Mick Jagger. Philip Norman

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СКАЧАТЬ gloves. There was also PR mileage to be extracted from his intellectual achievements. Until now, only one British pop star, Mike Sarne, had experienced further education (coincidentally also at London University).

      As Tony Calder remembers, Mick was profoundly uneasy over the master plan that Oldham outlined to him – and not just for its gross misrepresentation of his character. ‘He said he’d bide his time and see if it worked out or not. But there were so many times when he’d turn up at the office, Andrew would call for two cups of tea and shut the door. He’d be in there alone with Mick for a couple of hours doing one thing – building up his confidence. Self-esteem? He didn’t have any. He was a wimp.’

      A famous colour clip of the Stones onstage at the ABC cinema, Hull, filmed by one of Britain’s last surviving cinema newsreels, shows them playing ‘Around and Around’ for the umpteenth time, against a barrage of maniacal screams. They seem to be doing remarkably little to encourage this uproar: Bill playing bass in his odd vertical style, Keith lost in his chords, Brian almost street-mime motionless, with an odd new electric guitar shaped like an Elizabethan lute. Mick, in his familiar matelot-striped shirt – and almost glowing with cleanliness – seems least involved of all. Even in this paean to the liberating joy of music, his well-moistened lips barely stir, giving the words an edge of sarcasm (‘Rose outa my seat . . . I just had to daynce . . .’) reflected in his veiled eyes and occasional flamenco-style hand clap. In the guitar solo he does a stiff-legged dance with head thrust forward and posterior stuck out, ironically rather like the vaudeville ‘eccentric’ style, then still preserved by such veterans as Max Wall and Nat Jackley.

      Since the onset of Beatlemania, young girls at pop shows had screamed dementedly whatever acts were served up to them, male or female, but until now had always stayed in their seats. With Rolling Stones concerts came a new development: they attacked the stage. These were the days when security at British pop concerts consisted of theatre staff checking tickets at the door, and the only barrier between performers and audience as a rule was an empty orchestra pit. During a performance in Lowestoft, Suffolk, on 6 September, half a dozen demented girls began trying to tear off the band’s clothes and grabbing for souvenirs. (Bill later discovered a valuable ring had been wrenched off his finger.) Mick’s athleticism proved an unexpected asset: as one invader rushed at him, he swept her up in a fireman’s lift, carried her offstage, then returned to continue the number.

      The next day brought a 200-mile drive from coastal Suffolk to Aberystwyth, north Wales, then another of 150 miles south to Birmingham for a second appearance on Thank Your Lucky Stars. Also on the bill was Craig Douglas, who had panned Mick’s ‘Come On’ vocal in Melody Maker. Before becoming a pop singer, Douglas had been a milkman on the Isle of Wight; in revenge for his hostile review – and with unendearing social snobbery – the Stones dumped a cluster of empty milk bottles outside his dressing room door.

      On 15 September they were opening in a show called The Great Pop Prom at London’s Royal Albert Hall, with the Beatles as top of the bill. Five months earlier, Mick, Keith and Brian had walked into the Albert Hall anonymously, disguised as Beatle roadies; now the Chelsea boot was well and truly on the other foot. The Stones’ support-band spot unleashed such pandemonium that John Lennon and Paul McCartney were seen peeping through the curtains, nervous of being upstaged for the first time since their Hamburg days. Boyfriend magazine was unequivocal in naming the night’s real stars: ‘Just one shake of [that] overgrown hair is enough to make every girl in the audience scream with tingling excitement.’

      Two weeks later, the Stones set out on their first national package tour, as footnotes to a bill headed by three legendary American names, Little Richard, the Everly Brothers and Bo Diddley. As a mark of respect to their third-biggest R&B hero – and perhaps a tacit admission that their singer was not as brazenly confident as he seemed – the band dropped all Bo Diddley songs from their stage act during the month-long tour. In fact, as well as being flattered by their reverence, Diddley was impressed by their musicianship, later using Bill and Charlie as his rhythm section on a BBC radio appearance. For Mick, the main benefit was seeing Diddley’s virtuoso sideman, Jerome Green, play lollipop-shaped maracas, two in each hand. From now on, he, too, shook maracas in the faster numbers, albeit only one per hand – and even that with a hint of irony.

      Touring meant staying in hotels, which for such a bottom-of-the-bill act meant grim establishments with dirty net curtains, malodorous carpets and electricity coin meters in the bedrooms, all in all not much different from home back in Chelsea. It emerged, however, that one Edith Grove flatmate was not having to endure it. As well as his leader’s £5-per-week premium, Brian had secretly arranged with Eric Easton to stay in a better class of hotel than the others.

      Before long, the tour’s American headliners were facing the Beatles’ recent problem at the Royal Albert Hall. Little Richard remained oblivious, entertaining his audience with an extended striptease, then going for a ten-minute walkabout through the auditorium with a forty-strong police guard. But the Everly Brothers’ tender harmonies became increasingly drowned out by chants of ‘We want the Stones!’ In the end, the emcee had to go out and plead for Mick’s heroes of yesteryear to be given a break.

      By autumn, the Stones’ word-of-mouth reputation was sufficient for them to be voted Britain’s sixth most popular band in Melody Maker’s annual readers’ poll. Yet their future on record was anything but secure. Unless their inexperienced young manager–record producer could concoct a far bigger hit single than ‘Come On’, Decca would be looking for excuses to circumvent their contract and dump them. And the stock of likely hits in the R&B canon was shrinking all the time as other bands and solo singers dipped into it.

      After a flick through R&B’s back catalogue, Andrew Oldham chose an overt novelty number, Leiber and Stoller’s ‘Poison Ivy’, originally recorded by the Coasters with voices teetering on the edge of goonery. As the B-side, weirdly, he prescribed another quasi-comedy song, Benny Spellman’s ‘Fortune Teller’. For a time Mick seemed headed for exactly the vaudeville kind of pop he so despised. However, a recording session with Decca’s in-house producer, Michael Barclay, on 15 July revealed the whole band to be deeply uncomfortable with Oldham’s choice. And, having scheduled the two tracks for release in August, Decca then ominously cancelled them.

      Salvation came unexpectedly while Oldham and the Stones were at Ken Colyer’s Studio 51 Club in Soho, trying out other potential A-sides and getting nowhere. Escaping outside for a breath of air, Oldham chanced to run into John Lennon and Paul McCartney, fresh from receiving awards as Show-Business Personalities of the Year at the Savoy Hotel. Told of the Stones’ problem, John and Paul good-naturedly offered a song of theirs called ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, so new that it wasn’t even quite finished. The duo accompanied Oldham back to Studio 51 and demo’d a Liverpudlian R&B pastiche that their rivals could cover without shame or self-compromise. Their gift thankfully accepted, they added the song’s final touches then and there, making it all look absurdly easy.

      On 7 October the Stones went straight into Kingsway Sound Studios, Holborn (just down the road from LSE), and recorded a version of ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ needing virtually no production and only a couple of takes. The B-side was a cobbled-up instrumental, based on Booker T. and the MG’s’ ‘Green Onions’ and entitled ‘Stoned’ – to most British ears, still only something that happened to adulterous women in the Bible.

      ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ was released on 1 November, three weeks before the Beatles’ own version, sung by Ringo Starr, appeared on their landmark second album, With the Beatles. While the northerners could not stop themselves adding harmony and humour, the Stones’ treatment was raw and basic, just Mick’s voice in alternation with Brian’s molten slide guitar; not so much sly romantic proposition as barefaced sexual attack. ‘Another group trying their chart luck with a Lennon-McCartney composition,’ patronised the New Musical Express. ‘Fuzzy and undisciplined . . . complete chaos,’ sniffed Disc. Indiscipline and chaos seemed to СКАЧАТЬ