Mick Jagger. Philip Norman

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СКАЧАТЬ and winking traffic lights. Early-sixties teenagers were desperately short of Sabbath amusements; consequently, the hundreds that descended on the Station Hotel were not just blues enthusiasts but of every musical and stylistic allegiance: ‘Rockers’ in black leather and motorcycle boots; ‘Mods’ in striped Italian jackets and rakish trilby hats; jazzers in chunky knits; beatniks in polo necks; rich kids from opulent riverside villas and mansion blocks; poor kids from back streets and council estates; and always girls, girls and more girls, with hairstyles across the board, from bob to beehive. As they streamed through the nondescript pub into its red-spotlit rear annexe, they shed factionalism with their winter coats and simply became Stones fans.

      The club closed at ten-thirty, the same time as the pub, but by then the glasses in the nearby bars would literally be shaking. From the start, Gomelsky encouraged his members to forget the usual restraint of blues worship and to express themselves as uninhibitedly as Mick did onstage. A special Crawdaddy dance evolved, based on the Twist and Hully Gully, where partners were not needed (in fact were superfluous) and males rather than females competed for attention, wagging their heads and hips Jaggerishly or leaping up and down on the spot in a punk-rock Pogo fourteen years too early. The finale, in which everyone joined, was two Bo Diddley songs, ‘Do the Crawdaddy’ and ‘Pretty Thing’, spun out to twenty minutes or more and floor-stompingly loud enough to wake the Tudor ghosts at Hampton Court Palace across the river. Yet, for now at least, excitement never turned into violence or destruction. The Stones in this glass house left it completely unscathed, the multi-mirrored walls suffering not even a crack.

      Returning to his first love, Gomelsky began shooting a 35mm film of the Stones onstage at the Crawdaddy and, partly as a source of extra footage, arranged for them to cut further demos at a recording studio in Morden. During this era, according to rock folklore, a demo tape was sent to Saturday Club, BBC radio’s main pop music programme, which responded that the band was acceptable but not the singer, as he sounded ‘too coloured’. However, the show’s host, Brian Matthew – still broadcasting in the twenty-first-century – denies ever having been party to such a judgement; in any case, the whole point about Mick’s voice was that it didn’t sound ‘coloured’.

      Their only other contact with the recording industry was a friend of Ian Stewart’s named Glyn Johns, who worked for a small independent studio called IBC in Portland Place, owned by the BBC orchestra leader Eric Robinson. Johns was allowed to record any musicians he thought promising, and at his invitation the Stones taped five numbers from their stage act at IBC. In return, he received a six-month option to try to sell the demo tape to a major label.

      Giorgio Gomelsky became the band’s de facto manager yet, with extraordinary selflessness, never tried to put them under contract or even keep them all to himself. Continuing the fishy theme (‘crawdaddy’ is Deep Southern slang for crayfish or langoustine), they also began playing regularly on Eel Pie Island, situated on a broad stretch of the Thames at Twickenham. The island’s main feature was a dilapidated grand hotel with a ballroom whose sprung wooden floor had been famous in the Charleston and Black Bottom era. Here, a local antiques dealer now put on weekend blues marathons, featuring the Stones in rotation with other superstars of the future, then unrecognisable as such. They included a Kingston Art College reject named Eric Clapton – at this stage so nervous that he could only play guitar sitting down – and a raspy-voiced trainee gravedigger from north London named Rod Stewart.

      Gomelsky, besides, had other fish to fry. One of early 1963’s few talking points outside of the weather was that eccentrically barbered Liverpool band the Beatles, who had followed their mediocre début single with a smash hit, ‘Please Please Me’, and were whipping up teenage hysteria unknown since the early days of Elvis Presley. Gomelsky had first seen them playing seedy clubs in Hamburg a couple of years previously, and even then had thought them something way out of the ordinary. When ‘Please Please Me’ became a hit, he approached their manager, Brian Epstein, with the idea of making a documentary film about them.

      Though the film proposal fell through, Gomelsky grew friendly enough with the Beatles to get them out to the Crawdaddy one Sunday night when the Rollin’ Stones were playing. Despite the enormous difference in their status, the Liverpudlians and the southern boys immediately hit it off – and, surprisingly, discovered musical roots in common. The Beatles had played American R&B cover versions for years before John Lennon and Paul McCartney began writing original songs; they had also been just as edgy and aggressive as the Stones onstage before Epstein put them into matching shiny suits and made them bow and smile. Lennon, never comfortable about paying this price for success, appeared positively envious of the freedom Mick, Brian and Keith enjoyed as nobodies.

      Later, the Beatles visited 102 Edith Grove, pronouncing it almost palatial compared with their own former living conditions behind the screen of a porno cinema in Hamburg’s red-light district. The rock ’n’ roll-obsessed Lennon turned out to know almost nothing about the Stones’ blues heroes, and had never heard a Jimmy Reed record until Mick played him Reed’s ‘I’ll Change My Style’. When, a few days later, the Beatles appeared in a BBC-sponsored ‘Pop Prom’ at the Royal Albert Hall, they invited Mick, Keith and Brian to come along and visit them backstage. To avoid having to pay for tickets, the three borrowed guitars from the Beatles’ equipment and passed themselves off as roadies. For the only time in his life, Mick found himself in a crowd of screaming fans who were completely unaware of his presence.

      MOST YOUNG MEN of this era, whatever their calling, expected to be engaged by their late teens and married by the age of twenty-one. And in the beautiful, bright and fascinatingly connected Cleo Sylvestre nineteen-year-old Mick thought he had already found the woman for him. There would, of course, be huge problems in taking their presently casual (and still platonic) relationship to a more permanent level. Interracial matches were still exceedingly rare in Britain, particularly among the middle class, and heavy opposition could be expected from both his family and Cleo’s. However, he was prepared to face down any amount of disapproval and prejudice. As a first step, he wanted Cleo to come to Dartford and meet his family, certain that even his mother would be instantly captivated by her.

      But Cleo did not feel nearly ready for such a commitment. She had only just left school and was about to begin studying at a teacher-training college near Richmond. She also had an inbuilt nervousness about marriage – and men – having witnessed stormy and at times violent rows between her own parents before their separation. ‘I told Mick it had nothing to do with how I felt about him,’ she recalls. ‘It was just that the time wasn’t right. I wanted us still to be friends, but he said he couldn’t bear for it to be just on that level.’

      The heartbreak, though real enough, was not to be of long duration. One night in early 1963, the Rollin’ Stones were playing yet another Thames-side blues club, the Ricky-Tick, hard by the battlements of the royal castle at Windsor. When Mick launched into Bo Diddley’s ‘Pretty Thing’ (‘let me buy you a wedding ring / let me hear the choir sing . . .’), his bandmates knew exactly whom it was aimed at.

      Her name was Christine – aka Chrissie – Shrimpton; she was seventeen years old, but very different from the usual schoolgirl blues fan. Her older sister, the fashion model Jean Shrimpton, was growing increasingly famous through appearances in once-stuffy Vogue magazine, photographed by the young East Ender David Bailey. While Jean’s looks were coolly patrician – more fifties, in fact, than sixties – Chrissie was a quintessential young woman of now with her Alice-banded hair, ethereally pale face and thick black bush-baby eyes. The impassive pout essential to this look was enhanced by unusually wide and full lips, albeit not quite on the same scale as Mick’s.

      Despite a noticeably posh accent and aura, Chrissie Shrimpton was less upper class than she appeared – and also more of a natural rebel than Mick had ever been. Her father was a self-made Buckinghamshire builder who had used his wealth to realise his dream of owning a farm in the high-priced countryside near Burnham. Though brought up with every luxury and given an expensive private education, Chrissie was an unruly spirit, constitutionally unable СКАЧАТЬ