Mick Jagger. Philip Norman

student with his beige wool cardigan and black-, purple- and yellow-striped LSE scarf. Keith, though also technically a student, did his utmost not to resemble one with his faded blue denim jeans and jerkin and lilac-coloured shirt. To 1961 eyes, that made an unpleasing cross between a Teddy Boy and a beatnik.

      Keith instantly recognised Mike by the lips, as Mike did Keith by the almost skull-bony face and protruding ears that had barely changed since he was in short trousers. It also happened that Mike was carrying two albums he had just received from the Chess label in Chicago, The Best of Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry’s Rockin’ at the Hops. ‘To me,’ Keith would recall, ‘that was Captain Morgan’s treasure. I thought, “I know you. And what you got under your arm’s worth robbing.”’

      The upshot was that when their train pulled in, they decided to travel together. Rattling through the Kentish suburbs, they found they had other idols in common, a crowd almost as dense as the newspaper-reading, strap-hanging one around them: Sonny Boy Williamson . . . John Lee Hooker . . . Howlin’ Wolf . . . Willie Dixon . . . Jimmy Reed . . . Jimmy Witherspoon . . . T-Bone Walker . . . Little Walter . . . Never one to stint on melodrama, Keith would afterwards equate the moment with the blues’ darkest fable – young Robert Johnson keeping a tryst with the devil and, Faust-like, bartering his soul to be able to play like an angel. ‘Just sitting on that train . . . it was almost like we made a deal without knowing it, like Robert did.’ When the train pulled into Sidcup, he was so absorbed in copying down the serial numbers on Mike’s albums that he almost forgot to get off.

      Keith not only had music in his blood (where it was destined to be severely jostled by other, more questionable additives) but guitar wood almost in his bones. Once again, Kent could claim little of the credit. On his mother’s side, he was descended from French Huguenots, Protestants who had fled Catholic persecution in their own country and found asylum in the Channel Isles. The music was infused largely through his maternal grandfather, Theodore Augustus Dupree, who led a succession of semi-professional dance bands and played numerous instruments, including piano, saxophone, violin and guitar. One of Keith’s great childhood treats – all in all somewhat fewer than Mike Jagger enjoyed – was to accompany his ‘Grandfather Gus’ to the Ivor Mairants music store in London’s West End, where guitars were custom-built on the premises. Sometimes he would be allowed into the workshops to watch the fascinating silhouettes take shape and inhale the aromas of raw rosewood, resin and varnish; despite stiff competition, the headiest narcotic he would ever know.

      An only child, he had been raised by parents who in every way were the opposite of Mike’s. His father, Bert Richards, a dour, introverted character, worked punishingly long shifts as a supervisor in a lightbulb factory and so had little energy left over to be an authority figure and role model like Joe Jagger. In equal contrast with Eva Jagger, Keith’s mother, Doris, was a sunny-natured, down-to-earth woman who spoiled him rotten, loved music, and had an eclectic taste ranging from Sarah Vaughan to Mozart. As she washed up his dirty dishes with the radio blaring, she’d call out to him to ‘listen to that blue note!’

      Doris’s refusal ever to make Keith toe the line had withstood every sanction of mid-fifties state schooling and resulted in an intelligent, perceptive boy being branded an irredeemable dunce. By the age of thirteen, he was regarded as an academic no-hoper and had been consigned to Dartford Technical School, hopefully to acquire some honest artisan trade. The school was in Wilmington, which meant he unknowingly crossed paths with Mike every morning and evening as Mike went to and from Dartford Grammar. At Dartford Tech, he was as inattentive and disruptive as at school, and was expelled after two years without a single plumbing or bricklaying certificate to his name.

      Sidcup Art College was the bottom of the heap. In this era, even the smallest British town usually had its own college or school of art built in Victorian mock-Gothic style, a civic amenity as familiar as the library or the swimming baths. All were open to school leavers with the faintest artistic bent, which as a rule meant misfits who had not reached university standard but lacked the drive to go out and find a job. Since the fifties, a secondary role of art schools had been giving shelter to young men whose obsession with rock ’n’ roll music seemed destined to take them nowhere. Keith had joined an unwitting brotherhood that also included, or would include, John Lennon, Peter Townshend, Eric Clapton, Ronnie Wood, Ray Davies, Syd Barrett and David Jones, later Bowie.

      As a working-class teenager, he felt the full impact of rock ’n’ roll’s first wave, rather than waiting around like bourgeois Mike for it to clean up its act. The national guitar fever unleashed by Elvis Presley had infected him long ago, thanks to Grandfather Gus and the craftsmen at Ivor Mairants’s. His adoring mum bought him his first guitar for seven pounds, out of her wages from working in a Dartford baker’s shop. Though he could sing – in fact, had sung soprano in the massed choirs at the Queen’s coronation – his ambition was to be like Scotty Moore, the solo guitarist in Presley’s backing trio, whose light and jaunty rockabilly riffs somehow perfectly set off the King’s brooding sexual menace.

      At Sidcup Art College he did little on a creative level, apart from developing what would become a near genius for vandalism. Musically speaking, however, the college provided an education which he devoured like none before. Among its students was a clique of hard-core blues enthusiasts, as usual acting like a resistance cell in an occupied country. Their moving spirit, Dick Taylor, had lately arrived from Dartford Grammar School, where he had belonged to an identical underground movement with Mike Jagger. Dick converted Keith to the blues just as he’d converted Mike a year earlier. In the process, he sometimes mentioned playing in a band, but so vaguely that Keith never realised his old primary schoolmate was also a member. He had in fact been longing to join but, says Taylor, was ‘too shy to ask’.

      After their chance reunion on that morning commuter train, Mike and Keith met up again at Dartford’s only cool place, the Carousel coffee bar, and were soon regularly hanging out together. Keith brought along his guitar, an acoustic Hofner cello model with F-holes, and Mike revealed that, despite his college scarf and well-bred accent, he sang blues. They began making music together immediately, finding their tastes identical – blues, with some pop if it was good – and their empathy almost telepathic. ‘We’d hear something, we’d both look at each other at once,’ Keith would later write in his autobiography, Life. ‘We’d hear a record and go “That’s wrong. That’s faking it. That’s real.”’ As with two other total opposites, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who had met in Liverpool four years earlier, their character differences only seemed to cement the friendship. ‘[Mike] liked Keith’s laid-back quality, his tough stance, his obsession with the guitar,’ says Taylor, ‘and Keith was attracted to Mike’s intelligence, his dramatic flair.’

      Mike was all for bringing Keith into the unnamed blues band that still somehow struggled along. But aside from Taylor, there were two other members to convince. Although Bob Beckwith and Alan Etherington had also now left Dartford Grammar School, both still lived at home, in circumstances as irreproachably middle class as the Jaggers’. Keith was not simply their social inferior, but hailed from very much the wrong side of the tracks: he lived in a council house on the definitely rough Temple Hill estate in east Dartford, and was known to hang out with the town’s most disreputable ‘Teds’. However, one band practice session was enough for Beckwith and Etherington to agree with Taylor’s estimate of Mike’s mate as ‘an absolute lout . . . but a really nice lout’. The line-up obligingly rearranged itself so that Keith could alternate on lead guitar with Beckwith.

      Chuck Berry was Keith’s real passport into their ranks. For Berry had done what no schoolteacher or college lecturer could – made him pay attention and apply himself. The gymnastic electric riffs with which Berry punctuated his vocals were still way beyond most of his young British admirers. But Keith, by listening to the records over and over, had nailed every last note and half chord in ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’, ‘Memphis, Tennessee’, even the complex intro and solo to ‘Johnny B. Goode’, where Berry somehow single-handedly sounded like two lead guitarists trying to outpick each other. Mike’s voice, if it resembled anyone’s, had always sounded a bit like Berry’s; in this authentic instrumental setting, he now became Chuck almost to the life.

      With Keith’s arrival, the band finally acquired a name,