Mick Jagger. Philip Norman

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СКАЧАТЬ finest blues harp player in Cyril – aka ‘Squirrel’ – Davies, who carried his collection of harmonicas around in a bag like a plumber’s tools. When the band played sans Jagger, Mick would haunt the stage front as avidly as any future Mick worshipper, watching the big, ungainly man coax the most delicate melodies as well as the most wickedly rousing rhythms from his tiny silver mouthpiece. However, the prickly, insecure and fiercely anti-rock ’n’ roll ‘Squirrel’ felt none of Korner’s zeal to help younger musicians. ‘He was very gruff, almost to the point of rudeness,’ his would-be pupil would recall. ‘He told me to fuck off, basically. I’d ask, “How do you bend a note?” and Cyril would say, “Well, you get a pair of pliers . . .”’

      Nor was Alexis Korner’s hospitality limited to the Ealing Club stage. At his London flat, in Moscow Road, Bayswater, he and his wife, Bobbie, kept open house for his young protégés as well as for the occasional blues maestro visiting from America. Mick and the other Blue Boys would go back there after closing time to sit in the kitchen – where Big Bill Broonzy had once slept on the floor – drinking instant coffee and talking until dawn came up over the cupolas of nearby Whiteley’s department store. The Korners found Mick always quiet and polite, though by now more than a little influenced by the LSE’s in-house radicalism. On one occasion, he described the blues as ‘our working-class music’ and expressed surprise that a former public schoolboy like Korner should be involved with it. Keith always seemed consumed by shyness, never pushing himself forward as a musician or a person, just happy to be around Mick.

      On the club’s second night, yet another Korner find had made his début there. He was a short, stocky twenty-year-old, dressed at the height of fashion in a grey herringbone jacket, a shirt with one of the new faux-Victorian rounded collars and elastic-sided Chelsea boots. He had a mop of fair hair almost as ungovernable as Mick’s, and even more silkily clean, and a smile of shining choirboy innocence. His name was Brian Jones.

      Two evenings later, the Dartford boys walked in to find him onstage, playing Robert Johnson’s ‘Dust My Broom’ on ‘bottleneck’ or ‘slide’ guitar – not holding down individual strings but sliding a steel-jacketed finger back and forth along all six at once in extravagant sweeps to produce quivering metallic mayhem. It was a style, and song, identified with one of the Blue Boys’ greatest Chicago idols, Elmore James; the newcomer did not merely sound like James but was billed under a pseudonym, ‘Elmo Lewis’, clearly designed to put him on the same level. This hubris excited Keith, in particular, almost more than the music. ‘It’s Elmore James, man,’ he kept whispering to Mick as they watched. ‘It’s fuckin’ Elmore James . . .’

      Brian was a blues pilgrim from even farther afield than Dartford. He had been raised in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, a bastion of stuffy propriety rivalling Kent’s Tunbridge Wells. His background was as solidly middle class as Mick’s and his educational background almost identical. The son of a civil engineer, he had attended Cheltenham Grammar School, distinguishing himself both in class and at games, though hampered in the latter by chronic asthma. Both his parents being Welsh, and his mother a piano teacher to boot, he was instinctively musical, easily mastering the piano, recorder, clarinet and saxophone before he had left short trousers. He could pick up almost any instrument and, in a minute or two, coax some kind of tune from it.

      Like Mick, he turned into a rebel against middle-class convention, but in his case the process was considerably more spectacular. At the age of sixteen, while still at Cheltenham Grammar, he fathered a child with a schoolgirl two years his junior. The episode devastated his upright Welsh parents, scandalised Cheltenham (especially sensitive to such issues because of its world-renowned ‘Ladies’ College’), and even reached Britain’s main Sunday scandal sheet, the News of the World. After matters with the girl’s family had been resolved and the baby given up for adoption, most young men would have learned an unforgettable lesson – but not this one. By the age of twenty he had sired two further children with different young women, each time failing to do the decent thing by marrying the mother and accepting responsibility for the child. Long before there were rock stars as we have come to know them – motivated only by music and self-gratification, oblivious to the trail of ruined lives in their wake – there was Brian Jones.

      Leaving school with two more A-levels than Mick, he could easily have gone on to university, but instead drifted from one tedious office job to another while playing alto sax with a rock ’n’ roll group (aptly named the Ramrods). He had met Alexis Korner in Cheltenham while Korner was still in the Chris Barber band; with Korner’s encouragement he’d migrated to London soon afterwards, hotly pursued by the latest young woman he had got ‘up the duff’ with their baby son. In the meantime, he taught himself to play slide guitar well – brilliantly – enough for Korner to put him into the Blues Incorporated line-up at the Ealing Club.

      He was only a little older than Mick and Keith, but seemed vastly more mature and sophisticated when they talked to him following his Elmore James imposture. As a guitarist, his rapport was initially with Keith. But Mick was equally impressed by his soft, lisping voice with no trace of West Country bumpkin; his super-chic clothes and hair; his knowledge of music across the whole spectrum from pop to jazz; his surprising articulateness and literacy and wicked sense of humour; above all, his determination not to let his chaotic private life hinder him from, somehow or other, becoming a star.

      Thereafter, when the Dartford boys drove to Ealing, they would make a lengthy detour to pick up Brian from his flat in Notting Hill Gate. He was supporting himself – and, to a minor extent, his girlfriend and third child – with day jobs in shops and department stores that usually ended when he was caught stealing from the cash register. Despite a seeming total lack of scruples, he had a knack of endearing himself to honest people with what Alexis Korner termed ‘a beautiful mixture of politeness and rudeness’. Whereas Mick was merely a visitor to the Korners’ flat – not always appreciated for his left-wing stridency and his patronising way of calling thirty-something Bobbie Korner ‘Auntie Bobbie’ – Brian treated the place virtually as a second home.

      By now, the Ealing Club’s open-mic policy had produced other young blues singers, all similarly white and bourgeois, to challenge the kid in the cardigan. Brian – who, despite his Welsh antecedents, did not possess a singing voice – worked as a guitar/vocal duo with a sometime Oxford University student named Paul Pond (later to find fame as Paul Jones with the Manfred Mann band and, still later, as an actor, musical comedy star and radio presenter). On some nights the vocal spot with Blues Incorporated would be given to ‘Long’ John Baldry, a hugely tall, sandy-haired former street busker whose father was a police officer in Colindale; on others it went to a long-faced Middlesex boy named Art Wood whose kid brother Ronnie was among the club’s most devoted members, though not yet old enough to be served alcohol.

      Occasionally, two or more vocalists at once took the stage in an implied talent contest that did not always seem to come out in the kid’s favour. Both Paul Pond and Long John Baldry had more recognisably ‘soulful’ voices, while Long John, towering over him in a shared rendition of Muddy Waters’s ‘Got My Mojo Workin’’, brought his lack of inches into uncomfortable relief. Yet Mick was the vocalist Korner always preferred. The waspish Long John – openly gay at a time when few young Britons dared to be – dismissed him as ‘all lips and ears . . . like a ventriloquist’s dummy’.

      Korner also began using Mick on Blues Incorporated gigs outside the club, paying him ‘a pound or ten bob [fifty pence]’ per show. Some of these were for débutante balls at posh London hotels or country houses, in Buckinghamshire or Essex, whose front gates had porters’ lodges almost as big as the Jagger family home and front drives that seemed to go on forever. As far as Mick – or anyone in his social bracket – knew, the aristocracy had never taken the slightest interest in blues or R&B. But these young men in dinner jackets, Guards mess tunics or even kilts, proved as susceptible to Muddy, Elmore, T-Bone and Chuck as any back in proletarian Ealing; the girls might have double-barrelled surnames and horsey accents, but were no less putty in his hands when he threw his hair around. Despite СКАЧАТЬ