Mick Jagger. Philip Norman

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      At Sidcup Art College he did little on a creative level, apart from developing what would become a near genius for vandalism. Musically speaking, however, the college provided an education which he devoured like none before. Among its students was a clique of hard-core blues enthusiasts, as usual acting like a resistance cell in an occupied country. Their moving spirit, Dick Taylor, had lately arrived from Dartford Grammar School, where he had belonged to an identical underground movement with Mike Jagger. Dick converted Keith to the blues just as he’d converted Mike a year earlier. In the process, he sometimes mentioned playing in a band, but so vaguely that Keith never realised his old primary schoolmate was also a member. He had in fact been longing to join but, says Taylor, was ‘too shy to ask’.

      After their chance reunion on that morning commuter train, Mike and Keith met up again at Dartford’s only cool place, the Carousel coffee bar, and were soon regularly hanging out together. Keith brought along his guitar, an acoustic Hofner cello model with F-holes, and Mike revealed that, despite his college scarf and well-bred accent, he sang blues. They began making music together immediately, finding their tastes identical – blues, with some pop if it was good – and their empathy almost telepathic. ‘We’d hear something, we’d both look at each other at once,’ Keith would later write in his autobiography, Life. ‘We’d hear a record and go “That’s wrong. That’s faking it. That’s real.”’ As with two other total opposites, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who had met in Liverpool four years earlier, their character differences only seemed to cement the friendship. ‘[Mike] liked Keith’s laid-back quality, his tough stance, his obsession with the guitar,’ says Taylor, ‘and Keith was attracted to Mike’s intelligence, his dramatic flair.’

      Mike was all for bringing Keith into the unnamed blues band that still somehow struggled along. But aside from Taylor, there were two other members to convince. Although Bob Beckwith and Alan Etherington had also now left Dartford Grammar School, both still lived at home, in circumstances as irreproachably middle class as the Jaggers’. Keith was not simply their social inferior, but hailed from very much the wrong side of the tracks: he lived in a council house on the definitely rough Temple Hill estate in east Dartford, and was known to hang out with the town’s most disreputable ‘Teds’. However, one band practice session was enough for Beckwith and Etherington to agree with Taylor’s estimate of Mike’s mate as ‘an absolute lout . . . but a really nice lout’. The line-up obligingly rearranged itself so that Keith could alternate on lead guitar with Beckwith.

      Chuck Berry was Keith’s real passport into their ranks. For Berry had done what no schoolteacher or college lecturer could – made him pay attention and apply himself. The gymnastic electric riffs with which Berry punctuated his vocals were still way beyond most of his young British admirers. But Keith, by listening to the records over and over, had nailed every last note and half chord in ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’, ‘Memphis, Tennessee’, even the complex intro and solo to ‘Johnny B. Goode’, where Berry somehow single-handedly sounded like two lead guitarists trying to outpick each other. Mike’s voice, if it resembled anyone’s, had always sounded a bit like Berry’s; in this authentic instrumental setting, he now became Chuck almost to the life.

      With Keith’s arrival, the band finally acquired a name, Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys. His guitar had the name ‘Blue Boy’ inside it, and ‘Little Boy Blue’ was a pseudonym of the blues giant Sonny Boy Williamson. There was also a hint of giggle-making double entendre (‘Little Boy Blue, come blow up your horn’) and an ironic nod to The Blue Boy, Thomas Gainsborough’s eighteenth-century portrait of an angelic youth in sky-coloured satin. In other words, they could not have dreamed up anything much worse.

      Away from the band, not all Mike’s friends were quite so accepting of Keith. Alan Etherington recalls that in their wider ex-Dartford Grammar School circle, there would sometimes be parties to which Mike’s Teddy Boy friend was pointedly not invited. That used to upset Mike, showing his bandmates a more sensitive, caring person than they previously had taken him for. He adopted a protective attitude towards Keith – who was not nearly as tough as he pretended, and in many ways a rather sensitive, vulnerable soul – while Keith, in return, followed him with almost dog-like devotion.

      Mike, for his part, crossed over to Keith’s side of the tracks without any problem. The Richardses’ cosy, untidy council house on Spielman Road was the pleasantest possible contrast to the spotless and regimented Jagger home in The Close. Keith had no vigorous dad around to insist on weight training or team washing up, and Doris was motherly and easygoing in a way that Eva Jagger, for all her sterling qualities, had never been. When the Richardses went away for the weekend to Beesands in Devon that summer, Mike accompanied them in their battered old Vauxhall car. Keith took his guitar, and the two friends entertained customers at the local pub by playing Everly Brothers songs. Otherwise, Doris Richards remembered Mike being ‘bored to tears’ and repeatedly moaning, ‘No women . . . no women.’ On their marathon return journey, the car battery failed and they had to drive without lights. When finally they drew up outside the Jagger house four or five hours late, a tight-lipped Eva showed little sympathy.

      Mike had always soaked up other people’s accents and mannerisms, usually in a mocking spirit, sometimes in an admiring one. Now, outside of college – and home – he abandoned his rather goody-goody, stripe-scarfed student persona and began to dress and carry himself more like Keith, no longer speaking in the quiet, accentless tone of a nicely brought-up middle-class boy, but in brash Kentish Cockney. Around Keith, he ceased to be known as ‘Mike’, that name so redolent of sports cars, Harris-tweed jackets, and beer in pewter mugs at smart roadhouses on Sunday mornings. Now, instead, he became ‘Mick’, its defiantly proletarian butt end, redolent only of reeking public bars and mad-drunk Irishmen. It was the tough-nut prefix for which ‘Jagger’ seemed to have been waiting all these years; joined together, the three syllables were already practically smashing windows.

      While Keith’s arrival in the band widened their repertoire and gave their sound an extra bite, it did not make them any more ambitious or purposeful. They continued to practise together in a vacuum, still not trying to find live playing gigs or acquire a manager who might do so for them. Early in 1962, at Alan Etherington’s house, they used the Philips ‘Joystick’ recorder to tape Mike’s – or Mick’s – better Chuck Berry take-offs with Keith on lead guitar: two versions apiece of ‘Beautiful Delilah’, ‘Little Queenie’ and ‘Around and Around’, and one each of ‘Johnny B. Goode’ and ‘Down the Road Apiece’, plus Billy Boy Arnold’s ‘I Ain’t Got You’ and Ritchie Valens’s ‘La Bamba’. The tape was not submitted to a record company or talent agent, however, but simply analysed for instrumental and vocal faults, then forgotten – until thirty years later, when it was put up for auction as a unique glimpse of a superstar and supergroup in embryo, and sold for a fortune.

      *

      ON 15 MARCH 1962 Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys discovered they were not alone after all. Scanning that Thursday’s edition of Melody Maker, they lit on an advertisement for what was described – wholly justifiably, in their view – as ‘The Most Exciting Event of This Year’. In two evenings’ time, a club dedicated to blues music would open in the west London suburb of Ealing.

      The club’s founder, Alexis Korner, was the first in a succession of characters from exotic regions far outside Kent who would assist Mike’s transfiguration into Mick. Born in Paris of an Austro-Russian father and a Greco-Turkish mother, Korner spent his infancy in Switzerland and North Africa before growing up in London and attending one of its most exclusive schools, St Paul’s. He became addicted to the blues as a schoolboy, rejecting all his various heritages to learn boogie-woogie piano, banjo and guitar, and feeling – much like our Dartford schoolboy in later years – an almost sacred mission to keep the music alive.

      As a result, thirty-three-year-old Korner, a genial man with a shock of Afro hair before its time and an uneroded public school accent, now led Britain’s СКАЧАТЬ