Читать книгу Mick Jagger - Philip Norman - Страница 11

CHAPTER FIVE

‘“What a Cheeky Little Yob,” I Thought to Myself ’

Saturday 14th December, 1963: Beatles at [Wimbledon] Palais, Stones at [the Baths] Epsom. Went down to Palais but saw nothing but police & more police. Got to Epsom early & when we saw ‘admission by ticket only’ thought we might as well go home. Stayed for a little while chatting to 2 mods however & then that darling DARLING doorman let us in. Got right to the front & wow! Leaning up on the stage gazing into the face of Mick and he looked at me – he did! Keith glanced once, Charlie never & I don’t know about Brian & Ghost [Bill Wyman]. Mick kind of looks at you in a funny way – shy? impersonal? sexy? cold? I don’t know but it’s certainly cool & calm . . . as usual [he] commanded all the attention. He was in a pink shirt, navy trousers, Cuban [heeled] Chelsea’s & brown Chelsea cord waistcoat with black onyx cufflinks. He looked thin, cool and haggard. His hair hung in long ginger waves & his sharp sideways glances down at the audience (no – me!) made him look even more fright [crossed out] aloof and somehow witchlike . . . After the Stones had gone off, the curtains were drawn across but we got underneath them & watched the Stones standing around at the side, talking . . . Couldn’t get backstage worst luck!

– from Jacqui Graham’s diary

Chelsea had lost Mick, for now anyway. Under Andrew Oldham and Eric Easton’s management, the Rolling Stones received around £20 each per week, the same as most top British soccer players of that era. The three Edith Grove flatmates therefore could move on from the squalid pad where they had frozen and half starved – but also shared an idealism and camaraderie that were never to be revived.

Treading his usual fine line between sex addict and sex offender, Brian Jones had impregnated yet another teenage girlfriend. The mother of this, his fourth child by different partners – due to arrive in summer 1964 – was a sixteen-year-old trainee hairdresser named Linda Lawrence. In a surprising reversal of his usual tactics, Brian did not instantly desert Linda but showed every sign of standing by her and the baby and, still more surprisingly, went to live with her at her family’s council house in Windsor, Berkshire, where Mick had first wooed Chrissie Shrimpton. So fond of this prospective son-in-law did the Lawrences become that they named the house ‘Rolling Stone’ in Brian’s honour and also gave board and lodging to a white goat he bought as a pet and liked to take out for walks through Windsor on a lead.

It went without saying that Mick and Keith would continue living together. However, treading his usual fine line between authority figure and honorary bandmate, Andrew Oldham put forward the idea, or instruction, that he should join them. Svengali needed to be as close as possible to the Trilby he was moulding day by day.

Trilby, as a result, migrated from trendy Chelsea to the more prosaic north London district of Willesden. The new flat was a modest two-bedroom affair on the first floor of 33 Mapesbury Road, a street of identical 1930s houses with even less charm than Edith Grove – though immeasurably cleaner and quieter. Mick and Keith were the official tenants, while Oldham came and went, staying part of the time with his widowed mother in nearby (and more desirable) Hampstead.

Rock musicians’ neighbours are usually condemned to purgatorial nuisance, but with Jagger and Richard, Mapesbury Road got off lightly. For much of the time the pair were away on tour, and when they returned they would sleep for twelve or fourteen hours at a stretch. Their fans had no idea where they were living, and none yet possessed the gumption to find out. There were no riotous all-night parties, no revving cars or motorbikes or onslaughts of deafening music, not even the tiniest tinkle of breaking glass. There was no drug taking whatsoever at this stage, or even very much drinking. ‘A half bottle of wine in that place,’ Oldham would remember, ‘was a big deal.’

Since Mick had been swept up into his new pop-star life, his parents back home in Dartford had hardly seen him and, apart from the increasingly unflattering stories they read in the press, had no idea where he was or what he was doing. When Oldham commandeered the Stones, he did not have to sell himself as a responsible manager to their respective families the way Brian Epstein had, painstakingly, to the Beatles’; Oldham, indeed, had not even met Joe and Eva Jagger, and initially left all dealings with the couple to his associate Tony Calder. ‘One day,’ Calder remembers, ‘a call came through to the office, and this very polite voice said, “My name’s Joe Jagger. I understand that my son is getting rather famous. If you need help of any kind, just let me know.” I took calls from so many angry, hysterical people every day . . . I couldn’t believe I’d just been talking to somebody who was polite.’

Liaison with Joe and Eva improved when Oldham employed seventeen-year-old Shirley Arnold, a long-time loyal Stones supporter around the club circuit, to organise their fast-growing national fan club. Shirley joined the small Oldham enclave inside Eric Easton’s office in a Piccadilly office block called Radnor House. Also among the staff was Easton’s elderly father-in-law, a Mr Boreham, who advised clients on long-term financial planning. Shirley remembers Mr Boreham’s amazement after a consultation session with Mick. ‘He said Mick had asked him what he thought the pound would be worth on the currency markets in a few years’ time. That was something no one in the music or entertainment business thought about in those days.’

Henceforward, Shirley kept Joe and Eva fully updated about their son, finding them ‘lovely people’ who never made the slightest demands on their own account or expected to profit from his success. ‘Eva was the dominant one in the marriage, very conscious of what other people thought, and to begin with she wasn’t sure what to make of all the headlines. But Mick’s dad was always totally laid-back about it all.’

Brian Jones might cut a dash with his pet goat on the streets of Windsor, but elsewhere he was finding it increasingly hard to win the attention he craved. Ironically, the Stones’ takeover by professional managers that he had wanted so desperately had eroded almost all his former power and status as the band’s founder, chief motivator and creative driving force. While they were still struggling to break through, Brian had a certain value to Oldham and Easton as an ally within their ranks, and so could wangle preferential treatment in pay or hotel accommodation. But now that they had made it his doom was effectively sealed.

Knowing in his own mind what a star he was, he could not understand why Oldham should be devoting such time and trouble to Mick, or why audiences responded to the results with such fervour. ‘Brian would come into the office to collect his fan mail,’ Tony Calder remembers, ‘and there it would be in a little pile, with a dirty great pile next to it. “Who’s that other lot for?” he’d say. “They’re for Mick,” I’d say. Brian would storm out in a fury, not even taking his own fan mail.’

One way of fighting back would have been to compete against Mick in onstage showmanship, as lead guitarists often did against vocalists. But with curious perverseness – the same that made him go and live with his girlfriend and goat in Windsor rather than at least try to preserve the old solidarity of Edith Grove – Brian in performance struck none of the melodramatic or flamboyant poses that normally went with his role. Throughout the Stones’ set, he stood rooted to the stage with his lute-shaped Vox Teardrop guitar, as innocent-looking as some Elizabethan boy minstrel, giving out nothing but an occasional enigmatic smile. It was a technique that seldom failed him with individual females in intimate one-to-one situations, but in front of eight or nine thousand going crazy for Mick’s duckwalk, it was an ill-advised tactic.

The erosion of Brian’s leadership did not end there. Until now, he had always been the spokesman for the band in the quiet, cultured voice which, unlike Mick, he never slurred into faux Cockney. But Oldham considered him long-winded and – as an inveterate hypochondriac – too prone to ramble on about his latest head cold. So, with great reluctance at first, Mick began to do the talking as well as the singing (Keith being regarded, in both areas, as totally mute). ‘If Andrew told Mick, “You’ve got two interviews today,” his response would always be “Are you sure they want me?”’ Tony Calder remembers. ‘Andrew rehearsed him in talking to journalists just like he rehearsed him in how to perform.’ Under the rules of early-sixties pop journalism, this generally meant no more than reciting a press release about the Stones’ recording and touring plans. It also meant showing a deference scarcely in his nature to interviewers whom Oldham particularly needed to cultivate. When the New Musical Express’s news editor Derek Johnson turned up in person, a well-briefed Mick shook his hand and said, ‘Nice to meet you, sir.’

The music press, of course, voiced no criticisms of the Stones’ hair and personal hygiene, though their lack of stage uniforms still excited spasmodic wonder. Nor did the canny Oldham yet try to sell them as direct challengers to the Beatles. Rather, he peddled the line that they were standard-bearers for London and the south against the previously unchecked chart invasion from Liverpool. Mick delivered the perfect quote: proudly territorial without slighting the Liverpudlian songwriters who had recently done his band such a good turn, competitive but not unfriendly, ambitious but not arrogant. ‘This Mersey Sound is no different from our River Thames sound. As for these Liverpool blokes proclaiming themselves better than anyone else, that’s a load of rubbish. I’ve nothing against the Mersey Sound. It’s great. But it’s not as new and exclusive as the groups make out. I can’t say I blame them for jumping at this sort of publicity, though. If we came from Liverpool, we’d do the same. But we don’t, and we’re out to show the world.’

At first, Oldham sat in on every interview, poised to jump in with corrections or contradictions where necessary. But Mick proved so reliable at giving journalists what they wanted without giving anything away that he was soon allowed to go solo. ‘Andrew would prime him to do ten minutes,’ Tony Calder says. ‘But he’d expand it into twenty-five . . . then forty-five, then an hour.’ While other pop musicians fraternised with their interviewers, chatting over a pint at the pub or a Chinese meal, he always preferred the neutral ground of an office; while unfailingly polite, he had an air of detachment and faint amusement, as if he couldn’t understand all this fuss over the Stones – and him. ‘I still haven’t grasped what all this talk of images is about,’ he told Melody Maker. ‘I don’t particularly care whether parents hate us or not. They may grow to like us one day . . .’ It was a trick that never failed [in the perceptive Bill Wyman’s words] ‘to portray himself as indifferent whereas in fact he cared very much.’

But the most revealing encounter with Mick in this era was not recorded by any professional journalist. It appears in the diary kept by Jacqui Graham, the fifteen-year-old from Wimbledon County Grammar School for Girls who had switched allegiance from the Beatles to the Rolling Stones in late 1963, and now devoted her leisure hours to getting close to them. In the innocent time before security checks, backstage passes, Neanderthal bodyguards and dressing rooms turned into royal courts, that could be often be extraordinarily close.

Jacqui’s diary greets 5 January as a ‘brilliant Stoning start to 1964’ after a show at the Olympia Ballroom, Reading, which (in a portent of things to come) begins one and a half hours late. This time, it is Keith, with his ‘lovely hair’, and Charlie Watts who captivate her, while Mick ‘seem[s] not to be his usual bright self’ and is rather less ‘gorgeous’ than at Epsom three weeks before: ‘I noticed his gold cufflinks & his identity bracelet,’ the diarist says with her usual unsparing eye for detail. ‘He has rather repulsive fat lips and a wet, big tongue!’

On 11 January, when the Stones return to Epsom Baths, Jacqui and some other girls are waiting by the stage door and manage to follow them all the way into their dressing room. ‘Fabulous Keith’ with his ‘lovely, lean, intelligent face’, does not mind being watched while he dabs on acne cream, even allowing Jacqui to hold his Coke bottle and Mod peaked cap during the operation. Brian is observed, presciently, to be ‘not looking madly happy’, and to have ‘a very clipped and well-spoken voice . . . and a lovely slow, tired smile’. Charlie is ‘dreamsville but much smaller than I had imagined’ and Bill is ‘sweet, small, dark, very very helpful’. But Mick proves ‘a big disappointment & a big head . . . [he] thought he was it in his usual blue suit, brown gingham shirt and tartan waistcoat & he looked at us as tho’ we were something that the cat had brought in, although I did look up once to find him eyeing me up and down in a rather sly way. Still – although the worst – he is still fab! . . . then (damn & sod) home at 11.25.’

Friday, 24 January, which for the diarist ‘started off being puke’, turns into ‘the most fabulous day ever . . . Mick, Keith and Charlie relaxed, friendly & TALKING – yes REALLY TALKING TO US!’ With the Stones on again at Wimbledon Palais, she and her friend Susan Andrews manage to sneak into their empty dressing room and hide out there until they arrive. Once again, the intruders are allowed to hang around while the band prepares to go onstage. There is no sexual ulterior motive; they are simply resigned to goggling school-age girls being part of the furniture. This time, Jacqui finds Mick ‘very friendly . . . he smiled at me and seemed interested in what I had to say’. Only Brian seems reticent, possibly because his ‘secret wife’, Linda Lawrence, is also there. The two girls squeeze themselves into corners, watching the ebb and flow of official visitors, including an ad man who wants to put the Stones in a TV commercial for Rice Krispies. Mick relaxes so far as to strip off his shirt and put on another. ‘He made crude remarks like “must cover me tits up” etc.,’ the diarist records, ‘but I liked him.’ She is equally unfazed, later in the evening, to see both Mick and Keith wish Charlie good night by kissing him full on the mouth.

By mid-February, Jacqui and Susan have learned via the fans’ grapevine (or gape-vine) where Mick and Keith live and found out their home phone number. When the girls pluck up courage to ring it, Keith answers. Not in the least annoyed at being thus run to earth, he apologises that Mick isn’t in and stays on the line chatting for some time. This spurs the pair to an adventure which will later fill several pages of Jacqui’s diary, laid out with dialogue and stage directions like a film script:

MONDAY 17TH FEBRUARY. Fate held in store a 15 min conversation in Mick’s hall.

We set off with the spirit of adventure strong within us & at great length found 33 Mapesbury Road NW2. Not knowing which bell to ring we knocked and asked for Mick Jagger. Several minutes passed & then this old woman appeared & behind her I could see Micky standing on the stairs, arms folded with a queer sort of smile on his face. He looked like a sort of pale blue pole in the dim light because he was in his pyjamas – pale blue, dark blue trimmings & white cord. The jacket was open & the pyjama trousers falling down but he seemed quite oblivious & stood there in his bare feet just looking. I felt incapable of walking in but we did & once more our conversation was friendly but I got the feeling he was faintly amused at us for his expression, a vague sort of genial smile, remained unchanged throughout.

This is a rough idea of the conversation:

SILENCE

J: ‘Good morning’

S: “ “

M: “ “

S: ‘We phoned you up’

J: ‘Yes, I hope you don’t mind us coming round here like this, you remember we phoned you up about that party.’

M: ‘Yes, I remember’

J: ‘Well, we went to it & then went to another one over at Blackheath – the second one was at Blackheath, wasn’t it?’

S: ‘Yes’

J: ‘Anyway, we landed up at Hampstead station this morning & we knew you lived round this way so we thought we’d pop in. I hope you don’t mind. I s’pose it’s a bit of a cheek really but it’s typical of us, we’re always doing mad things.’

M: ‘How did you know my address?’

J: ‘Oh we’ve known it for ages. I’ve forgotten who gave it to us.’

S: ‘Which is your bell, you haven’t got your name on it.’

M: (evading question) ‘Oh, we always put different funny names on it.’

J: ‘I think you thought we were Bridget before, you know, about the long skirts.’

M: ‘Oh, I knew you weren’t Bridget – I thought you might be some of her friends. Someone sent me 2 dolls the other day, with long skirts on – very nice. I appreciated it.’

Crosses over to mirror having got up from sitting on stairs.

‘I must look awful, haven’t shaved or anything. A bloke came to see me once & took a picture of me like this.’

Arranges hair.

‘Sent them to me afterwards. I looked terrible – it was the flash.’

J: ‘I’d kill anyone if they did that to me.’

M: ‘Oh, we’ve got to go away again soon.’

S: ‘Where to?’

M: ‘Oh, Sunbury or some stupid place like that. We’re playing at Greenford tonight.’

Comes over to us.

‘Gosh, aren’t I small? Why aren’t you at work or anything.’

J: ‘Oh we got the day off, hadn’t got much to do. Where’s Keith, is he upstairs?’

M: ‘Yes, he’s, uh, busy’ (laughs)

Phone rings

‘Excuse me.’

Answers it.

‘Hallo, hallo, hallo – press Button A – git. Hallo, who’s there?’

Puts it down

M: ‘You were saying?’

J & S: Inordinate mumbles

M: ‘I thought you were the bloke coming to see me s’morning about some script.’

J: ‘Oh, is that for the Rice Krispies advertisement?’

M: ‘No, but how did you know about that?’

J: ‘Oh we were there when that bloke asked you.’

S: ‘We were in your dressing room at Wimbledon.’

J: ‘Yes, it was Brian that wanted to do it, wasn’t it?!’

No answer. Various other topics of conversation, then

M: ‘What’s the time?’

J: ‘Twenty past twelve.’

M: ‘Oh, he’ll be here soon. I’ve got to go & have a bath & get some clothes on. I’d invite you up but it’s a bit awkward – you do understand.’

Giggles

J & S: ‘Yes, we understand.’

M: ‘And I’ve only got a little room to myself. Can’t very well invite you in there, people might get ideas.’

J & S: ‘Uh . . . yea.’

Shows us the door

M: ‘Oh well, give us a ring sometime, when we’re at a theatre or dance hall & come and see us.’ Mumble Mumble ‘Come into the dressing room. Cheerio.’

J & S: ‘Cheerio.’

Exit

Door slams shut.

We trail around Willesden miserably – we return to Wimbledon & make dinner at around 3.30. We feel choked up & a bit silly.

GOING OUT WITH Jean Shrimpton’s younger sister was not Mick’s automatic passport into the upper echelons of Swinging London. Jean had always done her best to keep Chrissie at arm’s length and, besides, was still far from certain about the ‘ugly’ young man who sometimes decorously occupied her bed at her parents’ home in Buckinghamshire while she was away. Far more important to Mick’s initial social rise was David Bailey, the East End photographer who had put Jean into Vogue, made them both international celebrities and was now going out with her. Bailey, indeed, was to become a friend outlasting the era of both Shrimpton sisters; perhaps his closest ever outside music.

When the two first met, they could not have been much more unequal, one a nineteen-year-old LSE student, the other five years older and at a seemingly unsurpassable peak of celebrity. Mick was frankly awestruck by the glamour and sophistication of Bailey’s lifestyle – the Lotus Elan sports cars, mews studios and cowboy boots he had made a photographer’s essential accessories in place of potted palms, black cloths and ‘watch the birdie!’ Of no small influence either was the delighted frisson Bailey’s unreformed (and totally genuine) Cockney accent created among the debs and high-born female magazine editors who lionised him. Such was Mick’s admiration that he even allowed Bailey to tease him, as few others dared to do openly, about his appearance. When Eva Jagger took him shopping as a boy, Bailey used to joke, there would have been no problem about going into places where small children weren’t welcome. She could leave him outside, securely clamped to the shop window by his lips.

Early in their friendship, rather like Pip with Herbert Pocket in Dickens’s Great Expectations, Mick asked Bailey to take him to a posh restaurant and teach him how to conduct himself. They went to the Casserole on King’s Road, not far from the World’s End village where three hard-up Stones had so recently subsisted on stolen milk and stale fruit pies. Mick paid the bill – not an act to be much associated with him – but jibbed at Bailey’s suggestion that he should also leave a tip. Finally, he put down a pre-decimal ten-shilling (or ‘ten-bob’) note, equivalent to fifty pence today, with a 1964 purchasing power of £10. But as they left, Bailey saw him slip it back into his pocket.

Bailey soon picked up on Andrew Oldham’s influence over Mick, one that reminded him of a worldly-wise older brother with an awestruck younger one, and made his own moulding of Jean Shrimpton as a couture icon seem superficial by comparison. At the few Stones gigs he attended, he also found himself an uncomfortable witness to Brian Jones’s decreasing influence in the band and continual attempts to claw some power and status back. The photographer’s eagle eye for nuances noted that, while Mick was happy to zoom around with Jean and him in an unpretentious Mini-Minor, Brian drove a bulky Humber saloon, ‘the kind of car a vicar would use’. At the end of a gig, Bailey recalls, Mick and Keith would be like unkind children, playing an obviously habitual game of ‘let’s get away from Brian’.

Chrissie Shrimpton, too, recognised Oldham’s power over Mick, although at her tender age – she was still not yet nineteen – it represented unfathomably deep waters. Chrissie now spent most nights with Mick at 33 Mapesbury Road while officially sharing a bedsit with her friend Liz Gribben for the sake of appearances with her parents. When Jacqui Graham or other schoolgirl fans rang up the flat, a terse female voice would answer, discouraging them from further surprise appearances on the front doorstep.

For all the Stones’ growing fame, Mick still felt it a huge feather in his cap to be going out with Jean Shrimpton’s sister, even though Chrissie refused to capitalise on her surname or her own spectacular looks, and continued to work as a secretary, now at the Stones’ record company, Decca. ‘I still wanted to be with him all the time,’ she remembers. ‘The trouble was that my life was going on mostly in the daytime and Mick’s mostly went on at night.’ And Oldham’s rival stake in him was something she could only characterise as ‘powerful and frightening’.

The explosive, sometimes physically violent quarrels she and Mick had always had increased exponentially as the Stones’ fame did and he became more aware of himself as their star attraction and more prone to shove her out of sight whenever female fans materialised. Mortifyingly, to someone who valued coolness and self-possession above all, the blow-ups with Chrissie increasingly tended to happen in front of other people, at gigs, parties or new clubs like the Ad Lib. ‘They once had a terrible one at Eric Easton’s office,’ Shirley Arnold remembers. ‘It ended with Chrissie kicking Mick down the stairs.’

The fans who thought him so untouchable would have been astonished by his distress after Chrissie had stormed off into the night, and repeated phone calls to her mother could not locate her. Andrew Oldham would receive an anguished SOS and would go and meet him, usually at a bench on the Thames Embankment as far as possible from other prying eyes and ears. As Oldham recalls in Stoned, Mick would pour out his side of the story and almost tearfully recount how Chrissie had gone for him with her fists. (She herself now says firmly that she never used fists and ‘he wasn’t a victim of domestic abuse’.) The heart-to-hearts with Oldham would often last the rest of the night, ending at dawn with a walk through the deserted West End and breakfast at a taxi drivers’ café.

Oldham writes in Stoned that during this period he and Mick were ‘as close as two young men could probably become’ – and there has been endless speculation ever since about the extent of that closeness. Oldham certainly was not homosexual – indeed, had lately begun going out with a Hampstead girl named Sheila Klein (a surname to have large resonance in another context later in this story) whom he was soon to marry. At the same time, with his homing spirit for all outrage, he sought out the company of notable gay men in the music business – in particular the composer of Oliver!, Lionel Bart – and added their gestures and speech mannerisms to his repertoire of devices for amusing his friends and disconcerting his foes.

At all events, rumours began to fly around that in the extremely crowded quarters of 33 Mapesbury Road Mick and Oldham’s closeness extended to sharing the same bed. One must hasten to add that, in purer-minded 1964, that did not necessarily signify what it would today. Young men could still have platonic friendships in the Victorian mode, sharing flats, rooms and even beds (as pop band members often did on tour) without the slightest homoerotic overtones. Oldham’s own memoirs recall a night when the two of them ended up at his mother’s flat in Netherhall Gardens, Hampstead, and, rather than struggle home to Willesden, decided to crash out there. When Mrs Oldham looked into his room the next afternoon, she found them both squeezed into his single bed, still dead to the world.

According to Chrissie, Oldham’s soon-to-be fiancée, Sheila Klein, was also vexed by these rumours and – on a different occasion, at Mapesbury Road – suggested that the two of them should investigate for themselves. ‘[Sheila] got me to wait all night with her to see if Andrew and Mick slept in the same bed and they did . . . We found them asleep, facing the same way, and I can remember thinking how sweet they looked. Sheila said, “There, I knew they were!” and I still didn’t know what she meant.’

ON 7 FEBRUARY 1964 the Beatles had crossed the Atlantic for the first time, touching down in New York amid scenes of juvenile hysteria that made European Beatlemania seem muted by comparison and ending American dominance of pop music with a single appearance on the nationwide Ed Sullivan TV show. They were Britain’s most successful export since Shakespeare and Scotch whisky, ambassadors of seemingly boundless charm and good manners whose once-controversial hair was now regarded back home as a precious national asset. During a reception for them in Washington, DC, a woman guest produced some nail scissors and playfully snipped a lock or two from the back of Ringo Starr’s neck. For the attendant British media, it was an outrage tantamount to defacing the Crown Jewels.

While the Beatles conquered America, the Rolling Stones had to be content with conquering the American act meant to have headlined their second UK package tour. This was Phil Spector’s black female vocal trio the Ronettes, whose tumultuous ‘Be My Baby’ was a UK hit single currently far outselling ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’. They were also sexy in a way no female pop group had ever been, with their beehive hair, brazen eye makeup and slinky, chiffon-sleeved trouser suits. Even that could not save them from the same fate as the Everly Brothers, two months previously. Before the tour even began, the Stones replaced them as top of the bill.

Spector, the trio’s manager as well as record producer, was already fixated on lead singer Veronica – ‘Ronnie’ – Bennett (whom he would later subject to a gothic horror story of a marriage). Having received an advance character sketch of the top three Stones from his would-be British counterpart, Andrew Oldham, he sent them a stern collective telegram saying ‘Leave my girls alone’. This did not stop both Mick and Keith from making a beeline for Ronnie’s beehive at a party at deejay Tony Hall’s Mayfair flat which John Lennon and George Harrison also attended on the eve of their departure for America. Boyfriend magazine’s correspondent, Maureen O’Grady, remembers the atypical tension between the Dartford chums as they competed for Ronnie’s attention, and Mick’s sulky pique when she proved immune to his charms and went off with Beatle George.

With ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ barely out of the Top 10, the insatiable pop music machine was already slavering for a third Rolling Stones single. And this time there would be no friendly Beatles to help out. Instead, the Stones looked beyond the over-ransacked R&B back catalogue to the one white American performer who counted as an equal influence on them all. The unanimous choice was ‘Not Fade Away’, the B-side to Buddy Holly’s 1957 hit ‘Oh Boy’, which Mick had seen Holly play live at the Woolwich Granada cinema during the one British tour he managed before his premature death. Serendipitously, the Stones–Ronettes show would appear at the same venue.

‘Not Fade Away’ was recorded at Regent Sound Studios during a brief interlude between early tour dates. To lighten an initially rather tired, grumpy atmosphere, Oldham turned the session into a booze-fuelled party, inviting various other pop personalities along to lend a hand. The American singer Gene Pitney, a former PR client of Oldham’s, contributed extra percussion and an outsize bottle of cognac. Graham Nash and Allan Clarke of the (highly appropriate) Hollies dropped by to watch while the great Phil Spector, who had formerly produced Pitney’s records, shook maracas.

Buddy Holly and the Crickets’ ‘Not Fade Away’ had been an almost hymn-like chant of a cappella voices, whose only beat was drumsticks tapping on a cardboard box. But the Stones’ cover version was as full-on and aggressive as ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, with Keith’s rhythm guitar turned up to maximum for the first – but not last – time in the staccato, seesaw beat invented by their late tour companion Bo Diddley. Mick’s vocal made no attempt to replicate Holly’s subtlety and charm, but stuck to the same snarling sexual challenge as before. In counterpoint to Keith’s rhythm-led chords, Brian supplied a throbbing harmonica bottom line that made the others, temporarily, forgive him everything. The result might not exactly be a Wall of Sound on the Phil Spector level, Andrew Oldham commented, but it certainly was a Wall of Noise.

With nothing to put on the B-side, and tipsiness now firmly in control, Spector and Mick together cobbled up a song called ‘Little by Little’, an outright copy of Jimmy Reed’s ‘Shame Shame Shame’. At a later session, two further tracks were put on tape, both obviously unreleasable for commercial purposes. ‘And Mr Spector and Mr Pitney Came Too’ was a free-for-all instrumental featuring a wicked Mick take-off of Decca Records’ elderly boss Sir Edward Lewis. ‘Andrew’s Blues’ was a pornographic monologue by Phil Spector, dedicated to his British disciple-in-chief, featuring Allan Clarke and Graham Nash on back-up vocals.

When ‘Not Fade Away’ was released on 21 February few among the target audience even recognised it as a Buddy Holly homage. In its raw belligerence it seemed quintessentially Rolling Stones, which by now meant quintessentially Mick. For Jacqui Graham and her ilk, the accompanying vision was not of a bespectacled young Texan, dead too soon, but of ironic eyes and overstuffed, well-moistened lips slurring Holly’s original ‘A love for real will not fade away’ to a barely grammatical ‘Love is love and not fade away’; turning wistful hope into a sexual fait accompli. The single raced up every UK chart, peaking at No. 3, while Mick was still out on the road, upstaging, if not upending, Ronnie of the Ronettes.

With so many readers – or, at least, readers’ offspring – converted to the Stones, Britain’s national press now had to find something positive to say as well as recoiling like a Victorian maiden aunt from their hair and ‘dirtiness’. And the line from Fleet Street could not have been more perfect if Andrew Oldham had dictated it himself. ‘They look,’ said the Daily Express, ‘like boys whom any self-respecting mum would lock in the bathroom . . . five tough young London-based music-makers with doorstep mouths, pallid cheeks and unkempt hair . . . but now that the Beatles have registered with all age-groups, the Rolling Stones have taken over as the voice of the teens.’ Maureen Cleave of the London Evening Standard – who had been among the first national columnists to interview the Beatles – wrote about the Stones in a tone of repugnance more valuable than five-star adulation: ‘They’ve done terrible things to the music scene, set it back, I would say, about eight years . . . they’re a horrible-looking bunch, and Mick is indescribable.’

The rest of Fleet Street tumbled over itself to follow Oldham’s script, depicting the Beatles – without circulation-damaging lèse-majesté – as just a teensy bit staid and conventional and the Stones as their unchallenged successors at the cutting edge. The two bands’ followings were made to seem as incompatible and mutually hostile as supporters of rival soccer teams (though in truth there was huge overlap), one side of the stadium rooting for the honest, decent, caring North, the other for the cynical, arrogant, couldn’t-give-a-shit South; the family stands applauding tunefulness, charm and good grooming, the hooligan terraces cheering roughness, surliness and tonsorial anarchy. A few months earlier, schoolboys all over the country had been suspended for coming to class with Beatle cuts; now one with a Jagger hairdo was excluded until he had it ‘cut neatly like the Beatles’.

The raison d’être of all male pop stars, back through the Beatles and Elvis to Frank Sinatra and Rudy Vallee, had been sex appeal. Oldham’s greatest image coup for the Stones was to make them sexually menacing. In March, the (predominantly male) readers of Melody Maker were confronted with a banner headline he had skilfully fed the paper: WOULD YOU LET YOUR SISTER GO WITH A ROLLING STONE? The Express helpfully amplified this to WOULD YOU LET YOUR DAUGHTER MARRY A ROLLING STONE?, thereby conjuring up hideous mental pictures in respectable homes throughout Middle England. Nor did it need specifying which Rolling Stone most threatened the virtue of all those sisters and daughters. It was hard to think of a comparable bogeyman-seducer since Giacomo Casanova in eighteenth-century Italy.

On the road – travelling from gig to gig in a manner still totally law-abiding and unobtrusive – the band were publicly insulted and mocked, barred from hotels, refused service in restaurants, pubs and shops, at times even physically attacked. In Manchester, after their first Top of the Pops show, they went to a Chinese restaurant, were served pre-dinner drinks, but then sat for an hour without any food arriving. When they got up to leave, having scrupulously paid for their drinks, the chef burst out of the kitchen and chased them with a meat cleaver. On the Ronettes tour, their show at Slough’s Adelphi Theatre ended so late that the only restaurant still open in the area was the Heathrow Airport cafeteria. As they ate their plastic meals, a big American at the next table began yelling insults. Mick, impressively, went over to remonstrate and received a punch in the face that knocked him backwards. Keith tried to come to his aid, but was also felled. These being days long before airport security, Fleet Street never heard of the incident.

‘Not Fade Away’ ramped up the mayhem at Stones’ concerts – a strange outcome for Buddy Holly’s quiet little prairie hymn. It proved their best live number to date, not so much for Mick’s vocal as Brian’s harmonica playing. The former blond waxwork seemed to gain new energy, hunched over the stand mike with fringed eyes closed and shoulders grooving, as if literally blowing life into the embers of his leadership.

British pop’s notional North–South conflict reached a climax with its very own Battle of Gettysburg, a ‘Mad Mod Ball’, televised live from the Wembley Empire Pool arena and pitting the Rolling Stones against the cream of Merseybeat acts including Cilla Black, the Fourmost, the Searchers and Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas. When the Stones arrived, they found they were expected to perform on a revolving rostrum in the midst of some eight thousand already demented fans. The set-up terrified Mick, who was convinced he would be pulled off the stage before the end of his first song and that someone might actually be killed. To reach the stage, he and the others had to run through an avenue of police and stewards, implausibly miming song words while one of their tracks was played over the loudspeaker system. The cordon immediately gave way against the weight of the crowd, leaving the Stones submerged among mad Mods while their music echoed round a bare rostrum.

After their set, they were marooned onstage for a further half hour, fighting off would-be boarders, while a contingent of Rockers, the Mods’ motorbike-riding arch-foes, staged a counter-riot out in the street that resulted in thirty arrests. Unlike the real Gettysburg, it was a night of unstoppable victory for the South over those and all other rivals but one. ‘In mass popularity,’ wrote Melody Maker’s chief correspondent, Ray Coleman, ‘the Stones are second only to the Beatles.’

THAT POSITION, HOWEVER, could not be maintained simply by doing live shows. To stay ahead of Merseybeat and offer the Beatles any real challenge, the Stones had to come up with a new single as big as ‘Not Fade Away’ and – such was the rate of the pop charts’ metabolism – keep coming up with them at a rate of one roughly every twelve weeks. And the search for songs they could cover without compromising their ideals as a blues band or their carefully cultivated bad-boy image was growing ever more problematic.

Their options had been further reduced by using up four potential singles at once on an EP (extended play) record: Chuck Berry’s ‘Bye Bye Johnny’, the Coasters’ ‘Poison Ivy’, Barrett Strong’s ‘Money’ and Arthur Alexander’s ‘You Better Move On’, the latter always introduced by Mick as ‘our slow one’ and sung in atypically soulful, even plaintive mode, though its underlying message was still ‘piss off’. Produced in small 45-RPM format, with a glossy picture sleeve, EPs were as important a UK market as albums, and had their own separate chart. The Stones’ first not only went straight to the top of this but also made No. 15 on the singles charts.

The obvious solution was to give up covering other artists’ songs and write their own, as the two main Beatles did with such spectacular success. Thanks to John Lennon and Paul McCartney, songwriting was no longer the sacred preserve of Moon-and-June-rhyming Tin Pan Alley hacks, but something at which all young British pop musicians, however untrained, were entitled to have a shot. If it worked, it was insurance against that seemingly inevitable day when the pop audience tired of them as performers and they could fall back on writing full-time. Even Lennon and McCartney, at their America-conquering apogee, drew comfort from that safety net.

Until now, Mick had never for one moment visualised himself as a songwriter, let alone as one half of a partnership that would one day rival Lennon– McCartney’s. The idea came from Andrew Oldham and was not motivated by a desire to advance Mick. The fact was that, while Oldham’s management-PR side remained absorbed in the daily challenge of maintaining the Stones’ disreputability, his would-be Phil Spector side was growing bored by working in the recording studio with just a ‘covers band’ – and resentful of having to pay copyright fees and royalties to the composers whose songs were covered.

In February, he had informed Record Mirror that by autumn he would be ‘Britain’s most powerful independent record producer’. Since the Stones alone did not justify his assuming that title, he was actively scouting round for other artists to shape in the recording studio à la Spector – and had already found one. This was Cleo Sylvestre, who had auditioned as a back-up singer with the Stones eighteen months earlier, then gone on to have a platonic love affair with Mick which he took with so much the greater seriousness. Mick, in fact, recommended her to Oldham as a potential talent, even though he was still too upset by their break-up to be friends with her.

Oldham recorded Cleo singing the old Teddy Bears’ hit ‘To Know Him Is to Love Him’, which had been Phil Spector’s first writing and producing success. The B-side was an instrumental entitled ‘There Are but Five Rolling Stones’, played by the Stones but grandiosely credited to ‘The Andrew Oldham Orchestra’. Cleo’s pop-singing career failed to take off, but she went on to an award-winning career as an actress, notably with a one-woman show about Mary Seacole, the Crimean War’s ‘black Florence Nightingale’.

The domestic arrangements at 33 Mapesbury Road – and Brian’s absence in Windsor – meant that the songwriters within the Stones more or less had to be Mick and Keith. Likewise, Keith’s skill at playing hypnotic chords – as on ‘Not Fade Away’ – and Mick’s verbal fluency dictated which of them would write the lyrics and which the tune. Both agreed it was a good idea, but were too much intimidated by the competition all around to sit down and try. Oldham exerted every fibre of PR persuasiveness to change their minds, insisting that it could not be that difficult – witness the speed at which John and Paul had dashed off ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ that afternoon at Ken Coyler’s club – and spinning extravagant visions (hugely underestimated, it would turn out) of the publishing royalties they could earn. Even that could not tempt Mick to have a go.

Finally, one November night in 1963, Oldham resorted to simple coercion, locking the pair in the flat’s kitchenette, having previously removed all food and drink from it, then going off to spend the evening with his mother in Hampstead. If they wanted to eat that night, he shouted, they’d better have written a song when he came back. Returning a couple of hours later, he opened the front door quietly, tiptoed halfway upstairs and heard them hard at work. He went down again, slammed the door, and shouted ‘What have you got?’ A resentful, hungry Mick – those lips long-unstoked – ‘told me they’d written this fucking song and I’d better fucking like it’.

That first effort, unconsciously reflecting Oldham’s pressure, was entitled ‘It Should Be You’ and sounded enough like a real song to make them try again – and again. Fortuitously, the Stones were just leaving on a third national tour – this one including British pop’s only other ex–college student, Mike Sarne – which provided live models to copy and hours of boredom, backstage or in Stu’s van, when thinking up tunes and lyrics came as a positive relief. In a short time, Mick and Keith had accumulated around half a dozen songs, the most promising of which they recorded as rough demos at Regent Sound during quick trips back to London. The whole batch showed a romantic, even feminine side to the composers which made them quite unsuitable as Stones tracks, some indeed being specifically targeted at female artists: ‘My Only Girl’, ‘We Were Falling in Love’, ‘Will You Be My Lover Tonight?’ To hold their copyrights and receive any royalties they might earn, Oldham set up a publishing company called Nanker Phelge Music, a name as deliberately grotesque as the Beatles’ Northern Songs company was quietly traditional. A Nanker was Brian Jones’s name for his Lucky Jim facial contortions while Phelge was the Edith Grove flatmate who used to ‘gob’ so colourfully up the walls.

Oldham’s search for artists to cover these first Jagger– Richard songs was confined to the lower reaches of British pop and even there met with only modest success. ‘Will You Be My Lover Tonight?’ was recorded by a mutual friend of Oldham and the Stones named George Bean and released on Decca in January 1964, sinking without a trace. ‘Shang a Doo Lang’, an unashamed knock-off of the Crystals’ ‘He’s Sure the Boy I Love’, went to a sixteen-year-old newcomer named Adrienne Posta and was produced by Oldham with Spectoresque Wall of Sound effects. By far the most prestigious catch was Gene Pitney, a major American name whose fondness for London pop low life had led him to play back-up percussion at the boozy ‘Not Fade Away’ session. Pitney, it so happened, needed a follow-up to his recent massive hit with Bacharach and David’s ‘24 Hours from Tulsa’. Oldham persuaded him to make it Jagger and Richard’s ‘My Only Girl’, retitled ‘That Girl Belongs to Yesterday’. Though Pitney substantially rewrote the song, Mick and Keith’s credit survived when it made the UK Top 10 and even sneaked into the US Hot 100.

Adrienne Posta was the daughter of a wealthy furniture manufacturer who intended to make her a pop star by hook or by crook. When Decca released Adrienne’s version of Jagger and Richard’s ‘Shang a Doo Lang’ in early March, Oldham persuaded Mr Posta to hold a launch party at his flat in Seymour Place, Bayswater. The party was to witness a momentous meeting, though not the one Oldham originally had in mind. Deciding it was time Keith Richard ‘started going out with something other than a guitar’, Oldham asked his girlfriend Sheila Klein to bring along someone for Keith. She chose a friend with the happily coincidental name of Linda Keith, a former assistant at Vogue who had progressed to modelling.

Launch parties for records were unusual in 1964, and an impressive posse of Swinging London insiders turned up to wish Adrienne’s single Godspeed and partake of her father’s hospitality. They included Peter Asher from the singing duo Peter and Gordon, the latest act to benefit from Lennon– McCartney songs. Asher brought his actress sister Jane and her boyfriend, Paul McCartney, who lodged at the Asher family home in Wimpole Street, Marylebone. With them came an old Hampstead friend of Oldham’s named John Dunbar and his seventeen-year-old girlfriend, Marianne Faithfull.

The name that always seemed too perfect for the young woman it adorned – ‘Faithfull’ with two l’s, suggesting a double portion of innocent steadfastness – was not a publicist’s invention, as many people later assumed. Marianne’s father was an academic named Robert Glynn Faithfull who served with British intelligence during the Second World War, then went on to receive a doctorate in psychology from Liverpool University. Nothing about this seemingly quintessential English rose hinted at a background that was also more exotically foreign than any of the crucial people in Mick’s life had been, or would be.

Her mother, Eva, was an Austro-Hungarian aristocrat, Baroness Erisso, whose family, the Sacher-Masochs, dated back to Emperor Charlemagne. Eva’s great-uncle Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was the author of the nineteenth-century novel Venus im Pelz in which he gave his own name, ‘masochism’, to pleasure derived from self-inflicted pain. Brought up in Hapsburg grandeur, Eva had become an actress and dancer with the Max Reinhardt company in Vienna during the 1930s and, but for the war, might have followed Reinhardt to America and a career in Hollywood. Instead, she married the British intelligence officer Robert Faithfull and settled with him in Britain, where Marianne, their only child, was born in 1946.

The couple separated in 1952 and the Austrian baroness relocated to – of all places – Reading, the unexciting Berkshire town best known for Huntley & Palmer’s biscuits and Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol. Here she acquired a small house in the poorest district and worked variously as a shop assistant, coffee-bar server and bus conductress while still managing to imbue her daughter with a sense of patrician superiority. Marianne was educated on semi-charity terms at a Catholic convent school, St Joseph’s, under a regime so strict that the girls had to bathe in underslips to avoid the sin of looking at their own nude bodies.

She grew up to be a stunning combination of beauty and brains, mistily innocent-looking, yet with a voluptuous figure; shyly and refinedly spoken, yet with an inquiring intellect and a rich mezzo-soprano singing voice. She had no doubt that life would lead her into the theatre or music – possibly both – and by the age of sixteen was already working as a folk singer around Reading coffee bars. Early in 1964, she visited Cambridge to attend an undergraduates’ ball, and met Andrew Oldham’s friend John Dunbar, then studying fine arts at Churchill College. Oldham was looking to expand his managerial empire beyond the Stones, and asked Dunbar if he knew any girl singers. ‘Well, actually, yes,’ Dunbar replied.

At Adrienne Posta’s launch party, the other female guests wore butterfly-bright ‘dolly’ dresses with the new daringly short skirts. Marianne, however, chose blue jeans and a baggy shirt of Dunbar’s that was sexier than the most clinging sheath. Tony Calder, standing near the door with Mick, Oldham, Chrissie Shrimpton and Sheila Klein, still remembers her entrance: ‘It was like someone turned the sound down. It was like seeing the Virgin Mary 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.