Mick Jagger. Philip Norman

Mick,” I’d say. Brian would storm out in a fury, not even taking his own fan mail.’

      One way of fighting back would have been to compete against Mick in onstage showmanship, as lead guitarists often did against vocalists. But with curious perverseness – the same that made him go and live with his girlfriend and goat in Windsor rather than at least try to preserve the old solidarity of Edith Grove – Brian in performance struck none of the melodramatic or flamboyant poses that normally went with his role. Throughout the Stones’ set, he stood rooted to the stage with his lute-shaped Vox Teardrop guitar, as innocent-looking as some Elizabethan boy minstrel, giving out nothing but an occasional enigmatic smile. It was a technique that seldom failed him with individual females in intimate one-to-one situations, but in front of eight or nine thousand going crazy for Mick’s duckwalk, it was an ill-advised tactic.

      The erosion of Brian’s leadership did not end there. Until now, he had always been the spokesman for the band in the quiet, cultured voice which, unlike Mick, he never slurred into faux Cockney. But Oldham considered him long-winded and – as an inveterate hypochondriac – too prone to ramble on about his latest head cold. So, with great reluctance at first, Mick began to do the talking as well as the singing (Keith being regarded, in both areas, as totally mute). ‘If Andrew told Mick, “You’ve got two interviews today,” his response would always be “Are you sure they want me?”’ Tony Calder remembers. ‘Andrew rehearsed him in talking to journalists just like he rehearsed him in how to perform.’ Under the rules of early-sixties pop journalism, this generally meant no more than reciting a press release about the Stones’ recording and touring plans. It also meant showing a deference scarcely in his nature to interviewers whom Oldham particularly needed to cultivate. When the New Musical Express’s news editor Derek Johnson turned up in person, a well-briefed Mick shook his hand and said, ‘Nice to meet you, sir.’

      The music press, of course, voiced no criticisms of the Stones’ hair and personal hygiene, though their lack of stage uniforms still excited spasmodic wonder. Nor did the canny Oldham yet try to sell them as direct challengers to the Beatles. Rather, he peddled the line that they were standard-bearers for London and the south against the previously unchecked chart invasion from Liverpool. Mick delivered the perfect quote: proudly territorial without slighting the Liverpudlian songwriters who had recently done his band such a good turn, competitive but not unfriendly, ambitious but not arrogant. ‘This Mersey Sound is no different from our River Thames sound. As for these Liverpool blokes proclaiming themselves better than anyone else, that’s a load of rubbish. I’ve nothing against the Mersey Sound. It’s great. But it’s not as new and exclusive as the groups make out. I can’t say I blame them for jumping at this sort of publicity, though. If we came from Liverpool, we’d do the same. But we don’t, and we’re out to show the world.’

      At first, Oldham sat in on every interview, poised to jump in with corrections or contradictions where necessary. But Mick proved so reliable at giving journalists what they wanted without giving anything away that he was soon allowed to go solo. ‘Andrew would prime him to do ten minutes,’ Tony Calder says. ‘But he’d expand it into twenty-five . . . then forty-five, then an hour.’ While other pop musicians fraternised with their interviewers, chatting over a pint at the pub or a Chinese meal, he always preferred the neutral ground of an office; while unfailingly polite, he had an air of detachment and faint amusement, as if he couldn’t understand all this fuss over the Stones – and him. ‘I still haven’t grasped what all this talk of images is about,’ he told Melody Maker. ‘I don’t particularly care whether parents hate us or not. They may grow to like us one day . . .’ It was a trick that never failed [in the perceptive Bill Wyman’s words] ‘to portray himself as indifferent whereas in fact he cared very much.’

      But the most revealing encounter with Mick in this era was not recorded by any professional journalist. It appears in the diary kept by Jacqui Graham, the fifteen-year-old from Wimbledon County Grammar School for Girls who had switched allegiance from the Beatles to the Rolling Stones in late 1963, and now devoted her leisure hours to getting close to them. In the innocent time before security checks, backstage passes, Neanderthal bodyguards and dressing rooms turned into royal courts, that could be often be extraordinarily close.

      Jacqui’s diary greets 5 January as a ‘brilliant Stoning start to 1964’ after a show at the Olympia Ballroom, Reading, which (in a portent of things to come) begins one and a half hours late. This time, it is Keith, with his ‘lovely hair’, and Charlie Watts who captivate her, while Mick ‘seem[s] not to be his usual bright self’ and is rather less ‘gorgeous’ than at Epsom three weeks before: ‘I noticed his gold cufflinks & his identity bracelet,’ the diarist says with her usual unsparing eye for detail. ‘He has rather repulsive fat lips and a wet, big tongue!’

      On 11 January, when the Stones return to Epsom Baths, Jacqui and some other girls are waiting by the stage door and manage to follow them all the way into their dressing room. ‘Fabulous Keith’ with his ‘lovely, lean, intelligent face’, does not mind being watched while he dabs on acne cream, even allowing Jacqui to hold his Coke bottle and Mod peaked cap during the operation. Brian is observed, presciently, to be ‘not looking madly happy’, and to have ‘a very clipped and well-spoken voice . . . and a lovely slow, tired smile’. Charlie is ‘dreamsville but much smaller than I had imagined’ and Bill is ‘sweet, small, dark, very very helpful’. But Mick proves ‘a big disappointment & a big head . . . [he] thought he was it in his usual blue suit, brown gingham shirt and tartan waistcoat & he looked at us as tho’ we were something that the cat had brought in, although I did look up once to find him eyeing me up and down in a rather sly way. Still – although the worst – he is still fab! . . . then (damn & sod) home at 11.25.’

      Friday, 24 January, which for the diarist ‘started off being puke’, turns into ‘the most fabulous day ever . . . Mick, Keith and Charlie relaxed, friendly & TALKING – yes REALLY TALKING TO US!’ With the Stones on again at Wimbledon Palais, she and her friend Susan Andrews manage to sneak into their empty dressing room and hide out there until they arrive. Once again, the intruders are allowed to hang around while the band prepares to go onstage. There is no sexual ulterior motive; they are simply resigned to goggling school-age girls being part of the furniture. This time, Jacqui finds Mick ‘very friendly . . . he smiled at me and seemed interested in what I had to say’. Only Brian seems reticent, possibly because his ‘secret wife’, Linda Lawrence, is also there. The two girls squeeze themselves into corners, watching the ebb and flow of official visitors, including an ad man who wants to put the Stones in a TV commercial for Rice Krispies. Mick relaxes so far as to strip off his shirt and put on another. ‘He made crude remarks like “must cover me tits up” etc.,’ the diarist records, ‘but I liked him.’ She is equally unfazed, later in the evening, to see both Mick and Keith wish Charlie good night by kissing him full on the mouth.

      By mid-February, Jacqui and Susan have learned via the fans’ grapevine (or gape-vine) where Mick and Keith live and found out their home phone number. When the girls pluck up courage to ring it, Keith answers. Not in the least annoyed at being thus run to earth, he apologises that Mick isn’t in and stays on the line chatting for some time. This spurs the pair to an adventure which will later fill several pages of Jacqui’s diary, laid out with dialogue and stage directions like a film script:

      MONDAY 17TH FEBRUARY. Fate held in store a 15 min conversation in Mick’s hall.

      We set off with the spirit of adventure strong within us & at great length found 33 Mapesbury Road NW2. Not knowing which bell to ring we knocked and asked for Mick Jagger. Several minutes passed & then this old woman appeared & behind her I could see Micky standing on the stairs, arms folded with a queer sort of smile on his face. He looked like a sort of pale blue pole in the dim light because he was in his pyjamas – pale blue, dark blue trimmings & white cord. The jacket was open & the pyjama trousers falling down but he seemed quite oblivious & stood there in his bare feet just looking. I felt incapable of walking in but we did & once more our conversation was friendly but I got the feeling he was faintly amused at us for his expression, a vague sort of genial smile, remained unchanged throughout.

       This is a rough idea of the conversation: