it for a pile of records in a hasty transaction in the college ‘bogs’.

      So far as Dick Taylor was concerned, Keith Richards was just an incorrigible and hilarious distraction from the business of studying graphic design. ‘When I think of Keith at college, I think of dustbins burning. We used to get these baths of silk-screen wash, throw them over the dustbins and then throw on a match. The dustbins used to explode with a great “woomph”.

      ‘We were all popping pills then – to stay awake without sleep more than to get high. We used to buy these nose inhalers called Nostrilene, for the benzedrine, or even take girls’ period pills. Opposite the college, there was this little park with an aviary that had a cockatoo in it. Cocky the Cockatoo we used to call it. Keith used to feed it pep pills and make it stagger around on its perch. If ever we were feeling bored, we’d go and give another upper to Cocky the Cockatoo.’

      One morning, on his railway journey from Dartford to Sidcup, Keith happened to get into the same dreary commuter carriage as Mike Jagger, en route to the London School of Economics. They recognized each other vaguely from Wentworth County Primary School and a subsequent meeting when Mike had a holiday job selling ice cream outside Dartford Library. This meeting might have been as casual as the previous ones were it not that Mike had under his arm a pile of import blues albums he had got from America by mail order. Keith noticed the sacred names of Chuck Berry and Little Walker, and, with some incredulity, asked the striped-scarfed LSE student if he liked that kind of music, too.

      Chatting further, they discovered they had a common friend in Dick Taylor. Dick had already mentioned to Keith that he was rehearsing with a group sworn to play nothing but blues and r & b. By the time their train reached Sidcup, it was half-arranged that Keith Richards should come along and try rehearsing with Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys.

      He brought with him his semi-solid Hofner cutaway guitar and what seemed to the others a stunning virtuosity. Sitting on the stairs at home, he had managed to master nearly all Chuck Berry’s introductions and solos, even the swarm of notes running through the Berry classic Johnny B. Goode that created an effect like two guitars at once. He understood that even this complex break, like two guitars in unison, required something more than simply playing notes fast. ‘Keith sounded great – but he wasn’t flash,’ Dick Taylor says. ‘When he came in, you could feel something holding the band together.’

      Keith’s arrival, even so, did not advance the fortunes of Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys. They continued to practise as before, with no thought of any audience beyond Dick Taylor’s mum – no inkling that r & b music was a secret vouchsafed to anyone in Britain but themselves. The nearest they came to a public performance was playing together for a snapshot outside the Taylors’ back door. The snap shows Dick and Keith with their guitars parodying Chuck Berry’s duck walk, and Mike Jagger, in his student’s button-up cardigan, striking a dramatic pose against the background of drainpipe and pebbledashed council house wall.

      Music in that era forged many friendships between personalities that might otherwise have remained polar opposites. It had happened three years earlier between cynical, trouble-prone John Lennon and cautious, conservative Paul McCartney in Liverpool. It happened now, when Keith Richards, the ‘Ted’ from a council flat on the wrong side of Dartford, started to go around with Mike Jagger, the economics student from middle-class Denver Road.

      Though the LSE in 1961 was not the political hotbed it later became, a mild radicalism was as de rigueur among its students as the prevailing ‘bohemian’ look. For Mike Jagger it was to be little more than a look, expressed in his new leather tie and knitted cardigan. Just the same, armed with new words like ‘capitalism’ and ‘proletariat’, he seemed intent on rejecting his careful upbringing and sliding down to the class his mother so abhorred.

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