Mick Jagger. Philip Norman

launched than he, too, began making movies, further evidence to his detractors that his music alone had no staying power. While most such ‘exploitation’ flicks were simply vehicles for the songs, a few were fresh and witty dramas in their own right, notably Presley’s King Creole, and The Girl Can’t Help It, featuring Little Richard with new white heartthrobs Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent. For Mike, the epiphany came in the companionable darkness of Dartford’s State cinema, with its fuzzy-faced luminous clock and cigarette smoke drifting across the projector beam: ‘I saw Elvis and Gene Vincent, and thought, “Well, I can do this.”’

      Such American acts as did make it across the Atlantic often proved woefully unable to re-create the spellbinding sound of their records in the cavernous British variety theatres and cinemas where they appeared. The shining exception was Buddy Holly and his backing group, the Crickets, whose ‘That’ll Be the Day’ topped the UK singles charts in the summer of 1957. As well as singing in a unique stuttery, hiccupy style, Holly played lead guitar and wrote or co-wrote songs that were rock ’n’ roll at its most moodily exciting, yet constructed from the same simple chord sequences as skiffle. Bespectacled and dapper, more bank clerk than idol, he was a vital factor in raising rock ’n’ roll from its blue-collar status in Britain. Middle-class boys who could never hope or dare to be Elvis now used Holly’s songbook to transform their fading-from-fashion skiffle groups into tyro rock bands.

      His one and only British tour, in 1958, brought him to the Granada cinema in Woolwich, a few miles north of Dartford, on the evening of 14 March. Mike Jagger – already skilled at aping Holly’s vocal tics for comic effect – was in the audience with a group of school friends, all attending their very first rock concert. Holly’s set with the Crickets lasted barely half an hour, and was powered by just one twenty-watt guitar amplifier, yet reproduced all his record hits with near-perfect fidelity. Disdaining musical apartheid despite hailing from segregated west Texas, he freely acknowledged his indebtedness to black artists like Little Richard and Bo Diddley. He was also an extrovert showman, able to keep the beat as well as play complex solos on his solid-body Fender Stratocaster while flinging himself across the stage on his knees, even lying flat on his back. Mike’s favourite number was the B-side of ‘Oh Boy!’, Holly’s second British hit fronting the Crickets: a song in blues call-and-response style called ‘Not Fade Away’, whose quirky stop-start tempo was beaten with drumsticks on a cardboard box. The lyrics had a humour previously unknown in rock ’n’ roll (‘My love is bigger than a Cadillac / I try to show it but you drive me back . . .’). This, Mike realised, was not just someone to copy, but to be.

      Yet still he made no attempt to acquire the electric guitar needed to turn him into a rock singer like Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran or Britain’s first home-grown rock ’n’ roller, the chirpily unsexy Tommy Steele. And though attracted by the idea, along with countless other British boys, he did not seem exactly on fire with ambition. Dartford Grammar, it so happened, had produced a skiffle group named the Southerners who were something of a local legend. They had appeared on a nationwide TV talent show, Carroll Levis Junior Discoveries, and then been offered a recording test by the EMI label (which lost interest when they decided to wait until the school holidays before auditioning). Easily managing the transition from skiffle to rock, they were now a washboard-free, fully electrified combo renamed Danny Rogers and the Realms.

      The Realms’ drummer, Alan Dow, was a year senior to Mike, and in the science rather than arts stream, but met him on equal terms at the weekly basketball sessions run by Mike’s father. One night when Danny and the Realms played a gig at the school, Mike sidled up to Dow backstage and asked if he could sing a number with them. ‘I was specially nervous that night, because of appearing in front of all our school mates,’ Dow recalls. ‘I said I’d rather he didn’t.’

      He had no better luck when two old classmates from Wentworth Primary, David Spinks and Mike Turner, started putting together a band intended to be more faithful to rock ’n’ roll’s black originators than its white echoes. Mike suggested himself as a possible vocalist, and auditioned at David’s home in Wentworth Drive. Much as the other two liked him, they felt he neither looked nor sounded right – and, anyway, lack of a guitar was an automatic disqualification.

      His first taste of celebrity did not have a singing or even a speaking part. Joe Jagger’s liaison duties for the Central Council of Physical Recreation included advising television companies about programmes to encourage sports among children and teenagers – implicitly to counter the unhealthy effects of rock ’n’ roll. In 1957, Joe became a consultant to one of the new commercial networks, ATV, on a weekly series called Seeing Sport. Over the next couple of years, Mike appeared regularly on the programme with his brother Chris and other hand-picked young outdoor types, demonstrating skills like tent erecting or canoeing.

      A clip has survived of an item on rock climbing, filmed in grainy black-and-white at a beauty spot named High Rocks, near Tunbridge Wells. Fourteen-year-old Mike, in jeans and striped T-shirt, reclines in a gully with some other boys while an elderly instructor soliloquises droningly about equipment. Rather than studded mountaineering boots, which could damage these particular rock faces, the instructor recommends ‘ordinary gym shoes . . . like the kind Mike is wearing’. Mike allows one of his legs to be raised, displaying his virtuous rubber sole. For his father’s sake, he can’t show what he really thinks of this fussy, ragged-sweatered little man treating him like a dummy. But the deliberately blank stare – and the tongue, flicking out once too often to moisten the outsize lips – say it all.

      At school he continued to coast along, doing just enough to get by in class and on the games field. To his teachers and classmates alike he gave the impression he was there only under sufferance and that his thoughts were somewhere infinitely more glamorous and amusing. ‘Too easily distracted’, ‘attitude rather unsatisfactory’ and other such faint damnations recurred through his end-of-term reports. In the summer of 1959 he took his GCE O-level exams, which in those days were assessed by marks out of 100 rather than grades. He passed in seven subjects, just scraping through English literature (48), geography (51), history (56), Latin (49) and pure mathematics (53), doing moderately well in French (61) and English language (66). Further education being still for the fortunate minority, this was when most pupils left, aged sixteen, to start jobs in banks or solicitors’ offices. Mike, however, went into the sixth form for two more years to take A-level English, history and French. His headmaster, Lofty Hudson, predicted that he was ‘unlikely to do brilliantly in any of them’.

      He was also made a school prefect, in theory an auxiliary to Lofty and the staff in maintaining order and discipline. But it was an appointment that the head soon came to regret. Though Elvis Presley had originally cast his disruptive spell over girls, he had left a more lasting mark on boys, especially British ones, turning their former upright posture to a rebellious slouch and their former sunny smiles to sullen pouts, replacing their short-back-and-sides haircuts with toppling greasy quiffs, ‘ducks’ arses’ and sideburns. The Teddy Boy (i.e., Edwardian) style, too, was no longer peculiar to lawless young artisans but had introduced middle- and upper-class youths to ankle-hugging trousers, two-button ‘drape’ jackets and Slim Jim ties.

      Mike was not one to go too far – his mother would never have allowed it – but he broke Dartford Grammar’s strict dress code in subtle ways that were no less provocative to Lofty’s enforcers, sporting slip-on moccasin shoes instead of clumpy black lace-ups; a pale ‘shorty’ raincoat instead of the dark, belted kind; a low-fastening black jacket with a subtle gold fleck instead of his school blazer. Among his fiercest sartorial critics was Dr Wilfred Bennett, the senior languages tutor, whom he had already displeased by consistently performing below his abilities in French. Matters came to a head at the school’s annual Founder’s Day ceremony, attended by bigwigs from Dartford Council and other local dignitaries, when his gold-flecked jacket marred the otherwise faultless rows of regulation blazers. There was a heated confrontation with Dr Bennett afterwards, which ended with the teacher lashing out – as teachers then could with impunity – and Mike sprawled out on the ground.

      Perhaps more than any other pastime, music forges friendships between individuals who otherwise have nothing whatsoever in common. Never was it truer than in late 1950s Britain, when for the first time young people found a music of their