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 to wordy normality, with track listings, studio credits and a pronouncement that seemed like yet more Oldham hubris: ‘The Rolling Stones are more than a group – they are a way of life.’ Little did even he imagine that, almost half a century later, at the BAFTA film awards, an audience of the world’s most glamorous people would still be hungering to lead it.
Advance orders for The Rolling Stones exceeded 100,000 as against only 6,000 for the Beatles’ album début, Please Please Me. Better still, as it climbed the UK album chart to No. 1 it passed With the Beatles, finally on the decline after six months in the Top 20. The Stones, Oldham crowed delightedly, had ‘knocked the Beatles off’ in their home market. Now for America.
‘We Spent a Lot of Time Sitting in Bed, Doing Crosswords’
For any British band, the supreme challenge, and greatest thrill, is to ‘crack’ America. And few have failed quite so comprehensively as the Rolling Stones on their first US tour, in June 1964. The country would notice Mick soon enough, for better or worse, but during most of this initial three-week visit he was a barely distinguishable face among five, taking his equal share of disappointment and humiliation.
The Stones were not only following the triumphal footsteps of the Beatles four months earlier; they were also well to the rear in the so-called British Invasion of other UK bands who had stampeded after John, Paul, George and Ringo across the Atlantic and into the US charts. On the American edition of their first album, they were billed as ‘England’s Newest Hitmakers’, bracketing them with ‘soft’ pop acts they despised, such as Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas and the Dave Clark Five.
When the Beatles had arrived in New York in February, it was with an American No. 1 single, ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’. But the Stones could offer no such impressive