Chapter Three
A hundred and forty miles south-east-ish of Cheltenham and eighteen miles east of central London, in the downbeat Thames estuary town of Dartford, two little boys from disparate families met at Wentworth County Primary School. Unbeknown to both, they had been born in the same local nursing home. The Livingstone Hospital is still there today, an NHS facility. There is nothing to mark its significance as the birthplace of fêted sons. Little did Eva Jagger and Doris Richards know that their babies, born nineteen weeks apart, were destined to spend their whole lives together; nor that, joined at the hip, lip and bank account, their Christian names would one day be slurred in a single, potent phrase as globally recognised as that of Her Majesty.
Michael Philip Jagger hailed from a house on Denver Road in ‘Posh Town’, as the other-side-of-the-tracks kids called that neighbourhood, kept spotless by his Australian-born mother. Having landed in England as a teenager, Eva assimilated rapidly. She also became an ‘Avon lady’, selling make-up, bath products, skincare and perfumes door to door.1 His father Basil, known as ‘Joe’, was a respected PE teacher and physical education lecturer. Michael had a little brother, Christopher, four years his junior. These pretty, fine-skinned mummy’s boys minded their Ps and Qs, said grace before tea, ate up their carrots and greens and liked to sing along to the radio. The brothers were put through their paces in the back garden, lifting weights, aiming arrows and bowling cricket balls under Joe’s watchful eye. One parent fattening, the other fittening them. The result, in Michael, would be a lifelong obsession with leanness; an abhorrence of body fat; a preoccupation with stamina and appearance; and, thanks to his mother’s cosmetics case, which he would plunder during his late teens when Eva was out and about and he was wooing potential girlfriends, a fascination with make-up and beauty. It was to Michael’s blubber-lipped, beau-laid face that Mater’s foundation cream, lipstick and mascara samples would be applied by female friends. He wanted them to show him how to do it. He also wanted (secretly?) to look like them. Their temporary refinement of Jagger’s arresting ugly beauty rendered him an object of fascination among local fifth- and sixth-form girls, even if they found him too weird to be conventionally fanciable.
A couple of streets away, in a council flat above a greengrocer’s on Chastilian Road lived a scrawny, cartoonishly jug-eared, nail-bitten classmate by the name of Keith Richards. That place is still there too, blue-plaqued. People still come out to look when you rock up to take photographs. The son of factory workers from Walthamstow who shifted east along the river to be near family, but unwittingly closer to the devastation of Hitler’s bombs, little Richards could not have differed more dramatically from the Jagger kid. His high-spirited, music-loving mother, who had driven a van without a licence during the war, delivering bread and cakes, was delighted with her only child. Keith’s father Bert, a stocky, pipe-smoking, one-or-two-beers-at-the-most man whose family were ‘stern, rigid socialists’, served as a dispatch rider in Normandy and was the sole survivor of a mortar attack, an experience that scarred him for life.
Bert returned to factory work post-war, travelling west to toil long hours. He was detached from his boy’s upbringing, but spent time with him at weekends. They’d work the allotment together, or play a bit of football. Rationing was in place for years after the war ended. Keith would remember not being able to buy a bag of sweets until 1954. He recalls the looming, local lunatic asylums, where many unfortunates were housed, and where teenage Mike Jagger took part-time employment one summer, serving meals. Another of Mike’s summer jobs was selling ice creams. Keith packed sugar for pocket money, acquiring a penchant for crystalline substances, and did a bread round. He liked swimming, a bit of cricket and playing tennis. He’d sooner not look back on the almost daily beatings and bullyings from the big boys that he endured on his way home from school. Though his father boxed, and urged him to stick up for himself, Keith took the pummellings without retaliation. It is interesting that both boys had such physical fathers, though both were kind and neither was given to corporal abuse. Joe Jagger, the gentlemanly sportsman with a working command of most disciplines, taking pride in corporeal excellence and instilling his values in his sons; brawny Bert Richards, rough and ready, ‘a real athlete’, ‘an Irish boxer’, a most unlikely tennis player; a man who grew food and took pride in potatoes and beans.
Mike and Keith knew each other because they were the same age and knocked around the same drab neighbourhood, rather than because they attended the same school, where they hardly overlapped. But then both families moved away: Mike’s to the leafy village of Wilmington, all cricket teas, bright bunting and parish fairs; Keith’s to a blank new-build council house at Temple Hill: a grey, edgy estate conjured from wasteland that became a hostile manor of hoods and goods off the back of lorries. Thus distanced, the boys grew in opposite directions. Mike was on course for grammar school. Keith couldn’t be arsed with academia, felt detached and dispossessed, and sometimes fantasised about reinventing himself as a villain.
Mike had a brother, a home-grown ally, so Jagger family life had balance. Lonely Keith longed for siblings, forged brief, intense friendships with other kids during Devon family holidays, and would ‘always be heartbroken when it was over, gone’. Mike’s family ventured to more exotic climes, and favoured the suddenly fashionable Spanish Costas. By the age of ten he was toying with guitars. Keith had the edge on him there. He’d been around guitars all his life, thanks to his maternal grandparents. French-speaking, ladylike Emma and philandering Theodore Augustus Dupree had seven daughters, and were both eccentric and musical. His grandmother was an accomplished pianist. His pastry-cook grandfather played sax and violin. It was claimed that he was part of a musical double act during the First World War, entertaining the troops, and that injury impaired his ability to play. He later took up guitar, led a dance band during the 1930s and turned to factory work to pay the bills. By the 1950s he had his own square dance band, Gus Dupree and His Boys, performing on American air bases, at weddings and for the Freemasons. He kept a classical Spanish guitar on top of his upright piano; he’d get it out and put it up there, at least, when he knew that his grandson was coming round. When Keith was nine or ten and harmonising with his aunties, Gus reached for the guitar one day and offered him a strum. A chord and a lick later, Keith got the picture.
Mike Jagger lost his way at Dartford Grammar, working hard enough only to pass tests and exams. He saw through education early on. He soon grew bored with the inflexibility of the system, the redness of the uniform, the punitive stance of the place. His rejection of learning was a waste of his obvious intelligence and talent, but he couldn’t care. The young rebel resisted the Establishment’s public-school-like posturing and snobbery. He even lost interest in cricket, at which he had once considered himself to excel.2 He grew disdainful of authority in general, and let slip his once respectable appearance, becoming stylishly slovenly in a manner reminiscent of the schoolboy John Lennon.
In 1955, the year when Mick and Keith turned twelve; when Britain experienced a treacherous freeze, an unbearable heatwave and crippling drought; when eighty-year-old Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill resigned, and when Ruth Ellis became the last British woman to be hanged; when the Guinness World Records book was first published, the inventor of the world wide web Tim Berners-Lee was born and when Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin, breathed his last, the country found itself in the grip of the new rock’n’roll. Handed down from America where it had been conceived, it broke the banks of traditional music categories, shattered moulds and cracked open opportunities for musicians, singers and songwriters. Where adolescents had previously been little more than scaled-down versions of their parents, terrorised into toeing the line under the ‘not under my roof’ rule, there now surged a mutinous new demographic known as ‘teenagers’. With their own culture, wild music, fashion and views, many of them clashed relentlessly with parents in their dictatorial domestic set-ups. Rock’n’roll’s original golden age, soundtracked by Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Little Richard and ‘the King’, Elvis Presley, seemed to many to have exploded the world. In 1958, when Mike and Keith were turning fifteen, Britain’s answer to Elvis, Cliff Richard, was enjoying his first hit with ‘Move It’, and London’s Marquee Jazz Club opened at 165 Oxford Street. Only four years later, on 12 July 1962, the Rollin’ Stones would be performing their first gig there … by which time the Beatles had hammered themselves into sensational shape on Hamburg’s shit-stained, strip-club-and-brothel-infested Reeperbahn, and were coasting towards their first hit, ‘Love Me Do’.3
What cataclysmic changes occurred in that brief interlude that led these ordinary, beloved, functioning boys from the relative safety of suburbia with their wistful dreams of the distant USA into the underworld dives and dankest dregs of London: a twilight realm of dodgy promoters, producers, managers, wheelers and drug-dealers, small-time crooks, cookers of books and floozies on the game? Perhaps the skiffle craze had a bit to do with it. Lonnie Donegan’s cover of American folk song ‘Rock Island Line’ was the kick-off.4 After watching him perform it on television, thousands of kids from St. Just-in-Penwith to Dunnet Head were electric-shocked into forming their own skiffle groups and having a go themselves. The traditional skiffle instruments – tea chest and broom handle bass, banjo and washboard – were mostly fashioned from bits and pieces around the home. John Lennon and fellow Quarry Bank boys were among them. Mike Jagger was not.
While the craze did hit Dartford Grammar School, and while some of his friends did get guitars and start jamming together annoyingly at break and after lunch, Mike kept his distance. Which was not for want of an instrument. He already had one. He didn’t go a bundle on Elvis, and had been left cold by the Comets and their avuncular leader Bill Haley. Mike’s first rock’n’roll obsession, if that’s not too strong a word for such a laid-back boy, was ‘the architect of rock’n’roll’, Little Richard.5 Which is interesting. This was rock’n’roll’s first black purveyor, a hysterical hollerer and unhinged performer who whipped up a storm with his deranged act, overt sexuality and devil-may-care stance. There was both a bold masculinity and mincing femininity about Richard, which at first went over the heads of many onlookers. To be gay in the forties and early fifties, let alone to be black and gay, was to risk public lynching or a prison sentence. Richard, thumbing his nose, would take to the stage in drag, from the safety net of his alias, ‘Princess LaVonne’. He fell into rhythm and blues in Atlanta, adopted the camp pompadour hairdo of jump blues singer Billy Wright, painted his face, got himself up in flashy gear and fashioned an ostentatious and highly provocative act. His were among the earliest shows at which black and white audiences would integrate, to dance with each other. Great swathes of America were alarmed by this fearsome racial mingling, holding rock’n’roll, the Devil’s music, to blame.
Richard cocked his leg atop his piano, spilled his jewels into the audience and became more defiantly pansyish by the week, so that the white guys could tell for certain he wasn’t after their chicks. Knickers were thrown. Urine was leaked. Collective loss of control went viral, all across the sexes. Richard played to both camps. He married, but batted and bowled. He came out, and went back in. He was openly homosexual again, then declared himself bisexual. He later experienced a Christian calling, denouncing sexualities other than straight as sinful. What was he on? His wife and a string of lovers protested his couldn’t-be-more-masculine virility. Quelle hoot. The boy Jagger saw, read and listened. He was getting ideas.
Buddy Holly (‘That’ll Be the Day’, ‘Peggy Sue’, ‘True Love Ways’) was Mike’s other first musical love. Accompanied by his school mate Dick Taylor, Jagger saw him perform live during Holly’s only UK tour, at the Woolwich Granada Cinema. He was entranced by the young American’s gauche demeanour, by his hiccuppy vocals and sweet falsetto. Divine coincidence, then (is there such a thing?), that the Stones would have their first Top 10 single with a cover of Holly’s Bo-Diddley-beat ‘Not Fade Away’, which saw its UK release on 21 February 1964.6
It was the secret musical tastes of Dick Taylor that awakened him. Mike Jagger’s first visit to the humble Bexleyheath home of his school friend was a descent into Aladdin’s cave. Plumber’s son Dick had an unexpected record collection that almost caused his eyes to fall out. Forget Buddy and Little Richard, this was proper music: the gurglings, stirrings, whinings and twangings that comprised the sounds of Chicago and of the mythical Deep South. Here were Howlin’ Wolf, Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters and the rest. Mike was both thrilled and troubled by them. They got under his skin. They dragged him back, demanding his ears. Where could he get records like this? Nowhere local, that was for sure. Hunting them down required both effort and excursion. Mike and Dick took to jumping on trains to London on Saturdays, to scour the Soho record shops for imports. They spied Chuck Berry in a documentary.7 Scales fell. The schoolboys were sold.
Thus enlightened, only now was Mike stirred to have a go himself, with a handful of classmates. Most of whom failed to hear things his way. Contrasting influences aforementioned drew a strange curdle from the raw Jagger throat. It did weird things to his already peculiar face, in particular his mouth, by which the lads in those here-today, gone-tomorrow schoolboy groups were put off. Embarrassed and unsettled by his cringey crooning, they gave him the ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you’ brush-off. Was he bothered? Nah. He was already immune to criticism, even at sixteen. He had discovered and was harnessing his superpower, an astonishing out-of-nowhere gift for mimicry. His first group, Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys, played no venue beyond Dick Taylor’s front room, to no greater audience than a single gobsmacked fan, Dick Taylor’s mother.
Where was Keith, at this point? Still out in the wasteland. Making his way to and from Dartford Tech, the runner-up school for boys who had failed the Eleven Plus but weren’t quite hopeless enough for the Secondary Modern. Not bothered about most subjects. Turned on by English. Allergic to both homework and discipline. Playing truant when he could get away with it. Learning how to fight back. Getting the boot in. Getting minded, minding one or two himself, and getting his head round the hard life. Would you Adam’n’Eve it, Doris’s littl’un in ’is short trarsers, havin’ a good ol’ ding-dong in front of ’Er Madge in Westminster Abbey. Come again? Keith Richards, rock’s quintessential anarchistic reprobate, was once a wet-behind-the-ears chorister for the Queen? You heard.
‘That’s where I learned a lot about singing and music and working with musicians,’ he asserts. ‘I learned how to put a band together – it’s basically the same job – and how to keep it together.’ Then the voice breaks, farewell choir, end of cosy coach trips in and out of London on the way to competitions. Resit all the lessons from the year you mostly missed. Go down a year, even. What the fuck? Life’s not fair. Take it on the chin or get bitter and take it out on other people, it’s up to you. What did you expect? Richards has better reasons than Jagger to lose faith and kick back at authority. He becomes more than merely a rebel. Keith’s an outlaw, now, a pirate. He dresses like one. He courts the reputation of the outcast. It starts small and builds. Like future bandmate Brian Jones, he takes cross-country in double P.E., but never runs it. He even wins prizes for it. He hunkers down elsewhere, taking the piss, having a fag and a laarf. He goes the distance to get himself expelled. In the end, he succeeds. If not for the art teacher who takes pity on him and paves his way into art school, he might have made Borstal.8
Keith’s salvation, whaddya know, is music. Most of it emanates from the radio, songs that lighten his cheating mother’s heart. He doesn’t yet know that Ma Doris is carrying on with a toyboy taxi driver half her age behind husband Bert’s back. Keith won’t put two and two together for a few more years. When eventually he does, his childhood is rewritten. It’ll all come out, and Doris will leave Bert once Keith leaves home. She’ll even marry her toyboy, far down the line. He will oddly change his surname to her married name of Richards, not she hers to his. Life will have kicked off by then. Keith will be somewhat preoccupied, being a Stone, getting wasted, getting busted for drugs and guns. He will think, from time to time, about going in search of his long-lost father. But he is fearful. The only man whose approval he ever craved will surely be ashamed of him for all the law-breaking. He puts it off and off, leaving the longing on the top shelf of his mind. He won’t see his father again for twenty years. When eventually Keith plucks up courage to track him down, through relatives, to pathetic digs in a Bexley public house, father and son are reunited. Does Keith see all this before it happens, as kids do sometimes? Does the ghost of his fall-out future steal in to torment? If it does, Keith’s taking no notice. He is in denial. There are worse places.
Music is his compensation. He can’t tell the difference between a black voice and a white one, but is lulled by the larynxes of Louis and Ella, of Sarah Vaughan, Fats Domino and Big Bill Broonzy. Don’t forget Grandad Gus’s input, de lure of de jazz. The Django Reinhardts, the Stéphane Grappellis. There’s even classical. The orchestras! The horns! The strings! Whatever it sounds like, it is Keith’s first drug. He gets in and out of the Boy Scouts, emerging with a love of being in a boy band, another substitute for the lack of blood brothers. He also leaves with survival skills, deeply human instincts, an affinity with the natural world, and a knife. Thenceforth, for the rest of his life, he will rarely be without one. His love of weaponry will eventually prove fatal, though not to him. He gets his first guitar from his mother, a seven-quid job, at the age of fifteen. At around the same time that Jagger finds his voice.
The Dartford railway station Jagger-meets-Richards story is so old, so often told, its tread is more worn than the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral. Along lopes Jagger, stripey-scarfed new student at the London School of Economics (motto: Rerum cognoscere causus9) and somewhat full of his old self. Dartford folk can smell cockiness a mile off. Who’s this one going to be, then, Prime Minister? Better smarten hisself up a bit. He wears it well, his new-found confidence, and carries a clutch of records under one arm that might confuse the casual observer. Little Walter. The Best of Muddy Waters. Chuck Berry’s Rockin’ at the Hops. Not the kind of LP you see for sale down Woolworth’s or reviewed in the rags. Who’s this likely lad lolloping along the platform? Mind how you go, son, look at him, does he know which way is up? The boys do a double-take. Wait, isn’t that wossname? Don’t I know him from somewhere?
They board the same London-bound train, and get talking. Mick is heading for Charing Cross station and the LSE campus in Clare Market, Holborn, down the Strand and up Kingsway. Hapless Keith’s on his way to his deadbeat, backstreet art school in Sidcup, where he has fallen in with a bunch of blues lovers including Dick Taylor, Mike Jagger’s record-collector mate from the Grammar. The pale, drainpipe-legged one studies the cool-dude one. Something about him? Yeah, know what you mean. Didn’t that kid sell the other kid an ice cream one summer? All the yob wants to know is where the cocky bloke buys his records. What do you mean, you send off to America for them? Where to? So distracted and kerfuffled is Keith that he almost forgets to get off. Yeah, it’s me. You’re singing a bit? I’m playing a bit. You know Dick Taylor? What you doing Saturday? It’s ‘Mick’, now, is it? Gotcha.
But what’s puzzling you is the nature of my game.