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ONE

‘I WAS SCHOOLED WITH A STRAP RIGHT ACROSS MY BACK’

When the black man was alone and destitute, he played the blues. With a roof over his head, however leaky, he played rhythm and blues. The difference is as great as between the country and the city; between Southern cotton fields and Eastern ghettoes; between fatalistic old age and vigorous, upwardly mobile youth. It is the difference between a guitar powered only by its own mournful echo, and a guitar belligerently amplified, played with aggressive slides and swoops along the fretboard by a switchblade knife or broken bottle neck. It is the difference between bleak, dusty, desperate noontide and pulsating, pleasure-seeking night.

While the blues stretch back into vague infinities of work gangs and prison cells, rhythm and blues can be given an approximate time and place of genesis. It grew up first during and just after the Second World War, amid the mass redistribution of American blacks into their country’s war machine. Its sound was of newly explored streets and unfamiliar alleys; of cheap neon, soda-fountain sugar and wafting gasoline; of the old, sleepy twelve-bar blues reacting in astonishment, delight – and sometimes fury – to all the varied stimuli of big-city life.

Nowadays, there are expensively illustrated books to familiarize us with r & b’s golden postwar age. There are the photographs of Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed, Otis Rush or T-Bone Walker, in their white shirts and gabardine trousers, singing against heavy silver microphones, perspiring over huge guitars with pearled fretboards, in clubs, bar lounges or juke joints, some tropic Forties night below the Mason-Dixon line. There are the show bills – usually from the Apollo Theatre in Harlem – which depict the young B.B. King, Bo Diddley or Fats Domino, wearing demure tuxedos and tiny bow ties, and smiling with a strained, reassuring politeness.

The smile of an r & b artist circa 1949 was the smile of someone expecting to be beaten up at any moment. The blues – stigmatized since the Twenties as ‘race’ or ‘specialty’ music – had been generally too esoteric for whites to understand. Rhythm and blues, with its flash suits, flaunted saxes and unrepressed sexuality, seemed to offer the most blatant threat to respectable – that is to say, all-white – society. It was denounced as lewd, ungodly, demented, a corrupter of children. Its clubs were raided and wrecked by white vigilantes; its performers attacked and, in not a few cases, lynched. Up to 1956 or so, every blues band travelling in its own country was a band on the run.

Throughout the Forties and early Fifties, its greatest creative period, the music remained segregated and submerged. Though r & b songs often appeared in the American hit parade, they were bowdlerized versions, purged of their sexual content by all-white crooners and dance bands. Roll With Me, Henry, an overt sexual challenge, for instance, became Dance With Me, Henry, an invitation to foxtrot. The original artists, with a few exceptions, were unknown to the general record-buying public. They could perform only in black clubs, record only on obscure black-owned labels, have their discs played only by the handful of radio stations controlled by blacks. When Bo Diddley finally got a booking on nationwide TV in 1958, it was stipulated that, to preserve decency, he must perform completely motionless. On camera, Diddley forgot his promise, lapsed into a shuffling pas seul and was docked his entire fee.

‘Help save the youth of America!’ – so ran one anti-r & b pamphlet of the early Fifties. ‘Don’t let your children buy or listen to these Negro records. The screaming, idiotic words and savage music are undermining the morals of our white American youth …’

A prophecy of things to come if ever there was one.

It is a journey further than any bluesman could imagine from Beale Street, Memphis, to Bexley in deepest Kent and the playground of Maypole infants’ school, where, one sunny day in 1950, teacher Ken Llewellyn called a group of his favourite pupils together for an informal photograph. The boys who assembled were the brightest and liveliest in Mr Llewellyn’s class. They included Robert Wallis and John Spinks and Michael Jagger, the least likely of all to stand still for a photograph. The others reined him in with arms around his shoulders, neck and waist. They stood together in their flannel shorts, their elastic school belts with metal S-clasps, English schoolboys at their apotheosis, laughing into the warm, safe, quiet Fifties sky.

Kent as a county begins in London, south-east of the Thames, in ranks of suburbs barely distinguishable from one another, crossed by railway bridges, whose names are synonyms for dullness and decorum – Bexley, Bromley, Beckenham, Dartford, Sidcup, Sevenoaks and the rest. One must travel far on grubby trains, crossing many bridges, to discover what is still called ‘the Garden of England’, with its apple orchards, hop fields and oast houses. It is a large and bewilderingly imprecise county, ranging from the miles of drab dockland around Chatham and Rochester to the Regency splendours of Royal Tunbridge Wells; from the medieval majesty of Canterbury Cathedral to the faded Victorian seaside of Margate and Broadstairs, where Charles Dickens wrote Bleak House. Somewhere in the sprawling landscape is the field in which Mr Pickwick lost his hat while watching military manoeuvres, the bucolic landscape, bespoken by Alfred Jingle, of ‘apples, hops, cherries, women’.

Least romantic of all Kentish suburbs is Dartford, where, on December 7, 1940, Basil Joseph Jagger married Eva Scutts. The bridegroom was a slight, quiet-looking man whose wiry frame betrayed his calling as physical-training teacher. The bride was a pretty young woman with a wide smile and that air of determined gentility which sometimes goes with slight foreignness. Eva, in fact, had been born in Australia and had emigrated to Britain with her family in her early teens. The best man was Basil’s more ebullient brother, Albert. Afterwards, there was a reception for fifty guests at the Coneybeare Hall.

Basil – known as Joe to his family and friends – was not merely a drill sergeant in white singlet and gym shoes, exhorting local schoolchildren to lift up their knees and swing their arms. He subsequently became a lecturer in physical education at Strawberry Hill College, Twickenham. Horace Walpole’s sumptuous mock-Gothic mansion was – and still is – the nucleus of this teacher-training institute, run by a Catholic order, the Vincentians, to supply Catholic schools all over the world. Joe Jagger’s job was to give a grounding in physical education simple and comprehensive enough to be passed on to student priests or mission children in the wilds of Africa or Asia.

He also worked as a lecturer with the nascent British Sports Council. His speciality was basketball, an American sport not much in vogue in mid-Fifties Britain. Joe Jagger was among the pioneers of the British basketball movement and was the author of what remains the definitive book on the subject, published by Faber and Faber in 1962.

His wife Eva was a lively and energetic person whose vivacity at times seemed to verge on the domineering. Eva had always been secretly rather ashamed of her Australian origin, with its implied stigma of roughness and unsophistication. Marriage to Joe, with his markedly superior social standing and education, increased her determination to show herself the equal of any true ‘Brit’. Their small house, in Denver Road, Dartford, was scoured by Eva into a spotless state the equal of any neighbour’s. Joe and Eva’s whole life as a young married couple was dictated by consideration of what those ever-vigilant neighbours might think.

Their first son, Michael Philip, was born on July 26, 1943. The tide of the Second World War had long since turned in the Allies’ favour, but Britain was still an embattled redoubt of air-raid precautions, white-helmeted wardens, clothing coupons and butcher-shop queues. Though the RAF nightly pounded Hamburg and Essen in ‘thousand-bomber raids’, attacks by the German Luftwaffe on London continued. The Kent suburbs heard the distant thunder and saw the horizontal flashes as the poor old East End caught it from the sky again.

Michael Jagger was a child of absolutely conventional beauty, with chubby cheeks, guileless eyes and hair that assumed a reddish tinge. As a toddler, he proved amiable and obedient, though prone to boisterous spirits that could sometimes go too far. Once, on holiday at the seaside, his mother remembers, he marched along the beach, deliberately kicking down every other child’s sandcastle in his path. His reign as an adored only child lasted until 1947, when Eva presented him with a younger brother, Christopher.

Home life for the Jagger brothers was pervaded by their mother’s house-proud fastidiousness and their father’s devotion to physical fitness. Their Denver Road neighbours were accustomed to seeing the small back garden of the Jagger house littered with sports equipment – weight-training barbells, cricket stumps and archery targets. Other children asked home to tea by Mike or Chris were somewhat intimidated by the schoolmasterly regimen, which included Grace before meals and a system of fixed penalties and punishments for misbehaviour.

Mike’s physical prowess showed through early at Maypole infants’ school and afterwards at Wentworth County Primary, to which his Maypole teacher, Ken Llewellyn, an expatriate Welshman, had also transferred. Mr Llewellyn remembers him fondly as one of an outstanding junior class whose ascent to grammar school and university seemed assured. ‘It was a joy to teach them. They were full of life, full of all sorts of questions. I took them for games as well. Mike was already looking like a useful cricketer. If I remember him at all, it’s running in from the playground with both knees grazed and a great big smile on his face.’

John Spinks lived in Heather Drive, Dartford, not far from the Jaggers in Denver Road. He was Mike’s playmate in the sandpit that lay between their houses. When Mike accidentally impaled a hand on a spiked metal railing, it was John Spinks who, with praiseworthy coolness, pulled it free. To John, he seemed at times almost too conventionally law-abiding and obedient. ‘I always thought he was a bit of a mother’s boy. He did everything he was told at home. He was an indiarubber character, really. He could bend any way to stay out of trouble.’

Even as a small boy, his other friend Robert Wallis remembers, he had a strangely remote, abstracted quality – a sense of being preoccupied with matters far weightier than their schoolboy games together. Joe Jagger was currently acting as adviser to a commercial TV programme called Seeing Sport, designed to promote physical fitness in children. Once a week, he would take his elder son with him to the studios, to act as model for instruction about athletics or camping. ‘Mike is going to show you how to light the fire,’ the voiceover would say, or: ‘Here’s Mike, getting into the tent.’ ‘He became a bit of a star for doing that,’ Robert Wallis says. ‘He always had some interest outside the ones we had as a group. He gave the idea the he’d sooner be somewhere else than with us, doing far more glamorous things.’

Robert, John and Mike took the eleven-plus exam together, passing it as effortlessly as Ken Llewellyn had predicted. This crucial step determined whether they would go on to receive a mundane basic education at a secondary modern or be admitted to the far superior privileges of Dartford Grammar. Eva Jagger had every reason to be proud of her boy in his smart new uniform of gold-trimmed maroon blazer and cap.

Dartford Grammar School, when Mike Jagger arrived there in the early Fifties, possessed most features of an English public school – masters in gowns, house captains, societies, ceremonial Speech Days, ritualized athletics and sport. As its school magazine, The Dartfordian, attests, scholarship was generally excellent, yielding an unusually large annual export to Britain’s redbrick universities. Prominent in the school curriculum was the Army Cadet Force, designed to cushion the shock of the two years’ compulsory National Service each boy would face before embarking on his chosen career.

At Dartford Grammar, Mike Jagger’s academic promise – and his buoyant enthusiasm – mysteriously evaporated. From the first form to the fifth he merely coasted, doing only enough work to stay out of trouble. It became a sore provocation to the several teachers in whose subjects he was obviously gifted. The senior languages master, Dr Bennett, particularly resented his indifference, for – aided by unusual powers of mimicry – he showed all the signs of a first-class linguist. ‘There was one occasion when I spoke to him about his attitude very severely,’ Dr Bennett says. ‘He was so deliberately insulting that I simply knocked him down.’

His apathy extended even to sport. He seemed to lose interest in cricket after discovering he was not the deadly spin bowler he had supposed himself at Wentworth. The only sport he played regularly was basketball, his father’s speciality. Joe Jagger, in fact, introduced the sport to Dartford Grammar and helped coach the Basketball Society, of which Mike was Hon. Sec. ‘He was most keen on that, I think, because it was American,’ Robert Wallis says. ‘Mike was the one who had real American basketball boots to play in when the rest of us only had gym shoes.’

His appearance, from the age of fourteen onward, seemed to reflect his slack and insubordinate attitude. The chubby, laughing schoolboy of Ken Llewellyn’s class had grown into an adolescent whose skinny frame, hovering on the edge of effeteness, caused uniform distaste among his teachers. Likewise his face, with its somnolent eyes, its retroussé nose; most of all, the wide, sagging lips, set in what seemed a permanent grimace of either scorn or dumb insolence.

As he moved higher in the school, he became adept at flouting its dress regulations. Instead of the prescribed black lace-up shoes, he would arrive for class in French slip-on moccasins. In place of his blazer, he acquired a black, gold-threaded ‘Teddy boy’ jacket, which, to Dr Bennett’s annoyance, he wore even to the annual Founder’s Day ceremony.

He was already a source of much discussion at the nearby girls’ grammar school, where opinion as to his attractiveness remained sharply divided. In terms of conventional handsomeness he was obviously a non-starter. Yet some of the very girls who dismissed him as ugly or ‘a weed’ still looked for him in the after-school swarm and made bold attempts to talk to him – since he seemed uninterested in talking to them. It became almost a competition to pierce that scornful reserve and bring forth that rare smile which could split open the sullen face, making him look still the happy schoolboy who had laughed into the sun.

In 1955 came the plague called rock ’n’ roll. Bill Haley and the Comets invaded Britain’s sleepy hit parade with Rock Around the Clock, See You Later, Alligator, Everybody Razzle Dazzle and Rockin’ Through the Rye. Britain’s regimented teenage boys awoke to the sound of a braying sax, a slapping, spinning double bass, a voice that did not croon but jerked and jogged and hiccupped and jumped. What Haley was in fact playing was black rhythm and blues, purged of its bite and wit and wrapped in a swing or country-western beat. The very phrase ‘rock and roll’ was black slang for energetic fucking. Even in America, its origin had scarcely been realized. In Britain it was simply the most exciting noise that ever confused an adolescent’s glands. A British tour by Haley and the Comets in 1956 left a trail of wrecked theatres and slashed cinema seats. Music became, for the first time, a source of conflict between the young, who adored this outrageous new noise, and their parents, who loathed it and strove to extinguish it by every possible means.

A few months earlier, the British Decca label had released a record which, though quieter than Haley’s joyous gibberish, was destined to transform many lives more permanently. The record – one of the newfangled ‘long playing’ kind – was New Orleans Joys, by the Chris Barber Jazz Band.

Barber, twenty-five, led Britain’s most commercially successful Dixieland band. He remained, however, principally an archivist, devoted to keeping alive sources and style that might otherwise have been overlooked in the current ‘Trad’ boom. His New Orleans Joys LP included two blues songs played in the ‘skiffle’ style evolved in the Depression years, when musicians were often reduced to instruments extemporized from household utensils. The songs, Rock Island Line and John Henry, were performed by a primitive rhythm section of double bass, kitchen washboard and banjo, the last played by a skinny Glaswegian named Tony Donegan who had changed his name to Lonnie in honour of the American bluesman Lonnie Johnson.

The two songs, released on a single in 1956, became a stupendous British Top Ten hit. Haley and his group, in their plaid jackets and bow ties, owed their appeal to outlandish remoteness. But Donegan, with his nasal whine, his ex-serviceman’s haircut and backing of mundane domestic implements, made comparably exciting sounds that anyone could reproduce. Within days of Lonnie Donegan’s first appearance on national television, acolyte skiffle groups had sprung up all over Britain. The craze centred on London’s Soho, its jazz cellars and newly fashionable espresso coffee houses, into whose gloomy recesses record-company talent scouts now plunged in a hectic search for ersatz Lonnie Donegans. For the first time ever, musical talent was held to be of secondary importance to looks. Any boy who played a guitar and wore a plaid shirt with the collar turned up, if he sat around long enough in coffee bars like the Heaven and Hell, the Gyre and Gimble or the 2 I’s, could hope to follow the starry path of Lonnie Donegan or ‘Britain’s First rock ’n’ roller,’ Tommy Steele.

All over Britain, in suburban living rooms, boys crouched together with their matchwood guitars, their mothers’ washboards and basses improvised from tea chests and wire, struggling to learn the blues songs made popular by Donegan and his successors, grateful for the easy chords and pattered tempo, blissfully unaware that the lyrics, as Woody Guthrie or Huddie Leadbetter had written them, were violent political tracts; that Midnight Special was a cotton slave’s suicidal lament or that Lonnie Johnson’s plaintively sweet Careless Love was a song about syphilis, ending with murder.

Eva Jagger remembers that even as a very small boy her elder son would stand in front of the family wireless set, singing along to music with words made up in his head. Most of all he seemed to like Latin American rhythms, which he would accompany with a stream of Spanish-sounding nonsense. At the age of ten, on a Spanish holiday with Joe and Eva, he posed for a snapshot in a straw sombrero, playing a toy guitar. Sombrero tipped back, guitar flourished flamenco-style, the pose was, even then, self-consciously theatrical.

The skiffle craze swept through Dartford Grammar as through almost every other British school. Two of Mike’s friends, Bob Beckwith and Alan Etherington, acquired guitars and began practising together. But Mike, though he too had a guitar, joined none of the ad hoc classroom skiffle groups that would strum together, perched on desks during break time.

He never really liked Bill Haley, or even Elvis Presley, after the gold-suited, magical lout had superseded Haley as the corrupter of Britain’s youth. His first fan worship, significantly, was for Little Richard, the original black rock ’n’ roll star whose r & b beginnings were now camouflaged in a demented scream, a wobbling drape suit and an aura – though few perceived it then – of sexual ambiguity.

He did succumb, as most did, to the charm of Buddy Holly and the Crickets. Holly is blessed by countless guitar demigods for having first showed them the way from skiffle to rock ’n’ roll, in simple but inventive chord sequences through G and E. As his enormous output shows, he was a stylistic chameleon, equally at home with Texas rockabilly and black r & b. Soon to die, he visited Britain on tour only once, in March 1958. Mike Jagger went with another Dartford Grammar School friend, Dick Taylor, to see the Holly stage show at the Granada Cinema, Woolwich. Buddy Holly that night played one of the more esoteric items in his repertoire – a song called Not Fade Away, set to a halting, staccato beat invented by the blues star Bo Diddley. Dick Taylor remembers what an impression that song in particular made on Mike Jagger.

A wispy, amiable boy, son of a plumber in nearby Bexleyheath, Dick Taylor came nearer than most to penetrating the Jagger reserve. For Dick knew about American music far more exotic and exciting than Elvis and Little Richard. What Dick Taylor liked was real blues – the scratched and blurred master sketches that the rock ’n’ roll industry had turned into glib cartoons. It was at Dick Taylor’s house that Mike Jagger listened to Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed, Howlin’ Wolf, giants of the urban blues with heart-shivering voices, calling and answering their virtuoso guitars, that could change the view beyond the lace curtains from Kentish suburbia to the dark and windy canyons along Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive. From then on, the blues became Mike’s consuming passion.

Part of the music’s attraction was its sheer unavailability. Simply hearing it was complicated enough. You could not buy blues records in the Dartford or Bexleyheath record shops. As with all truly worthwhile things, it involved a trip to London. Mike and Dick would spend their Saturday afternoons at the jazz record shops in Charing Cross Road, thumbing through the blues ‘import’ stock in sleeves already dog-eared and thumbed in their wandering journey across the cultural hemispheres. The very label logos excited them – not boring British Decca and Philips, but Okeh and Crown and Chess and Sue and Imperial and Delmark.

If listening to blues was difficult, seeing it was virtually impossible. Though famous bluesmen like Big Bill Broonzy did perform in Britain during the late Fifties, news of their coming did not percolate down the line to Dartford. The only glimpse given to Dartford Grammar School’s secret blues caucus involved sitting through Jazz on a Summer’s Day, a film documentary about the American Newport Jazz Festival. Almost at the end, a lanky young black man got up onstage and sang through a derisive grin and played a red guitar that dangled almost to the level of his wildly knocking knees. That, for Dick Taylor, Mike Jagger and countless other British boys, was their first tantalizing sight of Chuck Berry. The film sequence ended with Berry dodging a hail of flashbulbs thrown by photographers in fury that the pure jazz had been so disrupted.

Mike Jagger’s earliest attempt at blues singing was at the house of a boy named David Soames in Wentworth Drive, Dartford. David was trying to form a rhythm and blues group with Mike Turner, another ex-pupil of Wentworth County Primary School. Both quickly decided that Mike Jagger sang in far too strange a fashion to be their vocalist. He accepted the decision without rancour and afterwards walked home with Mike Turner, discussing their forthcoming GCE O-Level examinations.

Dick Taylor owned a second-hand drum kit, which gained him admittance to several small amateur groups otherwise top-heavy with guitarists. By his last year at Dartford Grammar, he was practising regularly with Bob Beckwith, Alan Etherington and Mike Jagger. It was hardly a group at all, since they had no equipment – only the Etheringtons’ radiogram to amplify the guitars – and because Mike Jagger, their singer, refused to play a guitar himself, as was customary. He just stood or sat there and sang, diffidently until his powers as a mimic came to his aid. ‘The first song I remember him doing was Richie Valens’s La Bamba,’ Dick Taylor says. ‘Mick used to come out with this stream of words that sounded just like Spanish. He’d just make them up as he went along.’

The group was called Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys, in order that there be no mistake concerning their musical intentions. From first to last in their two-year history, Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys never played to an audience other than Dick Taylor’s mum. ‘She dug Mick right from the start,’ Taylor says. ‘She always told him he’d got something special.’

Their repertoire was limited to the precious store of blues import discs Dick Taylor had collected – Howlin’ Wolf’s Smokestack Lighting; Don and Bob’s Good Morning Little Schoolgirl; Dale Hawkins’s Susie Q. ‘We never even thought of playing to other people,’ Dick Taylor says. ‘We thought we were the only people in England who’d ever heard of r & b.’

After Jazz on a Summer’s Day, Chuck Berry dominated their thoughts. It was Mike Jagger who found out you could get Berry records by writing direct to the Chess record company in Chicago. Berry’s voice, light and sharp and strangely white-sounding, had a pitch not dissimilar to his own. Singing along with Sweet Little Sixteen or Reelin’ and Rockin’, he suddenly felt something more than just a mumbling impersonator. And Chuck Berry was the first intimation that rhythm and blues might be an expression of youth. Each Berry song was a novel in miniature about American teenage life, teeming with brand-name cars, sassy high-school queens and anarchic exhortations to forsake the classroom in favour of car-driving, singing and dancing.

Practice sessions took place at Alan Etherington’s house – because of the radiogram – or in Dick Taylor’s bedroom at Bexleyheath, seated on the bed around a big old-fashioned tape recorder. Dick remembers an anxious moment when Mike turned up to rehearse for the first time after accidentally biting a piece out of his tongue in the school gymnastics class. ‘He was terrified it was going to affect the way he sang. We all kept telling him it made no difference. But he did seem to lisp a bit and sound more bluesy after that.’

His own home, though welcoming to his friends, did not suggest itself as a practice place for Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys. Eva Jagger was not discouraging. She had nothing against their music, she told them – it was just that the neighbours might mind the noise. Joe Jagger’s main concern, as always, was keeping his son up to the mark in physical education. Once, when Mike was going off with Dick Taylor, his father called out, ‘Michael – don’t forget your weight training.’ Mike turned back obediently, went into the garden and exercised with barbells for a conscientious quarter of an hour.

He had passed his GCE O-Levels in a respectable enough seven subjects, and had qualified for entry into the Sixth Arts form to do Advanced Level English, History and French. He also became a school prefect, despite the headmaster’s manifest disapproval. The head, Mr Hudson, had never quite forgiven him for leading what seemed like an organized insurrection by lower-school boys against compulsory enrolment in the school Army Cadet Force.

He stuck out the two-year A-Level course with no idea what he was working for, beyond a vague notion that journalism might be interesting. For a brief time, too, he toyed with the idea of becoming a radio disc jockey. A London record producer named Joe Meek was currently advertising for would-be deejays to submit demonstration tapes. Robert Wallis remembers copying out Meek’s address from a newspaper and passing it on to Mike Jagger. But the project languished, apparently under parental discouragement.

His A-Level passes in English and History were only mediocre but by then it did not matter. He had already secured himself a place at the London School of Economics, to follow a two-year course in the subject that seemed best suited to his indecisive talents. ‘I wanted to do arts but thought I ought to do science,’ he says now. ‘Economics seemed about halfway in between.’

So, each morning, from the autumn of 1961, Mike Jagger, in his striped student scarf, joined the daily crowd of business people at Dartford railway station, his face turned towards a future that still seemed to lie only a little way up the commuter line to Victoria.

Each morning, from the top deck of the green Kentish bus, Dick Taylor would see the same thin, slouching figure trailing reluctantly up the long hill to Sidcup Art College. Winter or summer, Keith Richards wore the same tight blue jeans, Italian pointed shoes, denim jacket and the violet-coloured shirt that never seemed to be given a rest or a wash. In summer as well as winter, he contrived to look pinched and cold, his bullet head accentuating protuberant ears, his nose red raw, his mouth specked with teenage pimples. In one hand, he held a Player’s Weights cigarette; in the other, his only possession, a guitar. Dick Taylor knew it would be another day of abandoned study, and of rock ’n’ roll practice in the college lavatories.

Guitars, and loving them, are among Keith’s earliest memories. His mother’s father, Theodore Augustus Dupree – the family were originally Huguenots from the Channel Islands – led a small semi-professional dance band in the 1930s and himself played several instruments including saxophone, violin and guitar. The guitar still stood in ‘Grandfather Gus’s’ house, in a corner of the sitting room. Keith remembers with what excitement, even as a tiny boy, he would approach it and draw his hands with a soft thrum across its untuned strings.

‘He was a great character, my grandfather Gus. At that time, when I was small, he had a job in some tailoring sweatshop – he’d always be bringing little squares of felt out of his pocket and showing us. He carried on playing music, too, right up to the Sixties – touring the American air force bases with a country band. He’d got a job as janitor at Highgate School where Yehudi Menuhin’s son was a pupil. My grandfather, in the end, got to know Yehudi; they’d even have a bit of a scrape together on their violins. What a fantastic hustler!’

Bert Richards, Keith’s father, was a very different character, quiet and cautious with a reserve that – his son thinks now – was created largely by overwork and exhaustion. Bert worked as a supervisor at Osram’s light bulb factory in Hammersmith. He got up each day at 5 a.m. and did not come home in the evening until six. ‘He’d have something to eat, watch TV for a couple of hours, then go to bed, absolutely knackered,’ Keith says. ‘He must have been horrified to see what a thug he’d produced in me.’

The boy born in December 1943 thus grew up closest to his mother, Doris, a warm and jolly woman who had inherited the Dupree fondness for music and romance. Keith remembers how, as Doris did the housework, the radio would constantly pour out American big band music. When he first started school and was too nervous to walk there, Doris carried him all the way, bundled lovingly in her arms. From his earliest childhood, she encouraged him to do, and be, exactly what he wanted.

As a small boy, Keith had a beautiful soprano voice, good enough to be heard in Westminster Abbey itself. ‘Only three of us, in our white surplices, used to be good enough to do the hallelujahs. I was a star then – coming up by coach to London to sing in the inter-schools competition at the Albert Hall. I think that was my first taste of show business: when my voice broke and they didn’t want me in the choir any more. Suddenly it was “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.” I think that was when I stopped being a good boy and started to be a yob.’

Doris and Bert Richards lived in Chastillian Road, Dartford, just a street or two away from the Jaggers in Denver Road. Keith attended Wentworth County Primary School and was taught by Ken Llewellyn. He had met Mike Jagger, too, briefly, in the scream and jostle of the infants’ playground. Jagger, who customarily affects to remember nothing past, can none the less recall what a strong impression Keith made on him. ‘I asked him what he wanted to do when he grew up. He said he wanted to be a cowboy like Roy Rogers and play a guitar. I wasn’t that impressed by Roy Rogers, but the bit about the guitar did interest me.’

That first acquaintance was to be short-lived. Doris and Bert moved soon afterwards from Chastillian Road to a house on a new council estate on the other side of Dartford. Thereafter, Keith Richards became the very last kind of companion Joe and Eva Jagger could have wished for their elder son.

The Richardses lived on the Temple Hill Estate, in a small semi-detached house, 6 Spielman Road, the estate was brand new, dumped down on raw new tarmac roads without amusements or amenities. Bert Richards, as before, got up at five each morning to go to work at Osram’s in Hammersmith. Doris worked part-time in a Dartford baker’s shop. And Keith, between his father’s indifference and his mother’s over-indulgence, began to go resolutely to the bad.

It was not that he lacked ability – even talent. He could be, Ken Llewellyn remembers, a bright, attentive boy, responsive especially to words and language. He enjoyed cricket, swimming and – most surprisingly – tennis. He was, besides, good-natured and open, with a mischievous wit that made even schoolmasters unbend towards him.

What he could not do was accept discipline in any form. It was a lawlessness partly compounded of running wild on the estate; partly of his mother’s soft-hearted pampering. Doris did not mind if he failed to do his homework or went AWOL from cross-country runs or – as increasingly happened – if he failed to turn up for school altogether. She would leave him money at home to buy fish and chips for his lunch. Even when he dumped the fish and chip leavings in the kitchen sink, newspaper and all, Doris cleared up after him without complaint.

By the time he was thirteen, ordinary teachers despaired of educating him. It was decided he should go straight to Dartford Technical School, where his father hoped he might succumb to learning a useful trade.

Now, however, the long-suffering Bert Richards faced an additional vexation. ‘Every time the poor guy came in at night,’ Keith says, ‘he’d find me sitting at the top of the stairs with my guitar, playing and banging on the wall for percussion. He was great about it, really. He’d only mutter, “Stop that bloody noise.”’

Doris had bought Keith his first guitar, for seven pounds, from her wages at the baker’s shop. ‘I never knew what make it was,’ Keith says. ‘The name had been painted out.’ The only stipulation Doris made, supported by Grandfather Gus, was that he must learn to play properly. Soon afterwards, she gave him more money for a record player, from Dartford Co-Op shop, so he could learn by listening to the skiffle and rock ’n’ roll hits.

Now was the time of British rock ’n’ roll – of Tommy Steele and Terry Dene and the ‘cover’ versions of American songs put out on a label called Embassy that was sold only at Woolworth’s. Embassy records were the first that Keith Richards tried to copy, sitting at the top of the stairs at 6 Spielman Road. ‘I always sat on the top stair to practise. You could get the best echo that way – or standing in the bath.’

He soon realized that what made British rock ’n’ roll so tinny and false was not the vocal so much as the backing – the staid guitars played by bored ‘session men’, and sounding just as plumply complacent. Better by far to scrape up the full six shillings and fourpence for the original American version with guitars that shrilled and echoed as from a separate universe. Keith’s next idol, after his grandfather Gus, was Scotty Moore, Elvis Presley’s session guitarist. He still thinks Moore’s solo on Presley’s I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone the most exciting thing ever recorded. ‘I could never work out how he played it, and I still can’t. It’s such a wonderful thing that I almost don’t want to know.’

His guitar, allied with the life of a Dartford Teddy boy, became the final, irresistible temptation to play truant. In 1958, he was expelled from Dartford Technical School. A sympathetic teacher suggested there might be one last hope in the art college in the neighbouring dormitory town of Sidcup.

Sidcup Art College sounds immeasurably grander than it ever was. It existed, in fact, to give just such last chances to those whose inglorious school careers had fitted them for nothing better than what was then belittingly called ‘commercial art’. Sidcup’s art college was remarkably similar to the one in Hope Street, Liverpool, which – also in 1958 – admitted a similar habitual truant named John Lennon.

For Keith, Sidcup Art College was a first introduction to authentic blues music, never captured on a Woolworth’s Embassy label. A group of students – including Dick Taylor – would meet in an empty room next to the principal’s office, and play Little Walter and Big Bill Broonzy songs among the drawing boards and paste pots. It was from one of them Keith acquired his first electric guitar, swapping it for a pile of records in a hasty transaction in the college ‘bogs’.

So far as Dick Taylor was concerned, Keith Richards was just an incorrigible and hilarious distraction from the business of studying graphic design. ‘When I think of Keith at college, I think of dustbins burning. We used to get these baths of silk-screen wash, throw them over the dustbins and then throw on a match. The dustbins used to explode with a great “woomph”.

‘We were all popping pills then – to stay awake without sleep more than to get high. We used to buy these nose inhalers called Nostrilene, for the benzedrine, or even take girls’ period pills. Opposite the college, there was this little park with an aviary that had a cockatoo in it. Cocky the Cockatoo we used to call it. Keith used to feed it pep pills and make it stagger around on its perch. If ever we were feeling bored, we’d go and give another upper to Cocky the Cockatoo.’

One morning, on his railway journey from Dartford to Sidcup, Keith happened to get into the same dreary commuter carriage as Mike Jagger, en route to the London School of Economics. They recognized each other vaguely from Wentworth County Primary School and a subsequent meeting when Mike had a holiday job selling ice cream outside Dartford Library. This meeting might have been as casual as the previous ones were it not that Mike had under his arm a pile of import blues albums he had got from America by mail order. Keith noticed the sacred names of Chuck Berry and Little Walker, and, with some incredulity, asked the striped-scarfed LSE student if he liked that kind of music, too.

Chatting further, they discovered they had a common friend in Dick Taylor. Dick had already mentioned to Keith that he was rehearsing with a group sworn to play nothing but blues and r & b. By the time their train reached Sidcup, it was half-arranged that Keith Richards should come along and try rehearsing with Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys.

He brought with him his semi-solid Hofner cutaway guitar and what seemed to the others a stunning virtuosity. Sitting on the stairs at home, he had managed to master nearly all Chuck Berry’s introductions and solos, even the swarm of notes running through the Berry classic Johnny B. Goode that created an effect like two guitars at once. He understood that even this complex break, like two guitars in unison, required something more than simply playing notes fast. ‘Keith sounded great – but he wasn’t flash,’ Dick Taylor says. ‘When he came in, you could feel something holding the band together.’

Keith’s arrival, even so, did not advance the fortunes of Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys. They continued to practise as before, with no thought of any audience beyond Dick Taylor’s mum – no inkling that r & b music was a secret vouchsafed to anyone in Britain but themselves. The nearest they came to a public performance was playing together for a snapshot outside the Taylors’ back door. The snap shows Dick and Keith with their guitars parodying Chuck Berry’s duck walk, and Mike Jagger, in his student’s button-up cardigan, striking a dramatic pose against the background of drainpipe and pebbledashed council house wall.

Music in that era forged many friendships between personalities that might otherwise have remained polar opposites. It had happened three years earlier between cynical, trouble-prone John Lennon and cautious, conservative Paul McCartney in Liverpool. It happened now, when Keith Richards, the ‘Ted’ from a council flat on the wrong side of Dartford, started to go around with Mike Jagger, the economics student from middle-class Denver Road.

Though the LSE in 1961 was not the political hotbed it later became, a mild radicalism was as de rigueur among its students as the prevailing ‘bohemian’ look. For Mike Jagger it was to be little more than a look, expressed in his new leather tie and knitted cardigan. Just the same, armed with new words like ‘capitalism’ and ‘proletariat’, he seemed intent on rejecting his careful upbringing and sliding down to the class his mother so abhorred.

At the LSE, he dropped the ‘Mike’, which now seemed redolent of bourgeois young men with sports cars. ‘Mike Jagger’ would henceforward be a creature only in the memory of his earliest friends. It was Mick Jagger who hung around with Keith Richards, talking in broad Cockney and affecting some of Keith’s chaotic nonchalance and street-tough recklessness.

The mimicry was not completely one-sided. Keith on occasion could become thoughtful, self-effacing, even shy. It was as if each provided the other with a role he had desired but never dared assume before. Dick Taylor noticed what was to become a regular interchange of identities. ‘One day, Mick would become Keith. But then on another day, Keith could go all like Mick. You never knew which way round it would be.

‘But from then on, Mick and Keith were together. Whoever else came into the band or left, there’d always be Mick and Keith.’

Before Alexis Korner and his wife Bobbie went to bed in their flat in Moscow Road, Bayswater, they would be careful to leave the kitchenette window slightly ajar at the bottom. Next to the window was a table positioned in such a way that the late-arriving or unexpected guest could enter by rolling sideways across it. When Alexis and Bobbie got up next morning, four or five sleeping figures might be peacefully disposed under the table, against the cooker legs or among the food bowls of the Korners’ several cats.

The sleepers were American blues musicians on tour, for whom Alexis and Bobbie Korner provided refuge and hospitality in an otherwise bewildering land. Big Bill Broonzy, Muddy Waters, T-Bone Walker, the guitar giants so often visualized by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in their windy and harsh Chicago heaven, might be sitting barely twenty miles from Dartford in that Bayswater kitchenette, eating the Southern-style ham hocks that Bobbie Korner had learned to cook.

Alexis Korner’s antecedents were as richly cosmopolitan as the syllables of his name suggest. His father was Austrian, a former cavalry officer, and his mother was Greco-Turkish. By his father’s first marriage he had a Russian step-grandmother. He himself was born in Paris and spent his early childhood in Switzerland and North Africa. There was something more than a little Moroccan in his dark skin and tightly curled hair, and the vibrant, husky voice which only accidental circumstance was to bend into the brogue of suburban West London.

His father, the former cavalry officer, was an autocratic, distant figure, vaguely connected with high finance and – Alexis later thought – international espionage. ‘I know he lost a lot of money in the Twenties, when Britain went off the gold standard, and he couldn’t live as well as he had before. He was also supposed to have had something to do with the scandal surrounding the Zinoviev Letter. I’m sure he’d done something pretty major to earn the gratitude of the British government. When war broke out in 1939, we were living in England; my father could have expected to be interned as an enemy alien. Instead, he got his naturalization papers as a British subject virtually overnight.’

One Saturday in 1940, Alexis, a pupil of St Paul’s School, went from his home in Ealing to nearby Shepherd’s Bush market to indulge in the boyish pastime of pilfering from the stalls. His haul that morning included a record by the blues pianist Jimmy Yancey. ‘From that moment,’ he remembered later, ‘I only wanted to do one thing. I wanted to play boogie-woogie piano.’

When he attempted to do so on the family piano, his father would come along in a fury and slam down the lid. Nor was the elder Korner any better pleased when Alexis brought home his first guitar. ‘My father used to say the guitar was a “woman’s instrument”. He imagined it in operettas, tied with pink ribbon.’

Two years’ military service brought relief from this parental prejudice. Alexis served with the British Army in West Germany and – as well as playing football for his regiment – became a part-time announcer over the Forces’ radio network. He could saturate himself, not only in the music played to British troops, but also in the far more exciting output of AFN, the American Forces Network. As surreptitiously listening German boys already knew, AFN broadcast the very best in jazz and swing and even types of black music not available to civilians back home in the States. So the blues took root, on NATO bases and, later, in local clubs, amid pornographic bookshops, strip joints and mud-wrestling pits.

Back in London, working in the shipping firm owned by his mother’s Greek family, Alexis gravitated naturally to that first postwar ‘younger generation’, which haunted the Soho cellars, avid for politics and traditional jazz. ‘We were elitist – and highly political. We used to speak quite seriously in those days of founding a “fourth class”. There’d be the upper class, the middle class, the working class and us. That was how the blues came into it. When we heard a Leadbelly song or a Woody Guthrie song, we knew we were listening to a powerful political protest.’

The principal jazz bandleaders of the period did what they could to bring blues to the larger Dixieland audience. Humphrey Lyttelton, trumpeter, Old Etonian and friend of royalty, had brought Big Bill Broonzy to Britain as early as 1953. Ken Colyer, most pure of all the jazz and folk purists, featured some of the greatest American bluesmen at his London club, Studio 51, just off Leicester Square.

Chris Barber remained the music’s most passionate, consistent champion – the only one, in Korner’s words, to ‘put his money where his mouth was’ and plough actual cash into keeping blues alive. Barber, in the early Fifties, had been the moving spirit behind a formal conservation body, the National Jazz League. The league flourished, acquiring sufficient capital to buy its own Soho club, the Marquee in Wardour Street.

Alexis Korner joined the Barber band as banjoist during Lonnie Donegan’s absence on National Service. When Donegan returned and Rock Island Line became a hit, Korner was well placed, had he desired, to participate in the nine days’ skiffle wonder. He almost joined another successful skiffle group, the Vipers, signed up at the 2 I’s coffee bar by a then obscure EMI-label executive called George Martin. Instead, he formed his own group, bowing to commercial pressure with the word ‘skiffle’ only for its first extended-play record. Thereafter, the group was to be known as Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated.

The first band in Britain to play nothing but blues was a curious amalgam of fervent fantasy wedded to unlikely and incongruous human shapes. Its chief member, after Korner himself, was Cyril Davies, a fifteen-stone panel beater from South Harrow, a virtuoso on blues harmonica and twelve-string guitar, whose every waking moment was clouded by chagrin that he had not been born a black man. On saxophone there was Dick Heckstall-Smith, who in aspect and manner bore a passing resemblance to Lenin. On double bass there was the future bass guitar maestro, Jack Bruce. The drummer – when Alexis could persuade him to sit in – was a sad-faced boy called Charlie Watts. ‘I’d met Charlie at the Troubadour in Brompton Road, and always liked his playing. I’d said to him, “If I ever form a blues group, would you come in as drummer?” But he’d only do it part-time. He was too busy, studying commercial art in Harrow.’

It was Korner’s plan from the beginning to start his own club, as Ken Colyer and other musicians had, to protect their chosen music from the jibes or hostility of rival factions. Soho cellars or pub backrooms in those days could be hired for a few shillings a night. Alexis Korner’s first such venture, grandly styled the London Blues and Barrelhouse Club, was a room at the Round House pub in Wardour Street. The residency was sometimes interrupted by disputes between Korner and Cyril Davies, which led one or other to storm off and play in some rival club like the Troubadour.

As Blues Incorporated became more established, they started to receive bookings further and further outside London. One night, towards the end of 1961, Alexis found himself playing the blues to a rapturous crowd at a municipal hall in the genteel spa town of Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.

After the performance, a boy came up to Alexis in the pub across the road and talked to him earnestly – but with evident authority – about the blues and bluesmen. The boy was short but broadly built, and looked well-to-do in his smart Italian suit, white tab-collar shirt and Slim Jim tie. He spoke in a soft, well-mannered voice, lisping slightly. He said his name was Brian Jones. He was a musician himself, playing saxophone semi-professionally in a rock group called the Ramrods. What he really wanted to do, he told Alexis, was play Delta-style slide guitar with a band like Blues Incorporated. Alexis said – as Alexis always did – that if Brian Jones ever came to London, he was welcome to sleep on the Korners’ kitchen floor.

In March 1962, tired of battling against the prejudice of the Soho jazz crowd, Alexis Korner decided to see how a new blues club would go in his own West London suburb, Ealing. The venue was a small room under the ABC teashop, just across the road from Ealing Broadway station. The first session, March 17, was announced by a small display ad in the New Musical Express.

The ad caused astonished excitement twenty miles away in Kent, among a self-defeatingly modest group called Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys, to whom it still had not occurred that anyone else in Britain shared their musical fixation. The following Saturday, crammed into Alan Etherington’s father’s Riley ‘Pathfinder’ car, they set out for Ealing to investigate the extraordinary possibility that other people were playing the blues, to an audience, for money.