Mick Jagger. Philip Norman

and complete his degree.

      It was not the best moment to be competing for British pop fans’ attention. That rainy summer of 1963 saw the Beatles change from mere teenage idols into the objects of a national, multi-generational psychosis, ‘Beatlemania’. Their chirpy Liverpool charm a perfect antidote to the upper-class sleaze of the Profumo Affair – for now, Britain’s most lurid modern sex scandal – they dominated the headlines day after day with their wacky (but hygienic) haircuts, the shrieking hysteria of their audiences and the ‘yeah yeah yeah’ chorus of their latest and biggest-ever single, ‘She Loves You’. Politicians mentioned them in Parliament, psychologists analysed them, clerics preached sermons on them, historians found precedents for them in ancient Greece or Rome; no less an authority than the classical music critic of ‘top people’s paper’ The Times dissected the emergent songwriting talent of John Lennon and Paul McCartney with a seriousness normally devoted to Mozart and Beethoven.

      For the national press, which hitherto had virtually ignored pop music and its constituency except to criticise or lampoon, the Beatles were a circulation booster like nothing ever before. As a result, Fleet Street entered into an unspoken pact to print nothing negative about them, to keep the cotton-wool ball rolling as long as possible. Before the year’s end, they would top the bill on television’s prestigious Sunday Night at the London Palladium and duck their mop-tops respectfully before Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother at the Royal Variety Show.

      While the Beatles headed for the Palladium and the royal receiving line, the Rolling Stones, with only half a hit to their name, continued playing their circuit of little blues clubs, with the occasional débutante ball, for fees between £25 and £50. While the Beatles were fenced off by increasing numbers of police and security, the Stones still performed close enough to their fans for any to reach out and touch them. Among the newest of these was a Wimbledon schoolgirl named Jacqui Graham, in future life the publicity director of a major British publishing house. Fifteen-year-old Jacqui charted her developing obsession with twenty-year-old Mick in a diary that – rather like a 1960s version of Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters – combines eagle-eyed observation and the innocence of a bygone age:

      How fab can anyone be! . . . I have just seen the Rolling Stones and they are endsville! Mick Jagger is definitely the best. Tall [sic], very, very thin, with terribly long hair he was gorgeous! Dressed in a shirt, a brown wool tie which he took off, brown cord trousers and soft squidgy chukka boots. He (or I’m pretty sure he did) kept looking at me – I was just in front of him so he couldn’t help it – & I wasn’t quite sure what to do! Keith Richard is marvellous-looking but he didn’t join in much, he only seemed human when one of his guitar-strings broke. He wore very long and tight grey trousers, shirt and black leather waistcoat. Brian Jones had lovely colour hair & was rather nice. Didn’t think much of Bill Wyman. Charlie Watts had a rather interesting face. Oh but when Mick and Keith looked at me – I’m sure they did. Must see them on Sunday. They really are good – my ears are still buzzing.

      One August night when the Stones appeared at Richmond Athletic Ground – the Crawdaddy Club’s new, much-enlarged home – a production team from London’s Rediffusion TV company was there, recruiting audience members to take part in a new live Friday-evening pop show called Ready Steady Go! Its co-presenter was to be a twenty-year-old fashion journalist, and über-Mod, named Cathy McGowan, who belonged to the Stones’ regular Studio 51 following. And, after the show’s talent scouts had watched them at Richmond, they were booked for the show’s second broadcast, on 26 August.

      Ready Steady Go! was a mould-breaking production, designed in every way to give a musical mould-breaker his first significant national exposure. Whereas previous TV pop shows like Drumbeat and Thank Your Lucky Stars had kept the young studio audiences firmly out of shot, this one made them integral to the action, dancing the newest go-go steps on a studio floor littered with exposed cameras and sound booms or mingling with the featured singers and bands as if they were all guests at one big party. London’s new allure was captured in the slogan flashed on-screen with the opening credits – ‘The Weekend Starts Here.’ Coincidentally, the programme was made at Rediffusion’s Kingsway headquarters, just around the corner from the London School of Economics.

      The Rolling Stones on Ready Steady Go! showed Britain’s youth the real band behind that odd name and rather spiritless début single. Even though dressed in a kind of matching uniform – leather waistcoats, black trousers, white shirts and ties – and lip-synching to a backing track, they connected with their audience as instantaneously as at Richmond or on Eel Pie. Indeed, the resultant party atmosphere in the studio was a little too much even for RSG’s lenient floor managers. After the Stones’ brief spot, so many shrieking girls waited to waylay them that they couldn’t leave the building by any normal exit. Instead, Mick’s alma mater provided an escape route, across the small back courtyard Rediffusion shared with LSE and into the student bar where so recently he’d sat in his striped college scarf, discussing Russell and Keynes and making a half pint of bitter last a whole evening.

      Also in accordance with the beat-group style book (rule one: take all the work you can while it’s going), the Stones were launched on a series of one-nighters at the opposite extreme from the comfortable residencies to which they were accustomed. Distance was no object, and they frequently faced round-trips of two hundred miles or more in Ian Stewart’s Volkswagen van: no joke in an era when motorways were still a rarity and even two segregated traffic lanes were an occasion. These journeys often took them up north, the Jagger family’s original homeland – not that Mick ever showed any sign of nostalgia – through redbrick towns where streets were still cobbled, factories still hummed, coal pit-head wheels still turned and long-haired Londoners were gawped at like just-landed aliens.

      The gig might be at a cinema, a theatre, a Victorian town hall or corn exchange; one was a kiddies’ party whose guests, expecting more conventional entertainment, pelted them with cream buns. The Britain of 1963 had no fast-food outlets but fish-and-chip shops and Wimpy hamburger bars: but for these and Chinese and Indian restaurants, a certain ever-hungry mouth would have seen little action the livelong night. Local promoters who had booked the Stones sight unseen reacted with varying degrees of incredulity and horror at what turned up. After one show to a near-empty hall in the industrial back-of-beyond, the promoter docked them their entire fee for being ‘too noisy’, then saw them off the premises with the help of a ferocious Alsatian guard dog and wearing boxing gloves for good measure.

      At the beginning, Mick and Keith still saw themselves as missionaries, preaching R&B to the unenlightened as they had dedicated themselves to doing back in Dartford. They discovered, however, that dozens of other bands around the circuit, especially northern ones, had undergone the same conversion and felt the same proselytising zeal. The difference was that, while the others played only Chuck Berry’s ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, the Stones knew Berry’s entire œuvre. Mick observed, too, that northern bands in particular felt a common affinity with old-fashioned music-hall comedy and, following the Beatles’ example, ‘turned into vaudeville entertainers onstage’. That was a trap he was determined never to fall into. Graham Nash from the Hollies, the north’s second most successful band, couldn’t help admiring these unsmiling southerners’ refusal to conform to type: ‘They didn’t seem to be copying anybody – and they didn’t give a fuck.’

      The word that increasingly went ahead of them, based solely on the length of their hair, was dirty. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Mick was utterly fastidious about personal cleanliness, and one of those fortunate people who do not show dirt; Brian washed his eye-obscuring blond helmet so religiously each day that the others nicknamed him ‘Mister Shampoo’; Bill Wyman as a small boy used to do his mother’s housework for her; the Hornsey Art School student Gillian Wilson, who had a fling with Charlie Watts, remembers his underwear being cleaner than hers. They had now given up any semblance of a stage uniform and went onstage in the same Carnaby motley in which they’d arrived at the theatre. Though all of them were clothes-mad and cutting-edge fashionable, this revolutionary break with tradition added a reek of BO to the implied dandruff and head lice. Their manager took every opportunity to circulate the double slander, adding a third for good measure: ‘They don’t wash much