The Stones: The Acclaimed Biography. Philip Norman

foot 7 inch, sandy-haired and pink-faced youth got up and sang in a voice so black and raw, it was like having Chicago there in the room. The boy’s name was ‘Long’ John Baldry. He became Blues Incorporated’s first featured singer at the Ealing club on Saturdays and on Thursdays at the Marquee.

      A few days after the first Ealing session, Alexis Korner received a letter with a Dartford postmark enclosing a small spool tape. The letter, from someone called Mick Jagger, solicited Korner’s opinion of three songs by a group named Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys. The material offered was Reelin’ and Rockin’, Bright Lights Big City, and Around and Around. The tape was subsequently lost; all Korner could ever remember of it was that it sounded ‘absolutely terrible’.

      The tape served a useful enough purpose, introducing Little Boy Blue himself to an established musician, known for unusual kindness towards musical beginners. Mick Jagger received the same invitation as everyone else to Ealing, to join Blues Incorporated on the bandstand for what singers, too, called a ‘blow’. So, the next Saturday, taking all his courage, Jagger stepped on to the little stage, with its grubby tarpaulin canopy, and sang in public for the very first time.

      He did so looking every inch the LSE student in his white poplin shirt, half-unknotted tie and chunky ‘bohemian’ cardigan, glancing nervously behind him as the dignitaries of Blues Incorporated began to vamp the – for them – absurdly simple chords of Chuck Berry’s Around and Around. He himself has only a hazy recollection of standing there, half drunk, off key, forgetting his words and almost paralysed with fright. ‘The thing I noticed about him wasn’t his singing,’ Alexis Korner said. ‘It was the way he threw his hair around. He only had a short haircut, like everyone else’s. But, for a kid in a cardigan, that was moving quite excessively.’

      The song died into silence. Then – to the singer’s vast astonishment – there was a burst of applause. Even tetchy ‘Squirrel’ Davis was prepared to clap someone whose love of blues could take him so far beyond the embarrassment barrier. The fact that he had copied Chuck Berry’s phrasing note for note was further proof of being a true disciple.

      The next time Mick Jagger sang for Alexis Korner, it was for a fee of fifteen shillings, plus beer. Within a month, he had become Blues Incorporated’s second-string vocalist, singing with Korner for that same modest stipend whenever Long John Baldry was not available.

      On Saturdays, it became a habit for the Dartford boys, Mick, Keith, Alan and Dick, to call at Alexis’s flat in Bayswater and spend a couple of hours with the Korners before going on to Ealing together. Bobbie Korner would give them tea while Alexis told them stories of what Muddy and Broonzy had said in that very same kitchen – how Big Bill could never pronounce his fellow bluesmen’s names (he called Fats Waller ‘Fat Wallace’) or how T-Bone Walker, fuddled by distance and drink, had once enquired, ‘Is this Paris, France?’

      The Korners both remembered Jagger in this period as quiet and polite, though with political pretensions that Alexis found mildly aggravating. ‘We were talking about the blues one day and Mick said, “Why are you playing our working-class music?” I said, “Mick – you’re at the LSE! What could be more middle class than that?”’

      Keith, by contrast, was instantly sociable and engaging. ‘He’d sit at the kitchen table and talk to Bobbie for hours. I remember how he loved words. I didn’t really know him as a musician then – only that he played guitar in that group of theirs in Dartford. He never pushed himself forward as a musician. He just seemed happy to be around Mick.’

      By this time, the hospitable Korners had another young visitor regularly sleeping on their kitchenette floor. It was the boy Alexis had talked to in Cheltenham, little realizing how that morsel of encouragement had ignited the boy’s fierce desire to be in London, playing blues. So, late at night in Moscow Road, the kitchenette window would slide up. A dim figure would roll sideways across the table, down to the floor. Like Muddy Waters and Big Bill Broonzy before him, Brian Jones would fall asleep somewhere between the cats’ bowls and the legs of the electric cooker.

      Hatherley Road, Cheltenham, lies just outside that smugly elegant Gloucestershire spa town which will be ever associated in the English mind with retired army colonels and colleges for genteel young ladies. Hatherley Road is a long suburban avenue of identical 1930s houses, each with a single bay window, a neat front lawn and a wrought-iron ‘sunrise’ gate. Here and there, beyond a uniform creosote-covered garage, one can see the terraces of Cheltenham’s exclusive district and beyond, the soft green Cotswolds, striding away towards Wales.

      That Lewis Jones was a Welshman could not be doubted by his colleagues at Dowty and Co., Cheltenham’s aeronautical engineering works. Short, straight-backed, severe in manner, he possessed the inflexible virtues of Welshness in exact measure with its irreproachable faults. He was, in other words, respectable, decent, hard-working, religious, conventional, puritanically intolerant of those less strong-minded than himself. Like many of his countrymen, he regretted the advance of the twentieth century almost on principle. ‘Times change but I don’t,’ he would say, adding a heartfelt ‘Thank God!’

      The Welsh have almost an obligation to be musical. Lewis Jones played the organ at his local parish church for some years, until his dislike of petty ecclesiastical politics led him to resign. His wife Louisa – also Welsh – possessed a more pronounced talent, and supplemented Lewis’s income from Dowty’s by giving piano lessons to local schoolchildren.

      Their first child, Brian Lewis Hopkin Jones, was born on February 28, 1942. Of the two daughters who followed, only one – Barbara, born in 1946 – survived. The other, Pauline, died of leukaemia when Brian was three. Brian thought his parents had given her away and, for a long time afterwards, lived in terror that the same would be done to him.

      He was, his father said, a thoroughly normal and happy small boy, healthy but for childhood ailments and an attack of croup which left him prone to bronchitis and chronic asthma. At his first school, Dean Close, he worked well, enjoyed sport – particularly cricket and badminton – and became an excellent swimmer and diver. Sea air aggravated his asthma, however; after a single day at the beach, he would be confined to bed, wheezing and croaking piteously.

      Like his parents, and the race from which he sprang, Brian Jones was instinctively musical. Louisa started giving him piano lessons from the age of six; he afterwards took up the recorder and clarinet. Though able to read music, he mastered the reed instruments by ear and intuition, stumbling on melody by means he himself did not fully understand. So marked was his talent as a small boy that Lewis Jones thought he might be destined for a career as a classical musician.

      He passed the eleven-plus exam without effort and went on, as his parents had hoped, to Cheltenham Grammar School, down in the exclusive district of ‘The Promenade’, the retired generals and the Ladies’ College. This exclusive seminary, in fact, stood immediately adjacent to Cheltenham Grammar School and daily provided its senior boys with an unreachable fantasy as the young ladies ran forth, squealing, for their mid-morning break.

      Brian began well at Cheltenham Grammar, getting good marks for work, especially science and languages, excelling at cricket and swimming and winning a place as a clarinettist in the school orchestra. ‘Then, all of a sudden,’ Lewis Jones said bleakly, ‘he became very difficult. He started to rebel against everything – mainly me.’

      The trouble began when Brian ceased practising classical pieces on piano and clarinet, and began listening to a kind of music that Lewis Jones abhorred. At thirteen, he discovered jazz and, at fourteen, the saxophone-playing of Charlie Parker. He sold the clarinet his parents had bought him and used the proceeds to buy a second-hand alto sax. Within a few days, to his parents’ horror, the sound of a first, shaky solo brayed through the quiet house in Hatherley Road.

      He was soon good enough to sit in with local bands playing the trad jazz of Chris Barber and Humphrey Lyttelton. Even Cheltenham had its bohemian quarter, centred on the art college, on coffee bars like the Aztec, the Patio and the Waikiki, or pubs like the Wheatsheaf Inn, Leckhampton, where the 66 Jazz Club convened, with Brian Jones as membership secretary.

      At Cheltenham Grammar, meanwhile, he became known as a troublemaker,