Mick Jagger. Philip Norman

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СКАЧАТЬ in Hollywood. Instead, she married the British intelligence officer Robert Faithfull and settled with him in Britain, where Marianne, their only child, was born in 1946.

      The couple separated in 1952 and the Austrian baroness relocated to – of all places – Reading, the unexciting Berkshire town best known for Huntley & Palmer’s biscuits and Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol. Here she acquired a small house in the poorest district and worked variously as a shop assistant, coffee-bar server and bus conductress while still managing to imbue her daughter with a sense of patrician superiority. Marianne was educated on semi-charity terms at a Catholic convent school, St Joseph’s, under a regime so strict that the girls had to bathe in underslips to avoid the sin of looking at their own nude bodies.

      She grew up to be a stunning combination of beauty and brains, mistily innocent-looking, yet with a voluptuous figure; shyly and refinedly spoken, yet with an inquiring intellect and a rich mezzo-soprano singing voice. She had no doubt that life would lead her into the theatre or music – possibly both – and by the age of sixteen was already working as a folk singer around Reading coffee bars. Early in 1964, she visited Cambridge to attend an undergraduates’ ball, and met Andrew Oldham’s friend John Dunbar, then studying fine arts at Churchill College. Oldham was looking to expand his managerial empire beyond the Stones, and asked Dunbar if he knew any girl singers. ‘Well, actually, yes,’ Dunbar replied.

      At Adrienne Posta’s launch party, the other female guests wore butterfly-bright ‘dolly’ dresses with the new daringly short skirts. Marianne, however, chose blue jeans and a baggy shirt of Dunbar’s that was sexier than the most clinging sheath. Tony Calder, standing near the door with Mick, Oldham, Chrissie Shrimpton and Sheila Klein, still remembers her entrance: ‘It was like someone turned the sound down. It was like seeing the Virgin Mary with an amazing pair of tits. Andrew and Mick both said together, “I want to fuck her.” Both their girlfriends went, “What did you say?” Mick and Andrew went, “We said we want to record her.”’

      Marianne at this point thought the Rolling Stones were ‘yobbish schoolboys . . . with none of the polish of John Lennon or Paul McCartney’. By her own later account, she wouldn’t have noticed Mick if he hadn’t been in the throes of yet another row with Chrissie, ‘who was crying and shouting at him . . . and in the heat of the moment, one of her false eyelashes was peeling off’. The person who most interested her was Andrew Oldham, especially when he came over (‘all beaky and angular, like some bird of prey’), brusquely asked his friend John Dunbar for her name – no female equality for years yet! – and, on learning it genuinely was Marianne Faithfull, announced that he intended to make her a pop star.

      Within days, to her amazement, Marianne had a contract with the Stones’ label, Decca, and an appointment to record a single with Oldham as her producer. The A-side was to have been a Lionel Bart song, ‘I Don’t Know How (To Tell You)’, but when she tried it out it proved totally unsuited to her voice and to the persona her Svengali intended to create. Instead, Oldham turned to his in-house team of Jagger– Richard, giving them precise instructions as to the kind of ballad he required for Marianne: ‘She’s from a convent. I want a song with brick walls all round it, high windows and no sex.’

      Though the result bore a joint credit, Tony Calder remembers its conception to have been entirely Mick’s, working with session guitarist Big Jim Sullivan. The monologue of a lonely, disillusioned older woman – harking back to Alfred Lord Tennyson’s ‘Lady of Shallot’ and foreshadowing the Beatles’ ‘Eleanor Rigby’ – it was a glimpse of the sensitivity and almost feminine intuition Mick was known to possess but so rarely showed. The original title, ‘As Time Goes By’, became ‘As Tears Go By’ to avoid confusion with pianist Dooley Wilson’s famous cabaret spot in the film Casablanca.

      With hindsight, Marianne would consider ‘As Tears Go By’ ‘a Françoise Hardy song . . . Europop you might hear on a French jukebox . . . “The Lady of Shalott” to the tune of “These Foolish Things”’. She still concedes that for a songwriter so inexperienced it showed remarkable maturity – clairvoyance even. ‘It’s an absolutely astonishing thing for a boy of twenty to have written a song about a woman looking back nostalgically on her life. The uncanny thing is that Mick should have written those words so long before everything happened . . . it’s almost as if our whole relationship was prefigured in that song.’

      For this second recording session, Marianne travelled up from Reading to London chaperoned by her friend Sally Oldfield (sister of the future Tubular Bells wizard, Mike). Oldham’s production stuck to the ‘high brick walls and no sex’ formula, toning down her usually robust mezzo-soprano to a wispy demureness, counterpointed by the mournful murmur of a cor anglais, or English horn. Mick and Keith watched the proceedings and afterwards gave the two girls a lift back to Paddington station by taxi. On the way, Mick tried to get Marianne to sit on his lap, but she made Sally do so instead. ‘I mean, it was on that level,’ she recalls. ‘“What a cheeky little yob,” I thought to myself. “So immature.”’

      Within a month, ‘As Tears Go By’ was in the UK Top 20, finally peaking at No. 9. British pop finally had a thoroughly English female singer, or so it appeared, rather than just would-be American ones. And the media were confronted with a head-scratching paradox: two members of a band notorious for dirtiness, rawness and uncouthness had brought gentility – not to say virginity – into the charts for the very first time.

      The success of ‘As Tears Go By’ might have been expected to start a wholesale winning streak for the Jagger– Richard songwriting partnership that would finally benefit their own band rather than ill-assorted outsiders. But, strangely, having their name on a No. 9 hit acted more like a brake. Mick had no idea where the song had come from and, after weeks of racking his brains with Keith, began to despair of writing anything else a fraction as good.

      Certainly, when the Stones’ first album appeared, on 17 April, it was still far from clear that they had a would-be Lennon and McCartney in their ranks. Recorded at Regent Sound in just five days snatched from the Ronettes tour, this was almost completely made up of the cover versions from which Oldham had struggled to wean them – Chuck Berry’s ‘Carol’, Bo Diddley’s ‘Mona (I Need You Baby)’, Willie Dixon’s ‘I Just Want to Make Love to You’, James Moore’s ‘I’m a King Bee’, Jimmy Reed’s ‘Honest I Do’, Marvin Gaye’s ‘Can I Get a Witness?’, Rufus Thomas’s ‘Walking the Dog’, Bobby Troup’s ‘Route 66’. The only Jagger– Richard track thought worthy of inclusion was ‘Tell Me (You’re Coming Back)’, an echoey ballad in faintly Merseybeat style. The album, in fact, was like a Stones live show (much as the Beatles’ first one had been), its immediacy heightened by Regent Sound’s primitive equipment and Andrew Oldham’s anguished eye on the clock. At the session for ‘Can I Get a Witness?’, Mick realised he couldn’t remember all Marvin Gaye’s words, and neither could anyone else present. A hurried phone call had to be made to the song’s publishers on Savile Row for a copy of the lyrics to be hunted out and left in reception. The usefully athletic vocalist ran a half mile from Denmark Street to collect them, then back again. On the track he is still audibly breathless.

      The album was entitled, simply, The Rolling Stones – in itself an act of extreme Oldham hubris. The Beatles’ first album had followed custom in bearing the name of a hit single, ‘Please Please Me’, and even their ground-breaking second, With the Beatles, still had a whiff of conventionality. But Oldham did not stop there. In defiance of Decca Records’ entire marketing department, he insisted that The Rolling Stones’ front cover showed neither name nor title – just a glossy picture of the five standing sideways with heavily shadowed, unsmiling faces turned to the camera. Mick was first, then dapper Charlie, a squeezed-in Bill and barely recognisable Keith, with Brian – the only one in their old stage uniform of leather waistcoat and shirtsleeves rather than varicoloured suits – symbolically at the back and out of line.

      On its reverse, the cover returned СКАЧАТЬ