in his pocket, and willing as ever to do anything Brian told him. Within a week, Brian had annexed every penny of Hattrell’s money for meals, drinks, even a brand-new guitar. On Brian’s orders, Hattrell took off his army greatcoat and handed it to the shivering Keith. He would obediently follow them to their local hamburger bar, hand them more money and, at Brian’s command, stand patiently in the snow until they came out again. When Dick Hattrell’s money ran out, so did his welcome at the flat. One night as he lay in bed, Brian threatened to electrocute him with a guitar lead. Hattrell fled into the snow, terrified, wearing only his underpants. ‘He wouldn’t come back for an hour, he was so scared of Brian,’ Keith says. ‘When they finally did bring him in, he’d turned blue.’
The new year 1963 found Britain still snowbound, with villages, towns, even whole counties cut off, most transport paralysed, all sport fixtures cancelled, a whole nation gone to ground and huddled round the fitful blue warmth of its television screen. On January 12, the Saturday night pop show Thank Your Lucky Stars provided its snowed-in bumper audience with the spectacle of the Beatles, in the mop-top haircuts and crew-necked suits, miming their new record Please Please Me, not with scowls and prissy dance steps like Cliff Richard’s Shadows, but jigging about uninhibitedly, grinning at the camera and each other. To viewers over twenty-one, the interlude seemed no more than faintly comic. But on a million British teenagers, pent up by so much more than cold, that zesty ‘Whoa yeah’ chorus had an altogether different effect. By February 16, Please Please Me was number one on the Melody Maker’s Top Twenty chart.
The Beatles were also beginning to make regular radio appearances on the BBC Light Programme’s Saturday Club, giving live performances from their stage repertoire in a far-off Liverpool cellar club called the Cavern. Much of their material was rhythm and blues which they had copied from import discs brought from America to Liverpool by stewards on the transatlantic ships. Brian and Keith, listening to Saturday Club, huddled under their blankets at Edith Grove, were astonished to hear Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley songs on the stuffy BBC.
Since Saturday Club had a reputation for booking groups which had not yet even made a record, Brian sent off one of his prosy letters to the BBC, requesting an audition for the Stones. A fortnight later, they received a summons to report to a BBC rehearsal room. Before they set off, Brian shampooed and blow-dried his hair into a Beatle cut thicker and more eye-enveloping than the Beatles wore. ‘It shocked even us a bit,’ Keith says. ‘He looked like a Saint Bernard with hair all over his eyes. We told him he’d have to be careful or he’d bump into things.’
The audition took place under the eye of the show’s producer and of its compere, Brian Matthew. Both men based their musical judgement on the hidebound prejudices of a corporation which, for years, had banned even the phrase ‘Hot Jazz’ as being sexually suggestive. ‘We got a letter back from the producer in the end,’ Bill Wyman says. ‘He said they liked us as a group but they couldn’t book us because “the singer sounds too coloured”.’
Wyman still did not quite know why he stayed on in the Stones, especially now that his friend Tony Chapman had left. The country-wide thaw, and consequent improvement in suburban club dates, only emphasized their desperate need of a regular drummer even as semi-reliable as Chapman had been. Brian’s idea was to bring in Carlo Little, a bravura performer with Cyril Davis. But to Mick, Keith and Ian Stewart, there was only one possible candidate. ‘One night, we all just looked at each other and that did it,’ Stew says. ‘We went up to Charlie Watts and said, “Right, that’s it. You’re in.”’
The boy with the long, thin, dourly soulful face and the neat mod three-piece suit came from several social worlds away. Charlie Watts was a true Londoner, born at least within a rumour’s distance of Bow Bells, and with that air peculiar to many cockneys of being older than his years. His father worked for British Railways at King’s Cross station as a parcel deliveryman. His mother had formerly been a factory worker. The family lived in Islington, North London, in a house which, however modest, was ruled by Charles Sr’s punctilious tidiness. ‘My dad made me cover all my books with brown paper,’ Charlie says, ‘– even my Buffalo Bill annual.’ He cherished that annual, with its colour portrait of William F. Cody, looming ferociously from a Wild West that was – and remains – Charlie Watts’s abiding passion.
Charlie, at twenty-one, seemed set on a promising professional career. Since leaving Harrow Art College, he had worked as a lettering and layout man for the Regent Street advertisement agency Charles Hobson and Gray. It was a prestigious and – for that time – well-paid job which Charlie was reluctant to jeopardize, even for his beloved jazz. He had, indeed, recently given up playing with Blues Incorporated for fear that too many late nights would impair the daytime steadiness of his hand.
For the Stones, it was not simply that Charlie Watts owned a handsome set of drums and played them with an unobtrusive skill that held each ramshackle blues song together like cement. He was also warmly liked by each of them. He seemed to get on best with the group’s shyest and most uncertain member, Keith. Dapper as Charlie himself was, something in Keith’s incorrigible raggedness stirred him to wistful admiration. He would sit for hours at Edith Grove, listening to Keith play guitar duets with Brian, listening to their accumulated wisdom concerning Chuck Berry B-sides and, every so often, putting another shilling in the electric meter.
The drawback, in Charlie’s eyes, was that he loved jazz above everything, and saw no prospect, via these hard-up student types, of realizing his ambition to visit New York and see Birdland where Charlie Parker used to play. At the time the Stones pounced on him, he was also considering the offer of a regular place in the far more respectable Blues By Six. ‘He came to me, agonizing about it,’ Alexis Korner said. ‘I told him I thought the Rolling Stones were likely to get more work than the others, in the long run.’ So at last, with that resigned shrug – that look of placidly expecting the worst – Charlie Watts was in.
On Sunday evenings in the sedate Thames-side borough of Richmond, crowds of teenage boys in corduroy jackets and peg-top trousers, accompanied by white-faced, bare-kneed, shivering girls, could be seen emerging from the railway station and streaming up a narrow passageway by the side of a Victorian pub. At the end, under an improvised sign, CRAWDADDY CLUB, a black-bearded young man, somewhat like Captain Kidd in the comic books, stood guard on the door into the pub’s mirror-lined committee room, chaffing his customers in an accent exotically and indeterminately foreign. ‘Any girls who want to come in …’ Giorgio Gomelsky would say, ‘we’re so full, you’ll have to sit on your boyfriends’ shoulders.’
Giorgio was a twenty-nine-year-old Russian emigré, born in Georgia, exiled to Switzerland, educated in Italy and Germany, and now one of the best-known figures on the London jazz scene. He had worked for Chris Barber in the Fifties, helping to set up the National jazz league and, later, organizing the first of the League’s annual Jazz Festivals at Richmond Athletic Ground. He had discovered blues while working as a courier, escorting American blues singers on from London to Continental dates booked for them by Barber’s organization. ‘Sonny Boy Williamson lived in my house for six months. I travelled all over with him. We were in Liverpool when the Cavern was still only a Trad Jazz club.’
In the early Sixties, Giorgio combined the role of assistant film editor and West End Jazz Club manager, running the old Mississippi Room, with earnest attendance at classes to study Stanislavsky’s Method acting. Among his fellow students in the class was a young Irishman named Ronan O’Rahilly, whose family was rumoured to own the greater part of County Cork, and who was also trying to crash into the London entertainment scene by managing Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated.
Gomelsky’s first blues club was the Piccadilly, set up on a Russian shoestring in the old Cy Laurie folk cellar. The Rolling Stones played there just once, shortly before Harold Pendleton and Cyril Davies squeezed them out of the Marquee. Much as Gomelsky liked them as individuals, he thought their playing ‘abominable’. Counting Mick Jagger’s younger brother, Chris, only twenty or so people turned up that night to see them.
In early 1963, the Piccadilly Club had closed and Giorgio needed a new venue that could be hired with the single five-pound note he had in his pocket. He knew the landlord of the Station Hotel in Kew Road, Richmond, and knew that the pub’s