Mick Jagger. Philip Norman

government and the optional ones of political history and English legal institutions. Behind the mask of coolness and indifference, he worried that he was not making the most of his opportunities or justifying the investment that Kent County Council had made in him. His vague hankering for some kind of literary career was sharpened, that autumn, when his father became the Jagger family’s first published author. As the country’s leading authority on the sport, Joe edited and partially wrote a manual entitled Basketball Coaching and Playing in a series of how-to books issued by the prestigious house of Faber & Faber (which Mick’s fellow economics student Matthew Evans would one day run). B. Jagger’s opening chapter, ‘The Basketball Coach’, written in simple but forceful prose, set out principles his son would later employ in a somewhat different context. The successful coach, wrote B. Jagger, ‘must definitely possess . . . a sense of vocation, a dedication to the game, faith in his own ability, knowledge and enthusiasm’. Without these qualities, the team would be ‘an ordinary run-of-the-mill affair, rising to no great heights and probably keeping warm the lower half of some league table . . .’ The coach must train himself to develop ‘a keen analytical sense’ and view each game as ‘an endless succession of tactics’ dictated solely by him. ‘The players are for the whole time examples of [his] skill and ability . . . He must quickly eradicate weaknesses and use to the full the strong points of his players . . .’

      The greatest pressure on Mick, as always, came from his mother. Eva Jagger still could not take his singing seriously, and protested with all her considerable might at its deleterious effect on his studies – and the high-level professional career that was supposed to follow. The Edith Grove flat so appalled her that she couldn’t bear to set foot inside it (unlike Keith’s down-to-earth mum, who came in regularly to give it a good clean-up). When Mick remained obdurate about continuing with the Stones, Eva telephoned Alexis Korner and in her forthright way demanded whether ‘Michael’, as she firmly continued to call him, really was anything special as a singer. Korner replied that he most definitely was. The unexpectedly public-school voice at the other end of the line pacified Eva but still did not convince her.

      At LSE, Mick’s absences from lectures and tutorials were becoming more frequent, his need to copy fellow student Laurence Isaacson’s notes more urgent. Though only dimly aware of his other life with the Rollin’ Stones, Isaacson could not but notice the changes coming over that once-typical middle-class student. ‘He was still very quiet and unobtrusive when he did appear at college. But one day when he turned up, he’d had his hair streaked. He was the first bloke I ever knew who did that.’

      WHEN CLEOPATRA SYLVESTRE caught Mick’s eye at the Marquee Club, she was seventeen and still attending Camden School for Girls. The paradox of these clubs dedicated to black music was that very few actual black people frequented them – and those who did tended to be predominantly male. More often than not, Cleo would find herself the only young black woman in the Marquee’s audience. Anyway, she was an eye-catcher: tall and lovely in an American rather than British or Caribbean way, and always wearing something outrageous like a pink leather miniskirt she had made for herself, or a bright orange wig.

      Though she lived in a council flat in Euston, Cleo’s background was richly cosmopolitan. Her mother, Laureen Goodare, a well-known West End cabaret dancer during the Second World War, had had a long-time affair with the composer Constant Lambert. Her godfathers were Lambert and the MP, journalist and notorious homosexual Tom Driberg. Her close friend and frequent companion around the blues clubs was Judith Bronowski, daughter of the mathematician, biologist and television pundit Dr Jacob Bronowski.

      Cleo had first seen Mick when he was still with Blues Incorporated; he would smile and say hello, but it wasn’t until after the Rollin’ Stones started that he came over and spoke to her. Still experimenting with their sound and look, the band had thought of using black female back-up singers like Ray Charles’s Raelettes and Ike and Tina Turner’s Ikettes. Mick asked Cleo if she could find two black friends and audition as a backing trio, to be known as the Honeybees.

      The audition, at the Wetherby Arms pub in Chelsea, was a disaster. Cleo could find only one other candidate for the trio, a clubbing companion named Jean who proved to be tone-deaf. Though Cleo herself had a good voice, the idea of a nine-strong, mixed-race-and-gender Rollin’ Stones progressed no further. But from then on she became a special friend to the band and, increasingly, a very special one to Mick.

      She and Jean were their most faithful followers – groupies would be too crude – trailing them from places they now easily packed, like the Ealing Club, to those where they still struggled against anti-rock ’n’ roll prejudice, like Ken Colyer’s Studio 51 Club in Great Newport Street. ‘Sometimes when they played to only about nine people, Brian would literally be in tears,’ Cleo recalls. ‘But Mick was always the optimistic one, who said they had to keep going and they’d win everyone over in the end.’

      She and Mick began dating with all the conventionality – and chasteness – that word used to imply, during the brief intervals between his college hours, her school ones and the Stones’ nightlife. ‘We’d go to the cinema,’ Cleo remembers. ‘Once, Mick got tickets for the theatre, but for some reason we never made it there. He rang me up one day and asked me to join Keith and him in a boat on the lake in Regent’s Park. A few times, I met him at LSE, where he used to work in the library.’ Unluckily, she already had a boyfriend, who could not but know what was going on since he shared a flat with Mick’s sometime stage colleague, Long John Baldry. Their break-up was an early example of the threat Mick would later pose to so many men’s masculinity. When Cleo went to her ex’s flat to collect some records she’d left there, he was pressing clothes on an ironing board. He thrust the hot iron into her face so it burned her forehead, and hissed, ‘When you next see Mick, give him that for me.’

      Cleo was formidably bright as well as beautiful, and remembers ‘quite heavy’ discussions with Mick about politics and current affairs. He even suggested that when she left school, as she was soon to do, she should try to get into LSE so that they could see more of each other. She remembers his sense of humour and love of mimicking people, like the West Indian staff on the Underground shouting ‘Mind the doors!’ ‘Bill Wyman had just joined the band, and Mick used to laugh about him coming from Penge.’ The later stories of his stinginess are baffling to Cleo. ‘He was always so generous to me. Once, he bought me a huge box of chocolates that he’d spent all his money on, even his bus fare, so he had to walk all the way home to Chelsea.’

      He was also welcomed into the Euston council flat where Cleo lived with her mother, Laureen, the Blitz-era cabaret dancer, and their fluffy black-and-white cat. ‘My mum thought he was great, even though the neighbours used to mutter about his long hair. I’d come home to find the two of them nattering away together. Mick used to practise his stage moves in front of our mirror.’ Cleo, on the other hand, paid only fleeting visits to 102 Edith Grove – and never stayed overnight. Her main memory of his domicile is ‘trying to scrape the laboratory cultures out of the milk bottles’.

      Cleo’s home became a refuge for the whole band, with Brian making himself at home in his usual way and competing with Mick for the fascinating Laureen’s attention. ‘Brian used to love having our cat on his knees and stroking it,’ Cleo recalls. ‘When he left, his velvet suit used to be covered in white hairs, so my mum would run the Hoover over him as he stood there. One morning after an all-nighter, I took Mick and Brian back to our place for breakfast and my friend took Keith to hers. But my friend’s dad was a Nigerian and a bit militant. He said, “Get outa my house, white man,” took a spear down from the wall, and chased Keith with it.’

      Chronically hard up as they were, the Rollin’ Stones never turned down any job, however low-paying and hard to reach through the snow and slush. One night their Marquee audience included a Hornsey School of Art student named Gillian Wilson (in later life to become curator of the Getty Museum in California). ‘At the interval,’ she recalls, ‘I went up to this character with outsize lips and asked if they’d play at our Christmas dance. “’Ow much?” he said. I offered fifteen bob [seventy-five pence] each and Mick – though I didn’t know his name then – said “Okay.”’

      The Stones’ performance at Hornsey School of Art – which Gillian Wilson remembers lasting