Amid the Victorian splendour of Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, he saw all his greatest idols finally made flesh: tall, austere John Lee Hooker singing ‘Boogie Chillen’’, the song that could have been describing that former well-spoken Dartford schoolboy (‘The blues is in him . . . and it’s got to come out’); dapper Memphis Slim with a skunk’s-tail streak of white through his hair; Willie Dixon, the blues’ great backroom boy, almost as big and bulky as his stand-up bass; jokey T-Bone Walker, playing his guitar behind his head in the way Jimi Hendrix would ‘invent’ a few years later. There was no security in the modern sense, and afterwards the bluesmen were freely accessible to their fans, onstage below the hall’s massive pipe organ. One of the lesser names, ‘Shaky Jake’ Harris, presented the London boys with a harmonica, which became the proud centrepiece of a blues singsong on the long drive home. Mick, Keith and Brian were supposed to reimburse the van’s owner, Graham Ackers, for petrol and other incidental costs – amounting to 10s 6d, or about 52p each – but never did.
If the Rollin’ Stones’ gigs still paid only peanuts, there was another reward which their blues masters in Manchester had never known. Increasingly, after the night’s performance, they found themselves being mobbed by teenage girls, whose excitement their faithful interpretation of John Lee or T-Bone only partially explained. Most sought only autographs and flirtation, but a good few made it clear – clearer than young British women had done since the bawdy eighteenth century – that a deeper level of musical appreciation was on offer. Though Mick and Brian were the main objectives, Keith, Stu, Dick Taylor, even Phelge, as their occasional assistant roadie, shared in the unexpected dividends. Most nights, a bevy of these proto-groupies would accompany them back to 102 Edith Grove for what, due to space restrictions, was a largely open-plan sex session. Some were deemed worthy of a second invitation, for example a pair of identical twins named Sandy and Sarah partial to Mick and Phelge – neither of whom could tell one from the other, or bothered to try.
He would later become legendary for his apparent callousness towards females – yet among the Edith Grove flatmates it was Mick who showed the most awareness of how young and often vulnerable many of their visitors were to be with older men so late at night. One girl, after having had sex with two of his flatmates in succession, broke the news that she’d run away from home and the police were looking for her. The others were all for getting rid of her as soon as possible, before police officers came knocking at the door. But Mick, showing himself his father’s son once again, took the trouble to talk to the runaway at length about her problems at home, finally persuading her to telephone her parents and arrange for them to come and collect her.
THE WINTER OF 1962–3 turned into Britain’s worst for one hundred years, with arctic temperatures setting in long before Christmas and London hit as heavily by snow as the remotest Scottish Highlands. At 102 Edith Grove, it was almost as cold inside as out. Mick could escape to centrally heated lecture theatres and libraries at LSE, but Brian and Keith had to spend all day huddled over one feeble electric fire in skimpy ‘shorty’ overcoats, rubbing their hands and blowing their fingernails like penurious Dickensian clerks. The household was further enlarged by a Cheltenham friend of Brian’s named Richard Hattrell, a simple soul who did everything Brian told him and believed everything he said. One night when the Stones were out on a gig, Hattrell crept into Brian’s bed to snatch a little warmth and rest. Brian awoke him, brandishing two amplifier leads and threatening to electrocute him. The credulous Hattrell fled into the snow wearing only underpants. Not until he started to turn blue from exposure would the others let him back inside.
At the end of each week, Mick, Brian and Keith bought, borrowed or stole the music trades and scanned the pop charts, never thinking for one second they might ever figure there. America’s immemorial dominance was maintained by white solo singers like Neil Sedaka, Roy Orbison and Del Shannon. Black artists scored mainly by pandering to the white audience, as in novelty dance numbers like Chubby Checker’s ‘Let’s Twist Again’ and Little Eva’s ‘The Locomotion’. Britain seemed capable of producing only limp cover versions and wildly uncool Trad jazz. The one exception was an oddball minor hit called ‘Love Me Do’ by a Liverpool group with funny, fringed haircuts and the almost suicidally bizarre name of the Beatles. Rather than the usual slick studio arrangement, it had a rough R&B feel, with harmonica riffs very much like those Brian and Mick played in the clubs every night. They felt like their pockets had been picked by these insectoid upstarts from the unknown far north.
In October, Dick Taylor, the last of Mick’s old school friends still playing with him, had won a place at the Royal College of Art and decided to leave the band. There was some idea that Richard Hattrell might take over on bass guitar, but a course of lessons with their Ealing Club colleague Jack Bruce showed Hattrell to be totally unmusical. He returned to Tewkesbury and, worn down by his life with the Stones (a syndrome to be oft-repeated in the future) suffered a burst appendix and almost died. At the same time, their latest temporary drummer, Carlo Little, moved on to a better gig with Screaming Lord Sutch’s backing band, the Savages. There were thus two vacancies to be filled, this time with Mick and Keith as Brian’s co-judges. Auditions took place on a cold, slushy December day at a Chelsea pub called the Wetherby Arms.
The first spot was quickly filled by Tony Chapman, an experienced drummer with a successful semi-pro band called the Cliftons, who’d become bored by their conventional rock repertoire. Having got the gig, Chapman suggested that the Cliftons’ bass guitarist should also come and audition at the Wetherby Arms. He was a hollow-cheeked, unsmiling Londoner, even shorter and bonier than Mick, who held his instrument at an odd near-vertical angle. He had been born William Perks but used the stage name Bill Wyman.
Here, the fit seemed more problematic. At twenty-six, Bill was seven years older than Mick and Keith, a married man with a small son and steady day job on the maintenance staff of a department store. Furthermore, he lived in Penge, a name which British sophisticates find eternally amusing, along with Neasden, Wigan and Scunthorpe. Added to his seeming advanced age, archaic backswept hairstyle and south London accent, it instantly condemned him in Mick and Brian’s eyes as an Offer and an Ernie. He possessed one major saving grace, however, in the form of a spare amplifier, roughly twice as powerful as the band’s existing ones, which he told them they were free to use. So, notwithstanding the satirical nudges and Nanker grimaces of the ex-grammar school duo behind his back, working-class Wyman was in.
He for his part had serious misgivings about joining a group of scruffy arty types so much his junior – especially after seeing their domestic arrangements. ‘[The flat] was an absolute pit which I shall never forget – it looked like it was bomb-damaged,’ he would recall. ‘The front room overlooking the street had a double bed with rubbish piled all round it [and] I’ve never seen a kitchen like it . . . permanently piled high with dirty dishes and filth everywhere . . . I could never understand why they carried on like this . . . It could not just have been the lack of money. Bohemian angst most likely.’
Despite having left school at the age of sixteen, Bill was just as intelligent and articulate as Mick or Brian. He soon realised that although the Rollin’ Stones might not be going anywhere in particular, their singer definitely was – if not necessarily in music. While Keith merely seemed like ‘a Teddy Boy who’d spit in his beer to ensure nobody drank it’ and had ‘no plans to work’, and Brian regarded music as an irreplaceable vocation, Mick talked often of becoming a lawyer or perhaps a journalist, as the LSE graduate Bernard Levin had done with spectacular success. At times, he did not even seem quite comfortable with his new first name. ‘He hated being called Mick,’ Bill remembers. ‘In his own eyes he was still Mike.’
He was keeping up his LSE studies despite