Chapter Five
Brian Jones rented a flat for fifteen pounds a week at 102 Edith Grove, World’s End, during the late summer of 1962. The neighbourhood took its name from a famous Grade II Listed pub on the main drag, the Kings Road. ‘World’s End’ was the size of it, the place being practically unfit for human habitation. The damp, fetid fleapit with its redundant bathtub in the kitchen and a disgusting communal lavatory on the floor above became even more squalid after Mick and Keith moved in. It was as if they took pride in the filthy environment so at odds with the clean, warm homes from which the three of them hailed. The virtually destitute trio pilfered food from the fridges of other tenants in the building, returned empty beer bottles gathered at parties to local off-licences to claim refunds, and hurled cutlery and crockery into the backyard from the kitchen window instead of washing it up. The floor was a moving, mouldering feast of grimy garments, stinking underpants, discarded food and fag ends. Keith’s mother Doris wasn’t having it. She started visiting once a week to tackle the slum and take home laundry. But she was fighting a losing battle, and soon gave up.
The band, which at this point still included pianist Ian Stewart, supported Blues Incorporated for the next few months. Mick and Brian also sat in with the main act. Harold Pendleton was persuaded, by Chris Barber and enthusiast Giorgio Gomelsky, to launch a blues night at his Marquee Jazz Club every Thursday. When Blues Incorporated were booked by the BBC for 12 July 1962, they were invited to leave their ‘long-haired effeminate singer’ Jagger behind. Alexis talked Pendleton into allowing Brian’s and Mick’s group to perform at the Marquee instead. The audience was underwhelmed by these lanky louts, and made clear their displeasure. Pendleton was livid. But Korner, still convinced that these boys ‘had something’, continued to champion their cause. Pendleton relented, and booked them again to appear at the Marquee. They carried on performing at the Ealing Club.
Promoter, ducker, diver and all-round lovable character John Mansfield had launched his own successful Ricky Tick Jazz Club at the old Star and Garter Hotel in Windsor, Berkshire, about twenty-five miles west of central London. Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated had gone down such a storm on the opening night, 7 December 1962, that he was now champing at the bit to book these curious Stones for the follow-up, a week later. He phoned Ian Stewart, the only day-job-employed band member who had become by default their booker. As ‘Stu’ was the only one with a car, a pre-war Rover, he had also become their roadie. While Stu delivered the drum kit, speakers and amps, the group travelled to Windsor by train.
‘By the time they were nearly ready to start their first set, the room had already filled to capacity,’ recalled John in his memoir, which he self-published shortly before his death in 2019. Because he printed only a handful of copies, few Stones fans are aware of his importance in the band’s development. Margaret Kirby, former manager of both Arts and Heritage and the local museum in Windsor, shared with me her personal copy of John’s book, one of few in existence.
‘It’s fair to say, most of the crowd had no idea what they were about to experience,’ John wrote. ‘The physical appearance of the Stones was quite shocking to many of the teenagers who had crammed into the club that night. They looked more like caged wild animals. Their stage presence was unlike anything they had witnessed before. At the front of the stage, two microphones were set out in pole positions. Behind these, the band were busy getting the final things ready for their first set. An eerie sense of anticipation hung over the audience, many of whom were looking on, wide-eyed and open-mouthed.’
Their opener that night was ‘Bo Diddley’, the great man’s own number from 1955.
‘It was electrifying,’ said Mansfield. ‘Forget the reception they’d received at the Marquee, back in July. Here in Windsor, the reaction to the band could not have been more different … Other numbers followed, like Muddy Waters’s ‘I Want to be Loved’, Bo Diddley’s ‘Road Runner’ and Chuck Berry’s ‘Come On’. The clapping and stamping was becoming frightening.
‘This phenomenal debut by the Stones had been a triumph. What a night! … [It was] probably the most amazing reception the Stones had ever had, and the most amazing response to a group I’d ever witnessed. I tried to book them straight away for the following Friday, but they already had a gig booked for then. They were eager to play again, so we booked them on 11 and 25 January. Bill Wyman mentioned the Paramounts from Southend as a possible alternative, and gave me Gary Brooker’s telephone number. The two had met when Bill’s group, the Cliftons, played on the same bill as the Paramounts earlier in the year.’
Despite the fact that the Ricky Tick was the Stones’ first-ever provincial booking and their biggest success to date, as well as being Bill Wyman’s own debut with the band, none of the band ever referred to it. Not even Wyman, the meticulous diarist and collector of Stones memorabilia and ephemera, who assumed the role of Rolling Stones’ unofficial historian, and who might have been expected to record the fact for posterity.
‘[Not] in any book, magazine or radio interview that I know of,’ said Mansfield, clearly baffled. ‘Bill did subsequently acknowledge it in a later book, but only after I had pointed out the oversight to him. In contrast to the Windsor gig, just six days later on 20 December, the Stones appeared at the Scene Club in London, and attracted six people!’
The winter of 1962–63 in the UK was the coldest since 1740. Heavy snow obliterated England over Christmas and the New Year, rendering roads impassable and paralysing communities. Businesses closed, and coal, food and other necessities were in short supply. Back at the Edith Grove hellhole, life was getting desperate. Not only were the water pipes frozen and the toilet too iced to flush, but Brian had been sacked from his job for stealing and there was very little money coming in. Brian, Mick and Keith took to a shared bed and stayed there, just to keep each other warm. Brian did somehow manage to wash and dry his baby-blond locks every day. The others could barely believe that this was his priority. Bill rocked up every couple of days with food, cigarettes and coins for the electricity meter. Brian hustled even harder to get the group gigs. He spent cash they couldn’t afford on having fly posters printed, which he and Stu went plastering across west and south-west London. It was the only way they could keep their burgeoning barmy army informed where they would be appearing next.
Drummer Tony Chapman pulled out, and was replaced by Charlie Watts. John Mansfield insisted that Charlie played his first gig with the band at the Flamingo Club on Wardour Street on 14 January 1963. It is indeed on record that the band made an appearance at that club on that specific date. The Stones and others have stated that Charlie’s debut happened at the Ealing Club two days earlier. Wherever, whatever: the classic line-up was now set in Stones. On Friday 11 January, ahead of either of the aforementioned, John and his business partner Philip Hayward, a firm friend since their army days, welcomed the Stones back to the Ricky Tick for their second gig at that venue. Guess what, another roaring success. John and Philip took the band to the local Drury House restaurant afterwards to celebrate.
‘We sat at a large table by the front window, and treated them to a three-course meal with wine,’ said John. ‘They devoured it like it was their first meal for a week. Philip and I were to do this a further six times. You would think that the Stones would remember our generosity. You’d be wrong.’
As well as the good time had by all, a new marketing ploy was first thought of. ‘Sat just behind us,’ recalled John, ‘was Henry the [local] bookmaker with his wife and twin daughters. Across the tables, Mick and Keith were having a chat with the two girls. Henry looked at them disapprovingly; they looked as though they might have just survived a blizzard [they probably had]. As we were leaving, Keith said something flirtatious to the girls. Henry stood up, and with hands stretched out in front of his daughters, declared, “I wouldn’t let a daughter of mine go out with a Rolling Stone!”’1
John Mansfield’s wry aside about the Stones’ ingratitude was justified. This was a man whose investment, perseverance, enthusiasm and flair had helped the band to turn a corner and begin their assault. He had staged the Stones to great acclaim eight times in as many weeks, and had turned hundreds, perhaps thousands of fans on to their music. But he was never accorded so much as a footnote in the fairy tale, except as a prompted afterthought by Bill Wyman in a book published after he had left the band. The corporate line has always been that the Crawdaddy Club at the old Station Hotel in Richmond was where it all began, having been the setting in which the line-up that would push on into fame and glory was consolidated. But Mansfield deserves a formal place in Stones history as a principal enabler.
There is no question that his vision, commitment and support were vital to the band’s progress. That he and partner Phil Hayward found themselves wiped from the narrative suggests an extraordinary level of control in the rewriting of Stones history from its earliest stages, before there was ever such a thing as ‘the Stones machine’.
We are well aware that deletions, omissions, embroidery and blatant fiction were the name of the PR game back then. Massively so. A good example of this is the way in which Freddie Mercury’s academic qualifications, should I say lack of them, were ‘fixed’ by Queen’s original publicist Tony Brainsby in order to match his intelligence to that of his three impressive bandmates, all of whom were educated to the Nth. Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon could have gone on to pursue careers in astrophysics, dentistry and engineering respectively. Their singer, who had shown early academic promise but lost his heart to rock’n’roll and was kicked out of his expensive boarding school in India, had no choice but to become a superstar.
Either the Stones, their playmakers or both plotted a trajectory that required streamlining. Less being more, their dramatic, rags-to-riches tale needed as few passengers and hangers-on as possible. In order to concentrate and focus their brilliance, superfluous middle men were deleted. They would make stars of the most headline-worthy individuals, whose personal flamboyance would reflect back favourably on the band and in turn become part of their legend. The same tactic was employed in the dismissal of pianist Ian Stewart, whose jaw, indeed his whole face, didn’t fit. A musician too many in the line-up, he was deemed surplus to requirements on stage. By whom? We are getting there.
Septuagenarian Scottish singer-songwriter Rab Noakes swore allegiance to the Stones right from the start. The musician and producer who has enjoyed a fifty-year career both as a solo artist and with the likes of Lindisfarne, Stealers Wheel, Gerry Rafferty and Barbara Dickson recalls intoxicating days when he and his brother Alan purchased the Stones’ first single, ‘Come On’, and saw the band on Ready Steady Go!, their first major television exposure. ‘They wore,’ Rab recalls, ‘matching waistcoats.
‘In September 1963, I travelled from my home town in Fife to Glasgow [sixty-five miles away] to work there. On my first night in the city, I went out to explore. As I walked up Renfield Street, I saw a poster at the glorious Odeon Cinema – a fabulous art deco building formerly known as the Paramount, opened in 1934 – advertising a forthcoming package tour. Topping the bill were the Everly Brothers, who had always been a big deal to me. Also performing were Bo Diddley, Little Richard, and way down in the small letters, the Rolling Stones. Being there was a must, so I was back the following night with enough money to purchase my ticket for the early show on 17 October. I treated myself to a good ticket: I was in Row D.
‘The Stones were thrilling,’ Rab remembers. ‘Their set was probably no more than about twelve minutes long. They were dressed in “the band-suit”: short houndstooth-checked jackets and black trousers. Even then, that was looking a little incongruous. It didn’t survive beyond that tour.’
Jagger the watchful student observed Little Richard intently from the wings, making mental note of the seasoned entertainer’s sexually charged stage presence and outrageous antics. Everything about Mick’s future stage personality was ignited that night.
‘Little Richard’s stage show was terrific,’ affirms Rab. ‘At one point, he left the stage and went up the right aisle. He somehow traversed a row of seats and came back down the left aisle. It was really exciting. Next, he removed his jacket and draped it on his piano stool before taking his shirt off. He tossed it into the crowd, and it landed right in front of me. How could I resist? I leaned forward and grabbed a sleeve. For years afterwards, the cuff of Little Richard’s shirt lurked in a drawer in my childhood bedroom. One day, after I wasn’t really returning to stay there any more, my mum did some tidying. Without realising its significance, she threw the rag into the refuse. It was gone.
‘It doesn’t detract, though, from the excitement of the evening. The Everly Brothers, who were on the wane by then, frankly weren’t that thrilling. They strolled through the hits without much enthusiasm. It was the stately Bo Diddley, the astounding Little Richard, and of course the newly exciting Rolling Stones, who brought the night alive.’
His next encounter came not long after that.
‘On reading the Sunday Mail on Sunday 12 January,’ he says, ‘I spotted an ad for the Rolling Stones at The Barrowland Ballroom the following day. I went there and, like many others, paid at the door. What a difference a few months had made! The band was tight, and fully on top of what they were doing. The Barrowland’s layout was very different back then. There wasn’t a stage as such, only a bandstand. The Stones were pretty close to the audience down at the front. The over-capacity crowd in those pre-health and safety days was tightly packed. Dangerously so. There was much screaming and yelling, and a constant stream of people, mostly lassies, who had fainted and were being moved aloft to the exits.
‘This show was great. There had been more releases such as the second single, ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ and the ‘You Better Move On’ EP. All those songs and other raw blues numbers were the repertoire. Their first LP was an essential acquisition. The Stones, along with being great in themselves, took their place among the essential gatekeepers. Long before algorithm connections began their often hilariously misguided “If you liked that, you’ll love this” routine, we had to follow the leads given by the artists we admired. The Beatles, for example, opened a window on Tamla Motown. Bob Dylan later led us to folk songs, including even the riches available from my own Scottish territory. The Stones’ huge revelation was an astonishing list of blues stalwarts. Their single releases were a must, over the years.
‘I remember reading a quote from Keith along the lines of, “You’ve got to hit it hard with your first record and keep on doing it”. And so they did. Their manager Andrew Loog Oldham famously locked Keith & Mick in a room and made them write songs. This action bore fruit soon enough with the early 1965 release of “The Last Time”, followed soon after by “Satisfaction”. They’ve kept them coming. It’s worth recalling that in those days, an old record was a dead record. It was gone. As soon as a hit tumbled down the charts and was replaced on the jukeboxes, it was finished. That was one of the reasons why you had to keep releasing new stuff. A gap could be fatal.’
Rab waited nineteen years for his next live experience of the Stones, at St James’ Park, Newcastle, the home of Newcastle United Football Club. At the first major rock show ever staged at that stadium, on 23 June 1982, they played for 38,000 fans in support of their Tattoo You album.
‘It was exciting to see them, but I’ve never been much of a fan of the big outdoor event,’ Rab admits. ‘Especially if you have to stand. I like to stand to perform, but to sit when I’m in an audience. So I have no significant memory of this one.’ Maybe the rain dulled his memory, as it drizzled all night. The twenty-five-song show kicked off with ‘Under My Thumb’ and blasted through hits including ‘Tumbling Dice’, ‘Miss You’, ‘Honky Tonk Women’, ‘Brown Sugar’, ‘Start Me Up’ and ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’. It finished with ‘Satisfaction’, the best bit of Tchaikovsky’s ‘1812 Overture’ and a pyrotechnic spurt. Phil Collins and Sting were hanging out backstage. You can’t always get what you want. The Stones would not return to St James’ Park for the next eight years.
‘The time after that,’ says Rab, recalling his next Stones adventure seventeen more years down the line, ‘was the Bridges to Babylon tour. My late wife Stephy and I went to Murrayfield2 to see that one, in June 1999. I really liked this outing. We were seated, and the stage set was astonishing. The bridge to the small stage was ingenious, as was the set they played, including blues interpretations.
‘Mick Jagger’s stagecraft is a remarkable thing. I thought it the first time I saw them, and I think it to this day. Even now, at this great age, you can hardly take your eyes off him.’
Rewind. Giorgio Gomelsky, a Georgian immigrant and dashing film industry entrepreneur with fingers in pies from shepherd’s to fish via steak and kidney, wrote about his passion for blues and jazz, and dreamed up the term ‘British Rhythm and Blues’.3 He established his own blues venue in the Station Hotel opposite Richmond railway station, in south-west London, after his boat wafted in on waves of realisation that the blues couldn’t explode as a popular mainstream genre until the teens were lured on board. Its loyal flock of nodding male beatnik aficionados was never going to take it stratospheric. So he went looking for teenagers, and chose the Station Hotel strategically: being situated only a hop and a skip from Wimbledon Art College up the road, it was likely to attract its droves of students. The Stones made their debut appearance at what was originally called the BRRB, later the Crawdaddy Club (after Bo Diddley’s song ‘Crawdad’, with which they would always end their set) on 24 February 1963. They performed to an audience of just three. There were double that number on stage.4 Undeterred, Gomelsky invited the faithful three back the following week, promising them free entry if they would each bring two friends. Previous books and biographies tell clashing stories.
‘One puts the figure at thirty people there on the opening night, and the Stones were paid seven pounds,’ recalled John Mansfield. ‘Another says that there were sixty-six people, and that they were paid twenty-four pounds. As Giorgio Gomelsky was the promoter, and was actually there, I assume that the version he told me is the most accurate.’
Word got out, putting the Crawdaddy on the map. Entrance queues began snaking around the block in the early afternoon ahead of each gig. Future Stone Ronnie Wood and other as yet unknowns – Ray Davies, Eric Clapton – waited patiently in line, as keen as anyone who pitched up to see the band billed as ‘inimitable’, ‘incomparable’ and ‘exhilarating’. As did the Beatles, by this time big stars, who attended on 14 April. They then went back with the Stones to the Edith Grove hellhole. God knows what they made of that. Perhaps they were by then too tanked to notice the squalor. New to the music scene in the capital, the Liverpudlians were keen to immerse themselves on every level.
‘When we started hanging around London, the Stones were up and coming in the clubs, and we knew Giorgio through [Brian] Epstein [the Beatles’ manager],’ said John Lennon. ‘We went down and saw them and became good friends. I remember Brian Jones came up and said, “Are you playing a harmonica or a harp on ‘Love Me Do’?” Because he knew I’d got this bottom note. I said, “A harmonica with a button,” which wasn’t really funky-blues enough; but you couldn’t get “Hey! Baby” licks on a blues harp, and we were also doing “Hey! Baby” by Bruce Channel.’5
Said Jagger, in a somewhat roundabout way, ‘They were both rivals and they were also, I mean, they were also showing the way, ’cause they were the first at this kind of … They were kind of trailblazers in a lot of ways, and they went to the United States first, y’know, they showed the way, they were big international stars – because in England, most people have never really been stars outside of England. You had your little patch, and that was it. And the Beatles kind of showed you could be big internationally.’
Illustrious visitors notwithstanding, nothing happened for the Stones immediately. Most of those early clubbers were in two minds, as well as unsure as to how they ought to react to the music. Up flashed another Gomelsky brainwave. He coerced his assistant, future rock photographer Hamish Grimes, into clambering on to a table and flinging his arms about, as if on drugs. Maybe he was. Cue audience primed to let rip in unfettered exuberance. The press roared in and wrote outraged pieces, comparing the club’s uninhibited atmosphere to frenzied religious revivalism. What? The Station Hotel’s owners threw wobblies. Afraid that such adverse publicity would bring them into disrepute, they gave Giorgio notice of heave-ho. Undeterred, the promoter simply shifted his club to a huge room under the grandstand at nearby Richmond Athletic Ground, and gifted the Stones a residency that would keep them in rent, electricity and beer for the next eight months. He also booked them to appear at the 1963 Richmond jazz festival. Take that, losers.
Re-enter John Mansfield, as though pursued by a bear,6 with whom Gomelsky was in talks about combining forces and launching their own management agency. Their intention was to sign the Stones. But the Georgian had the ball and he ran with it. He poured every drop of spunk into the band. Bill Wyman later described him as ‘a catalyst, giving the Stones the confidence when the odds were against them’. The gleeful Georgian bounced around whipping up passion for ‘his’ boys, charming press contacts, splashing publicity, yanking in favours to get them a promo film. He even managed to pull off a free demo recording, negotiated on the understanding that the studio, IBC in London’s Portland Place, would receive first refusal on the band’s first five songs. He encouraged his carefully cultivated hack friends down to see them, making clear that he expected favourable write-ups. One such journalist, Peter Jones of the Record Mirror, arrived at work the next morning raving his socks off about the band he had seen in Richmond the night before. And look, come on, you were expecting him. Another man of wealth-to-be and taste. Hope you guess his name. This blond, exigent hustler is Andrew Loog Oldham. He minces and shimmers on down to Richmond with a glint in his shark-like and the smell of lucre in his nose. He is nineteen years old. What kept him?
I found him on Twitter. He found me back. We introduced ourselves over email, and got chatting. It seemed strange, me in my urban eyrie in south London, he in his wilderness hideaway beyond Bogotà. Some 5,250 miles’ worth of North Atlantic saline separated us. That, and a whole other lifetime. I had at that stage read two of his three memoirs (I later caught up with 2011’s Rolling Stoned). He didn’t need to answer questions, he said, ‘because it is all in there’. It wasn’t quite. Contradictions prevailed, suggesting a man in the habit of revising his life as he went along. I wanted to know which Andrew I was about to get.
‘I will come,’ I said.
‘To the jungle?’
‘I’d love to meet you. I always prefer to interrogate face to face.’
‘I’ll get back to you.’
He did so. Many times. He couldn’t take the responsibility, he regretted to say. He described Colombia as ‘fifth world’, implying a backwater of terror and derangement from which I might not return. Why the hell was he living there, then? In the end, it couldn’t happen ahead of deadline. Not only was Colombia Covid red-listed, with all non-essential arrivals prohibited, but their government was refusing entry at El Dorado International to passengers landing directly from the UK. I explored other routes, preferably via the US. But Bogotà was on fire with Covid protests and mass disruptions. To reach Andrew, I would be looking at precarious rides from the capital along notorious terrorist and hostage routes. Forget insurance. I would run a high risk of being shot. Phone reception and internet access there are unreliable. He doesn’t bother with Skype or Zoom because connections disintegrate, and he has no IT help. It’s just him, his wife and five dogs.
The image is deliberate, echoing Oldham’s first impressions of Jagger as he stood watching him perform in the Station Hotel that first night he dragged himself down there, utterly mesmerised. He would later describe Mick as ‘an adolescent Tarzan, plucked from the jungle, not comfortable in his clothes’. Perhaps he couldn’t make up his mind whether to scarper or ejaculate.
He had never seen anything like it, he said. ‘They came on to me. All my preparations, ambitions and desires had just met their purpose … the music was authentic and sexually driven … It reached out and went inside me – totally. It satisfied me. I was in love … I heard what I always wanted to hear. I wanted it; it already belonged to me. Everything I’d done up until now was a preparation for this moment. I saw and heard what my life, thus far, had been for.’
Conceived during a wartime liaison between his Australian-born mother Cecelia Oldham and United States Army Air Corps lieutenant Andrew Loog, an American of Dutch heritage, he was born on 29 January 1944. He would never know his father, on account of the fact that tall, handsome airman Loog was shot down and killed over the English Channel seven months before his youngest child’s birth, and was buried in Belgium. His legitimate child and widow were back home in Texas. Andrew said that he was given his father’s surname despite the fact that it was not recorded on his birth certificate.
From the off, he was the upstart. Almost two years younger than Brian Jones, six months younger than Mick and a few weeks younger than Keith, what this privately educated lad lacked in maturity and experience he more than made up for in determination and cheek. A schoolboy songwriter, he was determined to make it as something, anything in the music business. He chased and chased the Stones until they caught him. Dasvidaniya, Gomelsky.
History paints Loog Oldham as the Stones’ first manager. Stealing them from under Giorgio’s nose while their trusting enabler was back in Switzerland burying his father, Oldham took his lead from the Beatles’ mastermind Brian Epstein, for whose NEMS management organisation he had briefly worked. Those goody-two-shoes mop tops deserved an antithesis, and he was going to be the one to give it to them. He would turn the Stones into the anti-Beatles. He would even get them signed to the very record label, Decca, that had famously sent the Beatles packing. As journalist Don Nicholl of weekly music paper Disc wrote, ‘The Beatles, who recommended the Stones to Decca, may well live to rue the day. This group could be challenging them for top places in the immediate future.’
Calculated to the point of cynical, ALO’s job was to fake it while the boys kept trying to make it. The ploy worked, and didn’t take long. Because he was too young to negotiate legal contracts, he went in with agent Eric Easton to create Impact Sound, through which they would manage, market and exploit the group. He nabbed Paul McCartney and John Lennon outside Leicester Square underground station, so the story goes, and hustled them into the Studio 51 jazz club on Great Newport Street (or was it De Lane Lea Studios? Both have been claimed) where Mick and the lads were rehearsing. There’s a nice yarn about John and Paul polishing off a song they’d been writing, right in front of the Stones. They had not only finished it, in fact, but had recorded it. With no plans to release it as a Beatles single, they handed it over to the Stones to do their worst with it as a cover. Their second single, ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ produced by Oldham and Easton, was released in September 1963. It zapped to No. 12.
Years later, John Lennon admitted that the Beatles’ gift of a song to the Stones had been less than altruistic.
‘It was only really a lick,’ he said, ‘so Paul and I went off in the corner of the room and finished the song off while they were all sitting there, talking. We came back and Mick and Keith said, “Jesus, look at that. They just went over there and wrote it.” You know, right in front of their eyes. We gave it to them. It was a throwaway. Ringo sang it for us, and the Stones did their version. It shows how much importance we put on them. We weren’t going to give them anything great, right? That was the Stones’ first record.’
Lennon was mistaken. It wasn’t. He had missed their cover of Chuck Berry’s ‘Come On’, released on 7 June 1963.
‘Anyway,’ concluded John, ‘Mick and Keith said, “If they can write a song so easily, we should try it.”’
Within four years, under Oldham’s assured tutelage, the Stones had become global superstars. By the end of that same forty-eight-month-long madness, he was off the case and out on his ear. But they owed him, this they knew. He had not only created their identity but had also produced their earliest hits, at a time when few understood what record production was. He launched the UK’s first independent production label and got away with it. But he was sucked in by the lifestyle even more comprehensively than they were. He descended to such drug-addicted depths that he came close to losing his life three times. He then vanished. He got himself back some time during the nineties. He fell in love again, married a Colombian model and actress, Esther Farfan, and moved home with her. ‘I not only fell in love with her, but I fell in love with the country,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t stand the idea of staying in England and becoming a relic.’
Now seventy-eight, he re-emerged a dozen years ago, having relaunched himself as a band manager in South America. Flaunting the wares of a rock band from Buenos Aires called the Ratones Paranoicos, whose favourite group and primary influence were the Rolling Stones, he was going at it again with all guns blazing. ‘I fell in love with them immediately,’ he said, that phrase again – well aware, because he had been there before, that that’s what it takes. He also worked with multi-instrumental Colombian artist Juan Galeano,7 who appeared to have seen the future. But Andrew’s main preoccupation was his daily satellite radio show, which connected him with Stones fans around the world and garnered him a whole new audience.
Andrew’s memoirs are whole books of cryptic throwaways. Packed with euphemisms and double entendres, they are too clever for their own good. Do we ever get a glimpse of the real him? I am still in three minds. His recollections have the awful ring of truth, but often smell as though they are straying into fantasy. Much of his prose seems to be written in code, with obscure references, suggesting that he is afraid to confront reality. Perhaps reality, for all of us, is in the habit of coming and going. Or perhaps he has forgotten what that is. His memory appears to work in movie frames and celluloid sequences. He speaks of the ambitions of his mind and groin. He alludes to homosexual encounters, to gay boy toys in the marital bed, to orgies with Brian Jones and bunches of birds in New York, even to Afghan hounds between the sheets. Did these things happen? He is mischievous about the lifts in Mick’s shoes, and about Jagger being allegedly under-endowed, a revelation that Keith also shared with the world; and about the miracle that is the Jagger hair. Did he really have sex with him? He is not going to tell me in so many words. Others reckon so. By which, we wouldn’t be surprised. The idea of the omnisexual hustler in the bed of the defiantly bisexual rocker is not exactly a stretch.
‘People say I made the Stones,’ Andrew muses in an email. ‘I didn’t. They were there already. They only wanted exploiting. They were all bad boys when I found them. I had to find a home for the songs that Mick and Keith were writing. So what if they were soppy and imitative to begin with – they had to come to the process of songwriting, through trial and error. That takes a lot of balls and front, as you find out what you really want to say and develop the confidence to believe that others will want to hear it.’
‘You must remember that I did dreams, not money,’ he tells me during our exchanges. ‘Therefore, I was inevitably expendable. This was all instinctual to me, and all that went on around my departure was, of course, horrendous and painful to a twenty-three-year-old ego (suaged by ECT, thankfully),8 [and] was par for the course for somebody who would eventually realise that this may be the last of his many lives. For me it was always about the fun of getting it done, the actuality of work. Downfalls are for the masses, the tabloids and those masquerading as above it.
‘I hired Leslie Perrin (the publicist) in 1966 in an attempt to head off the inevitable. It was too late, and the big lessons of life started to be doled out to us, or over us.
‘I do not know the Rolling Stones,’ he insists, when I ask what he thinks about them today. ‘I knew them for four short years as kids who played on the same block. And I did manage to get them into the sweet shop. It all worked very well until it didn’t, and wasn’t that a blessing. I always subscribed whatever war drum Mick and Keith beat to be a result of Allen Krime,9 with blame attached to me as it would be convenient, and you cannot expect them to have the thinking capacity beyond that of being an act.
‘He (Klein) stole our songs. That is like stealing your family and your dreams. I would not expect them to see it that simply. They have to get up every day, dust themselves off and get back into the ring. Choice, admittedly, but did Mother Teresa do anything fundamentally different?
‘They were perfect until they were not. The songs, they remain the key to life. That is why they are still there. The rest is happenstance and a work ethic. And having Joe Jagger for a father and Keith as your forever friend.
‘They were seamless. 45rpms, albums, image and stage. Always on the same level. You cannot say the same for the competition, who begrudgingly served up the hits and then retreated back to the blues.
‘I recently saw an Australian TV interview given by Roger Savage, the engineer of our first recording session at the original Marble Arch-based Olympic Studios. He emigrated shortly thereafter to Melbourne. He was in love with Carol, the receptionist, and has a very successful business there. As you’ll know, I am credited with having removed the sixth band member Ian Stewart. Obviously it’s not quite as simple as that. Anyway, Roger describes mixing the music with me and me telling him to take the piano out, not turn it down, but to take it out. He does so, reasonably astounded. The band and Stu, who is a member, come up to listen to the result. None of them says a word about what has just passed…
‘A few years later the gods of balance and free fall gave me a life, a wife and a country. I really do not speak the language [Spanish] because I have never had to work here to put food on the table, but I do speak the dream. Obviously your job is to break that down into just desserts.
‘The Stones played Bogotà a few years ago,’ he finishes. ‘I missed it. I was bringing a broken femur back into the game in Montreal, and catching up with Ozzy Osbourne. I saw them last in Seattle in 2005 with my youngest son. That band with the Pamela Anderson husband [he means Tommy Lee of Mötley Crüe, to whom Anderson is no longer married] were the support playing on their allotted stage, size the width of a handkerchief. That was a Tuesday. The very next day, the same venue was hosting Paul McCartney. The difference is time equals zeros and multitudes. Only the strong survive. And the songs are the weapon.’
This is Oldham’s redeeming shot. It may well prove, in time, to be his epitaph. It was the thing he had perceived instinctively, the secret he had always known. It always was, and always will be, about the songs.