Mick Jagger. Philip Norman

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ exams, which in those days were assessed by marks out of 100 rather than grades. He passed in seven subjects, just scraping through English literature (48), geography (51), history (56), Latin (49) and pure mathematics (53), doing moderately well in French (61) and English language (66). Further education being still for the fortunate minority, this was when most pupils left, aged sixteen, to start jobs in banks or solicitors’ offices. Mike, however, went into the sixth form for two more years to take A-level English, history and French. His headmaster, Lofty Hudson, predicted that he was ‘unlikely to do brilliantly in any of them’.

      He was also made a school prefect, in theory an auxiliary to Lofty and the staff in maintaining order and discipline. But it was an appointment that the head soon came to regret. Though Elvis Presley had originally cast his disruptive spell over girls, he had left a more lasting mark on boys, especially British ones, turning their former upright posture to a rebellious slouch and their former sunny smiles to sullen pouts, replacing their short-back-and-sides haircuts with toppling greasy quiffs, ‘ducks’ arses’ and sideburns. The Teddy Boy (i.e., Edwardian) style, too, was no longer peculiar to lawless young artisans but had introduced middle- and upper-class youths to ankle-hugging trousers, two-button ‘drape’ jackets and Slim Jim ties.

      Mike was not one to go too far – his mother would never have allowed it – but he broke Dartford Grammar’s strict dress code in subtle ways that were no less provocative to Lofty’s enforcers, sporting slip-on moccasin shoes instead of clumpy black lace-ups; a pale ‘shorty’ raincoat instead of the dark, belted kind; a low-fastening black jacket with a subtle gold fleck instead of his school blazer. Among his fiercest sartorial critics was Dr Wilfred Bennett, the senior languages tutor, whom he had already displeased by consistently performing below his abilities in French. Matters came to a head at the school’s annual Founder’s Day ceremony, attended by bigwigs from Dartford Council and other local dignitaries, when his gold-flecked jacket marred the otherwise faultless rows of regulation blazers. There was a heated confrontation with Dr Bennett afterwards, which ended with the teacher lashing out – as teachers then could with impunity – and Mike sprawled out on the ground.

      Perhaps more than any other pastime, music forges friendships between individuals who otherwise have nothing whatsoever in common. Never was it truer than in late 1950s Britain, when for the first time young people found a music of their own, only to have it derided by adult society in general. A few months from now, this feeling of persecuted brotherhood would initiate, or rather revive, the most important relationship of Mike’s life. The prologue, as it were, took place in his last two years at school when, somewhat surprisingly, the genteel kid from Wilmington chummed up with a plumber’s son from Bexleyheath named Dick Taylor.

      Dick’s consuming passion was not rock ’n’ roll but blues, the black music that had preceded it by something like half a century and provided its structure, its chords and its rebellious soul. For this esoteric taste he had to thank his older sister Robin, a hard-core blues fan while her friends swooned over white crooners like Frankie Vaughan and Russ Hamilton. Robin knew all its greatest exponents and, more important, knew where to find it on AFN or Voice of America, where the occasional blues record was played for the benefit of black GIs helping to defend Europe from communism. Dick, in turn, passed on the revelation to a small coterie at Dartford Grammar that included Mike Jagger.

      This was unconventionality on an altogether more epic scale than shorty raincoats. Liking rock ’n’ roll with its concealed black subtext was one thing – but this was music wholly reflecting the experience of black people, which few musicians but black ones had ever authentically created. In late-fifties Britain one still very seldom saw a black face outside London, least of all in the bucolic Home Counties: hence the unimpaired popularity of Helen Bannerman’s children’s story Little Black Sambo, Agatha Christie’s stage play Ten Little Niggers and BBC TV’s Black and White Minstrels, to say nothing of ‘nigger brown’ shoe polish and dogs routinely named ‘Blackie’, ‘Sambo’ and ‘Nigger’. Nor was there any but the most marginal, patronising awareness of black culture. Mass immigration until now had come mainly from former colonies in the Caribbean, furnishing a new menial class to staff public transport and the National Health Service. The only generic black music most Britons ever heard was West Indian calypsos, full of careful deference to the host nation and usually employed as a soundtrack to first-class cricket matches.

      There might seem no possible meeting point between suburban Kent with its privet hedges and slow green buses, and the Mississippi Delta with its tar-and-paper cabins, shanty towns and prison farms; still less between a genteelly raised white British boy and the dusty black troubadours whose chants of pain or anger or defiance had lightened the load and lifted the spirits of untold fellow sufferers under twentieth-century servitude. For Mike, the initial attraction of the blues was simply that of being different – standing out from his coevals as he already did through basketball. To some extent, too, it had a political element. This was the era of English literature’s so-called angry young men and their well-publicised contempt for the cosiness and insularity of life under Harold Macmillan’s Tory government. One of their numerous complaints, voiced in John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger, was that ‘there are no good, brave causes left’. To a would-be rebel in 1959, the oppression of black musicians in pre-war rural America was more than cause enough.

      But Mike’s love of the blues was as passionate and sincere as he’d ever been about anything in his life, or perhaps ever would be. In crackly recordings, mostly made long before his birth, he found an excitement – an empathy – he never had in the wildest moments of rock ’n’ roll. Indeed, he could see now just what an impostor rock was in so many ways; how puny were its wealthy young white stars in comparison with the bluesmen who’d written the book and, mostly, died in poverty; how those long-dead voices, wailing to the beat of a lone guitar, had a ferocity and humour and eloquence and elegance to which nothing on the rock ’n’ roll jukebox even came close. The parental furore over Elvis Presley’s sexual content, for instance, seemed laughable if one compared the pubescent hot flushes of ‘Teddy Bear’ and ‘All Shook Up’ with Lonnie Johnson’s syphilis-crazed ‘Careless Love’ or Blind Lemon Jefferson’s nakedly priapic ‘Black Snake Moan’. And what press-pilloried rock ’n’ roll reprobate, Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis, could hold a candle to Robert Johnson, the boy genius of the blues who lived almost the whole of his short life among drug addicts and prostitutes and was said to have made a pact with the devil in exchange for his peerless talent?

      Though skiffle had brought some blues songs into general consciousness, the music still had only a tiny British following – mostly ‘intellectual’ types who read leftish weeklies, wore maroon socks with sandals and carried their change in leather purses. Like skiffle, it was seen as a branch of jazz: the few American blues performers who ever performed live in Britain did so through the sponsorship – charity, some might say – of traditional jazz bandleaders like Humphrey Lyttelton, Ken Colyer and Chris Barber. ‘Humph’ had been bringing Big Bill Broonzy over as a support attraction since 1950, while every year or so the duo of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee attracted small but ardent crowds to Colyer’s Soho club, Studio 51. After helping give birth to skiffle, Barber had become a stalwart of the National Jazz League, which strove to put this most lackadaisical of the arts on an organised footing and had its own club, the Marquee in Oxford Street. Here, too, from time to time, some famous old blues survivor would appear onstage, still bewildered by his sudden transition from Chicago or Memphis.

      Finding the blues on record was almost as difficult. It was not available on six-shilling and fourpenny singles, like rock and pop, but only on what were still known as ‘LPs’ (long-players) rather than albums, priced at a daunting thirty shillings (£1.50) and up. To add to the expense, these were usually not released on British record labels but imported from America in their original packaging with the price in dollars and cents crossed out and a new one in pounds, shillings and pence substituted. Such exotica was, of course, not stocked by record shops in Dartford or even in large neighbouring towns such as Chatham or Rochester. To find it, Mike and Dick had to go to up to London and trawl through the racks at specialist СКАЧАТЬ