Филип Норман – Mick Jagger (страница 14)
Brian was a blues pilgrim from even farther afield than Dartford. He had been raised in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, a bastion of stuffy propriety rivalling Kent’s Tunbridge Wells. His background was as solidly middle class as Mick’s and his educational background almost identical. The son of a civil engineer, he had attended Cheltenham Grammar School, distinguishing himself both in class and at games, though hampered in the latter by chronic asthma. Both his parents being Welsh, and his mother a piano teacher to boot, he was instinctively musical, easily mastering the piano, recorder, clarinet and saxophone before he had left short trousers. He could pick up almost any instrument and, in a minute or two, coax some kind of tune from it.
Like Mick, he turned into a rebel against middle-class convention, but in his case the process was considerably more spectacular. At the age of sixteen, while still at Cheltenham Grammar, he fathered a child with a schoolgirl two years his junior. The episode devastated his upright Welsh parents, scandalised Cheltenham (especially sensitive to such issues because of its world-renowned ‘Ladies’ College’), and even reached Britain’s main Sunday scandal sheet, the
Leaving school with two more A-levels than Mick, he could easily have gone on to university, but instead drifted from one tedious office job to another while playing alto sax with a rock ’n’ roll group (aptly named the Ramrods). He had met Alexis Korner in Cheltenham while Korner was still in the Chris Barber band; with Korner’s encouragement he’d migrated to London soon afterwards, hotly pursued by the latest young woman he had got ‘up the duff’ with their baby son. In the meantime, he taught himself to play slide guitar well – brilliantly – enough for Korner to put him into the Blues Incorporated line-up at the Ealing Club.
He was only a little older than Mick and Keith, but seemed vastly more mature and sophisticated when they talked to him following his Elmore James imposture. As a guitarist, his rapport was initially with Keith. But Mick was equally impressed by his soft, lisping voice with no trace of West Country bumpkin; his super-chic clothes and hair; his knowledge of music across the whole spectrum from pop to jazz; his surprising articulateness and literacy and wicked sense of humour; above all, his determination not to let his chaotic private life hinder him from, somehow or other, becoming a star.
Thereafter, when the Dartford boys drove to Ealing, they would make a lengthy detour to pick up Brian from his flat in Notting Hill Gate. He was supporting himself – and, to a minor extent, his girlfriend and third child – with day jobs in shops and department stores that usually ended when he was caught stealing from the cash register. Despite a seeming total lack of scruples, he had a knack of endearing himself to honest people with what Alexis Korner termed ‘a beautiful mixture of politeness and rudeness’. Whereas Mick was merely a visitor to the Korners’ flat – not always appreciated for his left-wing stridency and his patronising way of calling thirty-something Bobbie Korner ‘Auntie Bobbie’ – Brian treated the place virtually as a second home.
By now, the Ealing Club’s open-mic policy had produced other young blues singers, all similarly white and bourgeois, to challenge the kid in the cardigan. Brian – who, despite his Welsh antecedents, did not possess a singing voice – worked as a guitar/vocal duo with a sometime Oxford University student named Paul Pond (later to find fame as Paul Jones with the Manfred Mann band and, still later, as an actor, musical comedy star and radio presenter). On some nights the vocal spot with Blues Incorporated would be given to ‘Long’ John Baldry, a hugely tall, sandy-haired former street busker whose father was a police officer in Colindale; on others it went to a long-faced Middlesex boy named Art Wood whose kid brother Ronnie was among the club’s most devoted members, though not yet old enough to be served alcohol.
Occasionally, two or more vocalists at once took the stage in an implied talent contest that did not always seem to come out in the kid’s favour. Both Paul Pond and Long John Baldry had more recognisably ‘soulful’ voices, while Long John, towering over him in a shared rendition of Muddy Waters’s ‘Got My Mojo Workin’’, brought his lack of inches into uncomfortable relief. Yet Mick was the vocalist Korner always preferred. The waspish Long John – openly gay at a time when few young Britons dared to be – dismissed him as ‘all lips and ears . . . like a ventriloquist’s dummy’.
Korner also began using Mick on Blues Incorporated gigs outside the club, paying him ‘a pound or ten bob [fifty pence]’ per show. Some of these were for débutante balls at posh London hotels or country houses, in Buckinghamshire or Essex, whose front gates had porters’ lodges almost as big as the Jagger family home and front drives that seemed to go on forever. As far as Mick – or anyone in his social bracket – knew, the aristocracy had never taken the slightest interest in blues or R&B. But these young men in dinner jackets, Guards mess tunics or even kilts, proved as susceptible to Muddy, Elmore, T-Bone and Chuck as any back in proletarian Ealing; the girls might have double-barrelled surnames and horsey accents, but were no less putty in his hands when he threw his hair around. Despite the wealth all around, the gigs seldom earned him more than a few shillings – but at least he always got fed well.
The most memorable was a grand ball given by the youthful marquess of Londonderry at his ancestral home, Londonderry House in Park Lane, shortly before its demolition to make way for the new London Hilton Hotel. Among the guests was the future interior designer and super-socialite Nicky Haslam, then still a pupil at Eton. Though America’s legendary Benny Goodman Orchestra was the main musical attraction, Blues Incorporated had an early-evening spot fronted, as Haslam’s memoirs recall, ‘by a hired-in singer . . . a skinny kid named Mick something’. Haslam’s companion, the future magazine editor Min Hogg, later reported the skinny kid had been sure enough of himself to make overtures and even ‘paw’ at her strapless pink satin evening gown. From the ABC bakery to the upper crust: he had found the milieu where from now on he would be happiest.
THE EALING CLUB had started with just one hundred members; now, only two months later, it boasted more than eight hundred. When it was crowded to capacity, and beyond, the heat rivalled that of a similar subterranean space called the Cavern in far-off Liverpool. So much condensation dripped from the walls and ceiling that Korner had to hang a tarpaulin sheet over the stage canopy to stop the already precarious electrical connections from shorting out.
Korner’s real triumph was a phone call from Harold Pendleton, manager of Soho’s Marquee Club, who had so loftily banned the blues from his stage at the beginning of the year. Worried by the numbers who were defecting from the Marquee to Ealing Broadway – and by an upsurge of younger blues musicians in rival Soho clubs – Pendleton had undergone a rapid change of heart. It happened that in his weekly programme, the Thursday-night spot had fallen vacant. This he offered to Blues Incorporated, starting on 19 May.
There was, of course, no question of the band appearing without a regular vocalist as it had mostly done in Ealing. Korner wanted Mick but – atypically nice man that he was – hesitated to split up the band Mick still had with Keith. However, Keith was happy for his friend to jump at this big chance. ‘I’ll always remember how nice he was about it,’ Bobbie Korner recalls. ‘He said, “Mick really deserves this and I’m not going to stand in his way.”’
Brian Jones was also heading for the West End. His stage partner Paul Pond, the vocalist he needed to set off his slide guitar riffs, had decided to resume studying at Oxford (and would do so until being recruited into Manfred Mann as Paul Jones). Korner’s move back to Soho, taking Mick along, spurred Brian into forming a blues band of his own whose centre of gravity would be there rather than provincial Ealing. The fact that he was unknown in Soho did not deter him. He placed an ad in