Филип Норман – Mick Jagger (страница 6)
Otherwise, he was an inconspicuous member of the school community, winning neither special distinction nor special censure, offering no challenge to the status quo, using his considerable wits to avoid trouble with chalk-throwing, ear-twisting masters rather than provoke it. His school friend John Spinks remembers him as ‘an India-rubber character’ who could ‘bend every way to stay out of trouble’.
By mid-1950s standards, he was not considered good-looking. Sex appeal then was entirely dictated by film stars, of whom the male archetypes were tall, keen-jawed and muscular, with close-cut, glossy hair – American action heroes such as John Wayne and Rock Hudson; British ‘officer types’ such as Jack Hawkins and Richard Todd. Mike, like his father, was slightly built and skinny enough for his rib cage to protrude, though unlike Joe he showed no sign of incipient baldness. His hair, formerly a reddish colour, was now mousy brown and already floppily unmanageable.
His most noticeable feature was a mouth which, like certain breeds of bull-baiting terriers, seemed to occupy the entire lower half of his face, making a smile literally stretching from ear to ear, and Cupid’s-bow lips of unusual thickness and colour that seemed to need double the usual amount of moistening by his tongue. His mother also had markedly full lips – kept in top condition by the amount she talked – but Joe was convinced that Mike’s came from the Jagger side of the family and would sometimes apologise, not altogether jokingly, for having passed them on to him.
As the boys in his year reached puberty (yes, in 1950s Britain it really was this late) and all at once became agonisingly conscious of their clothes, grooming and appeal to the opposite sex, small, scrawny, loose-mouthed Mike Jagger seemed to have rather little going for him. Yet in encounters with the forbidden girls’ grammar school he somehow always provoked the most smiles, blushes, giggles and whispered discussions behind his back. ‘Almost from the time I met Mike, he always had girls flocking around him,’ Alan Etherington remembers. ‘A lot of our friends seemed to be much better looking, but they never had anything like the success that he did. Wherever he was, whatever he was doing, he knew he never needed to be alone.’
At the same time, his maturing looks, especially the lips, could arouse strange antagonism in males; teasing and taunting from classmates, sometimes even physical bullying by older boys. Not for being effeminate – his prowess on the sports field automatically discounted that – but for something far more damning. This was a time when unreformed nineteenth-century racism, the so-called colour bar, held sway in even Britain’s most civilised and liberal circles. To grammar school boys, as to their parents, thick lips suggested just one thing and there was just one term for it, repugnant now but back then quite normal.
Decades later, in a rare moment of self-revelation, he would admit that during his time at Dartford Grammar ‘the N-word’, for ‘nigger’, was thrown at him more than once. The time was still far off when he would find the comparison flattering.
THOUSANDS OF BRITISH men who grew up in the 1950s – and almost all who went on to dominate popular culture in the sixties – recall the arrival of rock ’n’ roll music from America as a life-changing moment. But such was not Mike Jagger’s experience. In rigidly class-bound postwar Britain, rock ’n’ roll’s impact was initially confined to young people of the lower social orders, the so-called Teddy Boys and Teddy Girls. During its earliest phase it made little impression on the bourgeoisie or the aristocracy, both of whose younger generations viewed it with almost as much distaste as did their parents. Likewise, in the hierarchical education system, it found its first enraptured audience in secondary modern and technical schools. At institutions like Dartford Grammar it was, rather, a subject for high-flown sixth-form debates: ‘Is rock ’n’ roll a symptom of declining morals in the twentieth century?’
Like Spanish influenza forty years previously, it struck in two stages, the second infinitely more virulent than the first. In 1955, a song called ‘Rock Around the Clock’ by Bill Haley and His Comets topped the sleepy British pop music charts and caused outbreaks of rioting in proletarian dance halls, but was plausibly written off by the national media as just another short-lived transatlantic novelty. A year later, Elvis Presley came along with a younger, more dangerous spin on Haley’s simple exuberance and the added ingredient of raw sex.
As a middle-class grammar school boy, Mike was just an onlooker in the media furore over Presley – the ‘suggestiveness’ of his onstage hip grinding and knee trembling, the length of his hair and sullen smoulder of his features, the (literally) incontinent hysteria to which he aroused his young female audiences. While adult America’s fear and loathing were almost on a par with the national Communist phobia, adult Britain reacted more with amusement and a dash of complacency. A figure like Presley, it was felt, could only emerge from the flashy, hyperactive land of Hollywood movies, Chicago gangsters and ballyhooing political conventions. Here in the immemorial home of understatement, irony and the stiff upper lip, a performer in any remotely similar mode was inconceivable.
The charge of blatant sexuality levelled against all rock ’n’ roll, not merely Presley, was manifestly absurd. Its direct ancestor was the blues – black America’s original pairing of voice with guitar – and the modern, electrified, up-tempo variant called rhythm and blues or R&B. The blues had never been inhibited about sex;
As a Dartford Grammar pupil, the appropriate music for Mike Jagger was jazz, in particular the modern kind with its melodic complexities, subdued volume and air of intellectualism. Even that played little part in daily school life, where the musical diet was limited to hymns at morning assembly and traditional airs like ‘Early One Morning’ or ‘Sweet Lass of Richmond Hill’ (the latter another pointer to Mike’s remarkable future). ‘There was a general feeling that music wasn’t important,’ he would recall. ‘Some of the masters rather begrudgingly enjoyed jazz, but they couldn’t own up to it . . . Jazz was intelligent and people who wore glasses played it, so we all had to make out that we dug Dave Brubeck. It was cool to like that, and it wasn’t cool to like rock ’n’ roll.’
This social barrier was breached by skiffle, a short-lived craze peculiar to Britain which nonetheless rivalled, even threatened to eclipse, rock ’n’ roll. Skiffle had originally been American folk (i.e., white) music, evolved in the Depression years of the 1930s; in this new form, however, it drew equally on blues giants of the same era, notably Huddie ‘Leadbelly’ Ledbetter. Leadbelly songs like ‘Rock Island Line’, ‘Midnight Special’ and ‘Bring Me Little Water, Sylvie’, set mostly around cotton fields and railroads, had rock ’n’ roll’s driving beat and hormone-jangling chord patterns, but not its sexual taint or its power to cause disturbances among the proles. Most crucially, skiffle was an offshoot of jazz, having been revived as an intermission novelty by historically minded bandleaders like Ken Colyer and Chris Barber. Its biggest star, Tony Donegan, formerly Barber’s banjo player, had changed his first name to Lonnie in honour of bluesman Lonnie Johnson.
British-made skiffle was to have an influence far beyond its barely two-year commercial life span. In its original American form, its poor white performers often could not afford conventional instruments, so would use kitchen utensils like washboards, spoons and dustbin lids, augmented by kazoos, combs-and-paper and the occasional guitar. The success of Lonnie Donegan’s ‘skiffle group’ inspired youthful facsimiles to spring up throughout the UK, rattling and plunking on homespun instruments (which actually never featured in Donegan’s line-up). The amateur music-making tradition, in long decline since its Victorian heyday, was superabundantly reborn. Buttoned-up British boys, never previously considered in the least musical, now boldly faced audiences of their families and friends to sing and play with abandon. Overnight, the guitar changed from obscure back-row rhythm instrument into an object of young-manly worship and desire surpassing even the soccer ball. Such were the queues outside musical-instrument shops that, evoking not-so-distant wartime austerities, the