short and powerful legs. ‘He was like a little Welsh bull,’ Keith says. ‘He was broad, and he looked very tough.’
That first conversation produced only an exchange of views. Brian, interested mainly in jazz-influenced blues, had not yet discovered Chuck Berry. He listened intently to what Keith told him about Berry and Jimmy Reed. He made it clear, though, that his ambitions went somewhat higher than Alexis Korner’s part-time student vocalist and a red-nosed, pimply guitarist whose only public appearance to date had been in the garden of a Bexleyheath council house.
The partnership between Elmo Lewis and P. P. Pond lasted only for that one engagement. Paul Pond returned to Oxford to resume his studies and await his destiny with Manfred Mann. Elmo Lewis, on the lookout for partners again, placed an advertisement in Jazz News, Soho’s club information sheet, grandly inviting prospective sidesmen to audition with him in the back room of a Berwick Street pub, the Bricklayer’s Arms.
The first recruit, Ian Stewart, arrived by racing cycle, looking anything but the part of the blues pianist he claimed to be. Thick-set and muscular, with a long, pugnacious jaw, he entered the rehearsal room in leather shorts, carrying a pork pie he had bought for his lunch. When he sat at the piano, however, all such visual reservations vanished. Pumping with one burly leg, he could make even those nicotine-yellowed keys give out the hectic, tinny airs of ragtime and barrel-house. He then sat back, took out his pork pie and began to eat it nonchalantly.
‘Stew’ became the nucleus of Brian’s group, together with an accomplished solo guitarist, Geoff Bradford. Over the next few days, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Dick Taylor also drifted in and auditioned to Brian’s satisfaction. Stew recognized them from the Ealing club, but rated none of them as musicians in his or Bradford’s class. Tough and short-spoken as he was, there was something about Keith, especially, that put him on his guard. ‘I think Keith was very shy in those days. Mick had got very friendly with Brian, and that seemed to make Keith edgy and uncomfortable.’
Soon there were arguments between Geoff Bradford, a pure blues guitarist in the Muddy Waters style, and Keith, the Chuck Berry acolyte. Bradford refused to have anything to do with ‘rock ’n’ roll rubbish’ like Roll Over Beethoven and Sweet Little Sixteen, and walked out, never to return. By this time, Elmo Lewis, the three Dartford boys and the lantern-jawed Stew had found enough in common to carry on together.
Practice sessions at the Bricklayer’s Arms took place three times a week, even though the embryo – and untitled – group still had no prospect of a booking. ‘It was a seven o’clock start, and we’d all be there sharp at seven,’ Ian Stewart remembered. ‘The one you could never depend on was Brian. He’d suddenly disappear for a few days, then he’d turn up again and want to get another rehearsal going. I never really trusted Brian – mainly because he was always saying, ‘Trust me, Stew.’
The solid Stew had a steady daytime job as a shipping clerk with Imperial Chemical Industries in Buckingham Gate. His first impression of Mick and Keith was of semi-vagrants, permanently broke, shabby and ravenous. Mick had no money but his seven pound per week student grant, plus the few shillings he got for singing with Alex. Keith, at the point of expulsion from Sidcup Art College, was entirely dependent on handouts from his mother. ‘They looked like they were going to starve together. But Mick was rather better off. Every so often, he’d leave Keith and go off to a slightly better caff. Mick always was very fond of his stomach.’
The first spark of originality in the group was struck by spontaneous interaction between Brian on his Gibson guitar and Keith on his Hofner. They would play, not as lead and subordinate rhythm, but as a duet, matching one another solo for solo, merging in a natural two-amp harmony, one zigzagging down the bass notes as the other climbed into treble register. This emergence of a ‘two-guitar band’ seemed an infinitely more exciting prospect than the skinny LSE student who sat about patiently, awaiting his chance to sing. Even then, in the trio of Mick, Keith and Brian, the joining of two inexorably left the third one out in the cold.
The sound they made could be heard in the main pub and, one night, fell on appreciative ears. Later, in the bar, a middle-aged man came up and introduced himself by visiting card as ‘David Norris, Artists’ Representative, Cockfosters’. He told them he’d liked what he’d heard, and could get them some engagements in ballrooms and dance halls – perhaps even at military bases on the Continent – provided they got themselves some decent instruments and stage suits. Mr Norris, for his pains, was firmly snubbed. All five had vowed they would never sell out their music to the commercial world, even if it meant they never got a single engagement.
Alexis Korner remained the only real star in the blues firmament. And, in the summer of 1962, it seemed as if Korner’s meteoric career was about to leave Mick Jagger behind. Blues Incorporated had been offered their first nationwide broadcast, on the BBC Light Programme’s Jazz Club. There were, however, two drawbacks. The first was that the BBC appearance, on July 12, clashed with Korner’s regular Thursday booking at the Marquee. The second was that the BBC, with typical frugality, would pay for five musicians only. Korner must therefore shed the most dispensable one in his line-up, the vocalist.
Jagger did not mind being dropped. He was, on the contrary, anxious for Korner to seize this chance to bring blues to a national audience. It was arranged that the Marquee date should be filled by Korner’s original Ealing vocalist, Long John Baldry. For an intermission band, the Marquee’s manager, Harold Pendleton, agreed to give a chance to the group which had been rehearsing at the Bricklayer’s Arms, though with so little hope it did not yet have a name.
The engagement was sufficiently important to merit a paragraph in the July 11 issue of Jazz News.
Mick Jagger, R & B vocalist, is taking a rhythm and blues group into the Marquee tomorrow night while Blues Inc. is doing its Jazz Club gig.
Called ‘The Rolling Stones’ (‘I hope they don’t think we’re a rock and roll outfit,’ says Mick), the line-up is: Jagger (vocals), Keith Richards, Elmo Lewis (guitars), Dick Taylor (bass), ‘Stew’ (piano) and Mick Avory (drums).
The name was chosen by Brian, in honour of the Muddy Waters song Rolling Stone. Ian Stewart, for one, objected strongly to it. ‘The Rolling Stones – I said it was terrible! It sounded like the name of an Irish show band, or something that ought to be playing at the Savoy.’ Mick Avory, the drummer they had recruited, felt equally dubious, but accepted – as the others did – that, since Brian had formed the group, he could call it what he liked.
So on July 12, 1962, with a playing order written on a page of Ian Stewart’s pocket diary, the six Rolling Stones faced their first audience. Mick wore a sweater, Brian a cord jacket and Keith a skimpy dark suit which left his shirt collar and cuffs exposed like the surplice of the angelic choirboy he formerly had been. Behind them, Dick Taylor, Ian Stewart and Mick Avory glanced at one another ominously. ‘You could hear people saying “Rolling Stones … Rolling Stones …”’ Dick Taylor remembers, ‘“Ah … rock ’n’ roll, are they …” Before we’d played a note, we could feel the hostility.’
Britain in 1962 was a nation still predominantly interested in recovering from 1939. The only generation that mattered was the one which had survived the war and its scarcely less uncomfortable aftermath, inspired by a common belief that one day butter would cease to be rationed; that coupons would no longer be needed to buy clothing or chocolate. These miracles had come to pass – and more. In British homes, as in American ones seen on the cinema screen, there were now TV sets, washing machines, garages containing cars with fins. There were transistor radios, cocktail cabinets and ‘genuine champagne perry’. Harold Macmillan, prime minister since the Suez Crisis, could be believed when he told the country, ‘You’ve never had it so good.’ Largely through that powerful superstition, government remained firmly in the hands of an elderly Edwardian whose winged white hair and drooping moustache gave him the appearance of a dilapidated but complacent sea lion.
The decade which still had not defined itself in 1962 was actually starting to form in 1955, with early sightings of that problematical new species, the ‘teenager’. It was a species, however, which for the next five years caused little profound effect on British