Mike’s physical prowess showed through early at Maypole infants’ school and afterwards at Wentworth County Primary, to which his Maypole teacher, Ken Llewellyn, an expatriate Welshman, had also transferred. Mr Llewellyn remembers him fondly as one of an outstanding junior class whose ascent to grammar school and university seemed assured. ‘It was a joy to teach them. They were full of life, full of all sorts of questions. I took them for games as well. Mike was already looking like a useful cricketer. If I remember him at all, it’s running in from the playground with both knees grazed and a great big smile on his face.’
John Spinks lived in Heather Drive, Dartford, not far from the Jaggers in Denver Road. He was Mike’s playmate in the sandpit that lay between their houses. When Mike accidentally impaled a hand on a spiked metal railing, it was John Spinks who, with praiseworthy coolness, pulled it free. To John, he seemed at times almost too conventionally law-abiding and obedient. ‘I always thought he was a bit of a mother’s boy. He did everything he was told at home. He was an indiarubber character, really. He could bend any way to stay out of trouble.’
Even as a small boy, his other friend Robert Wallis remembers, he had a strangely remote, abstracted quality – a sense of being preoccupied with matters far weightier than their schoolboy games together. Joe Jagger was currently acting as adviser to a commercial TV programme called Seeing Sport, designed to promote physical fitness in children. Once a week, he would take his elder son with him to the studios, to act as model for instruction about athletics or camping. ‘Mike is going to show you how to light the fire,’ the voiceover would say, or: ‘Here’s Mike, getting into the tent.’ ‘He became a bit of a star for doing that,’ Robert Wallis says. ‘He always had some interest outside the ones we had as a group. He gave the idea the he’d sooner be somewhere else than with us, doing far more glamorous things.’
Robert, John and Mike took the eleven-plus exam together, passing it as effortlessly as Ken Llewellyn had predicted. This crucial step determined whether they would go on to receive a mundane basic education at a secondary modern or be admitted to the far superior privileges of Dartford Grammar. Eva Jagger had every reason to be proud of her boy in his smart new uniform of gold-trimmed maroon blazer and cap.
Dartford Grammar School, when Mike Jagger arrived there in the early Fifties, possessed most features of an English public school – masters in gowns, house captains, societies, ceremonial Speech Days, ritualized athletics and sport. As its school magazine, The Dartfordian, attests, scholarship was generally excellent, yielding an unusually large annual export to Britain’s redbrick universities. Prominent in the school curriculum was the Army Cadet Force, designed to cushion the shock of the two years’ compulsory National Service each boy would face before embarking on his chosen career.
At Dartford Grammar, Mike Jagger’s academic promise – and his buoyant enthusiasm – mysteriously evaporated. From the first form to the fifth he merely coasted, doing only enough work to stay out of trouble. It became a sore provocation to the several teachers in whose subjects he was obviously gifted. The senior languages master, Dr Bennett, particularly resented his indifference, for – aided by unusual powers of mimicry – he showed all the signs of a first-class linguist. ‘There was one occasion when I spoke to him about his attitude very severely,’ Dr Bennett says. ‘He was so deliberately insulting that I simply knocked him down.’
His apathy extended even to sport. He seemed to lose interest in cricket after discovering he was not the deadly spin bowler he had supposed himself at Wentworth. The only sport he played regularly was basketball, his father’s speciality. Joe Jagger, in fact, introduced the sport to Dartford Grammar and helped coach the Basketball Society, of which Mike was Hon. Sec. ‘He was most keen on that, I think, because it was American,’ Robert Wallis says. ‘Mike was the one who had real American basketball boots to play in when the rest of us only had gym shoes.’
His appearance, from the age of fourteen onward, seemed to reflect his slack and insubordinate attitude. The chubby, laughing schoolboy of Ken Llewellyn’s class had grown into an adolescent whose skinny frame, hovering on the edge of effeteness, caused uniform distaste among his teachers. Likewise his face, with its somnolent eyes, its retroussé nose; most of all, the wide, sagging lips, set in what seemed a permanent grimace of either scorn or dumb insolence.
As he moved higher in the school, he became adept at flouting its dress regulations. Instead of the prescribed black lace-up shoes, he would arrive for class in French slip-on moccasins. In place of his blazer, he acquired a black, gold-threaded ‘Teddy boy’ jacket, which, to Dr Bennett’s annoyance, he wore even to the annual Founder’s Day ceremony.
He was already a source of much discussion at the nearby girls’ grammar school, where opinion as to his attractiveness remained sharply divided. In terms of conventional handsomeness he was obviously a non-starter. Yet some of the very girls who dismissed him as ugly or ‘a weed’ still looked for him in the after-school swarm and made bold attempts to talk to him – since he seemed uninterested in talking to them. It became almost a competition to pierce that scornful reserve and bring forth that rare smile which could split open the sullen face, making him look still the happy schoolboy who had laughed into the sun.
In 1955 came the plague called rock ’n’ roll. Bill Haley and the Comets invaded Britain’s sleepy hit parade with Rock Around the Clock, See You Later, Alligator, Everybody Razzle Dazzle and Rockin’ Through the Rye. Britain’s regimented teenage boys awoke to the sound of a braying sax, a slapping, spinning double bass, a voice that did not croon but jerked and jogged and hiccupped and jumped. What Haley was in fact playing was black rhythm and blues, purged of its bite and wit and wrapped in a swing or country-western beat. The very phrase ‘rock and roll’ was black slang for energetic fucking. Even in America, its origin had scarcely been realized. In Britain it was simply the most exciting noise that ever confused an adolescent’s glands. A British tour by Haley and the Comets in 1956 left a trail of wrecked theatres and slashed cinema seats. Music became, for the first time, a source of conflict between the young, who adored this outrageous new noise, and their parents, who loathed it and strove to extinguish it by every possible means.
A few months earlier, the British Decca label had released a record which, though quieter than Haley’s joyous gibberish, was destined to transform many lives more permanently. The record – one of the newfangled ‘long playing’ kind – was New Orleans Joys, by the Chris Barber Jazz Band.
Barber, twenty-five, led Britain’s most commercially successful Dixieland band. He remained, however, principally an archivist, devoted to keeping alive sources and style that might otherwise have been overlooked in the current ‘Trad’ boom. His New Orleans Joys LP included two blues songs played in the ‘skiffle’ style evolved in the Depression years, when musicians were often reduced to instruments extemporized from household utensils. The songs, Rock Island Line and John Henry, were performed by a primitive rhythm section of double bass, kitchen washboard and banjo, the last played by a skinny Glaswegian named Tony Donegan who had changed his name to Lonnie in honour of the American bluesman Lonnie Johnson.
The two songs, released on a single in 1956, became a stupendous British Top Ten hit. Haley and his group, in their plaid jackets and bow ties, owed their appeal to outlandish remoteness. But Donegan, with his nasal whine, his ex-serviceman’s haircut and backing of mundane domestic implements, made comparably exciting sounds that anyone could reproduce. Within days of Lonnie Donegan’s first appearance on national television, acolyte skiffle groups had sprung up all over Britain. The craze centred on London’s Soho, its jazz cellars and newly fashionable espresso coffee houses, into whose gloomy recesses record-company talent scouts now plunged in a hectic search for ersatz Lonnie Donegans. For the first time ever, musical talent was held to be of secondary importance to looks. Any boy who played a guitar and wore a plaid shirt with the collar turned up, if he sat around long enough