The Stones: The Acclaimed Biography. Philip Norman

would sit in class in football boots, claiming they were more comfortable than shoes. ‘Brian said it was boring to drink the regulation milk at break time, so he started the fashion of drinking brown ale instead. It became a whole fashion to drink brown ale at break time instead of milk.’

      At break, according to immemorial custom, the whole class would crowd at the window and gaze longingly down on the Cheltenham young ladies as they frolicked on the grass below. Brian Jones, it was well known, belonged to the select few Grammar School boys whose sexual adventures had gone beyond mere kissing and ‘petting’. It was known, too, that he scorned the Durex contraceptives that other boys carried symbolically in their wallets. ‘Bareback’ was the best way, he would insist, smiling a smile so lascivious, yet so mischievous, no one knew whether to believe him.

      They believed him when, in 1958, a fourteen-year-old pupil at the girls’ Grammar School became pregnant and named Brian Jones as the father. The news caused a scandal in Cheltenham and even got into a Sunday newspaper, the News of the World, where Brian was destined to feature many times more. The baby was born but put out to adoption. All that could be hoped, after bringing such disgrace on his family and himself, was that Brian had well and truly learned his lesson.

      The scandal brought about his premature exit from Cheltenham Grammar School, despite nine passes at GCE O-Level and Advanced-Level passes in Physics and Chemistry. For the next eighteen months, he worked variously as a shop assistant, a coalman and a trainee in the Borough Architect’s office of Cheltenham Council. A boyhood passion for buses led him to a brief career on Cheltenham municipal transport, as conductor and driver. He continued to play alto sax in various trad bands, then in a rock ’n’ roll combo called the Ramrods, which enjoyed some local fame until its lead singer went away on honeymoon and choked to death while eating a chip.

      In 1961, Brian made a second girl pregnant. Her name was Pat Andrews: she had met Brian at the Aztec coffee bar during one of his spells of unemployment. He had left home by now and was living with a friend named Dick Hattrell at a flat in Cheltenham’s art college district. This time, he seemed resigned to marrying the girl he had put ‘in the club’. After the baby was born, he visited her in hospital, bringing a vast bouquet of flowers he had bought by selling some of his precious LPs. On his insistence, the baby was named Julian, after the jazz musician Julian ‘Cannonball’ Adderley.

      Brian did not marry Pat Andrews. Instead, shortly after his conversation with Alexis Korner, he took off for London suddenly, accompanied by Dick Hattrell, to start a job his father had found for him with a firm of opticians. Lewis and Louisa Jones heard no more from him until he had become nationally notorious.

      He continued to write to Pat Andrews, assuring her he still loved her and would be sending for her and the baby soon. Pat grew increasingly restive after learning he had several girlfriends in London. Finally, one day in 1962, she bundled Julian Mark in her arms and, with just one pound note in her purse, set off from Cheltenham by long-distance bus to track the baby’s father down.

      He had left even his name behind in Cheltenham. It was not Brian Jones but ‘Elmo Lewis’ who made his first guest appearance with Blues Incorporated at the Ealing club. He had changed instruments, too, from alto sax to electric guitar, a brand-new, shiny Gibson, bought with money half saved, half stolen, and mastered by his usual blend of intuition, willpower and desire.

      No greater contrast could have been imagined between the middle-aged, rather beery-looking blues sidesman and the boy who stepped up beside Alexis in his neat Italian suit, holding the shiny new Gibson with one finger pointed stiff across its pearled fretboard. His debut was the Elmore James classic Dust My Blues. In his West London bedsitter, he had taught himself to play it exactly as James did, with a metal ‘slide’, swooping the metal bar along the guitar neck to lengthen each note into almost a second angry, sarcastic voice. The sudden appearance of Pat Andrews and baby Julian had only temporarily interrupted the transfiguration of Elmore into Elmo.

      Even then, Alexis remembered, his stage presence was subtly but unmistakably flavoured with aggression. The fact that he stood absolutely still somehow intensified an air of challenge to all comers, even as his eyes remained studiously downcast, his wide mouth pursed in virginal tranquillity. ‘He’d learned how to bait an audience, long before anything like that occurred to Mick. You should have seen those kids’ reaction when Brian picked up a tambourine and gave it one tiny little shake in their faces.’

      Even the Korners, his best London friends, knew almost nothing of Brian beyond what he inadvertently betrayed. He told them nothing of his home or family, and only under gravest sufferance mentioned the detested word ‘Cheltenham’. Alexis and Bobbie, as surrogate parents, came to realize in time that frustration and unhappiness of an abnormal depth lay beneath Brian’s driving wish to become famous by any means whatever.

      He had abandoned his traineeship as an optician by now, and had a job as an electrical-appliance salesman at Whiteley’s department store in Queensway, just a block away from the Korners’ flat in Moscow Road. Alexis would sometimes see him after work, crossing the road to meet a girl waiting reproachfully for him in the doorway to the MacFisheries shop. Though Pat Andrews and the baby had moved into Brian’s tiny Notting Hill bedsitter, she saw little more of him now than she had in Cheltenham. Eventually, she was forced to take a part-time job to support the child Brian now scarcely acknowledged as his.

      To the Korners and the Ealing club crowd, he presented the aspect of a young bachelor, interested only in clothes and in forming a blues band that would take the world by storm. Each time he arrived at the Ealing club he seemed to have a new suit, a new tab-collar shirt, a new bouffant-haired girlfriend admiringly in tow. The money for both, more often than not, would have come from Pat Andrews’s minuscule pay packet or from robbing the till in Whiteley’s electrical department.

      He stayed always one jump ahead of retribution, buoyed up by belief in his destiny and by that way he had of looking as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. When Brian fixed anyone with his big baby eyes and spoke in his soft, lisping, well-brought-up voice, it was impossible to imagine such chaos accumulating behind him. ‘He had a way of talking that was all his own,’ Alexis Korner said. ‘It was a most beautiful mixture of good manners and rudeness.’

      Ostensibly still living with Pat, Julian and Dick Hattrell, he contrived to lead a semi-nomadic life in London and outside, travelling from town to town, reconnoitring the music clubs, sitting in with local groups in the hope of finding musicians for a band of his own. One of his regular haunts was Guildford, where he would play at the Wooden Bridge Hotel with a scratch band called Rhode Island Red and the Roosters, featuring a pale and – it then seemed – deeply unpromising guitarist named Eric Clapton.

      In Oxford, a city catacombed with student-run jazz and blues clubs, he became friends with an English undergraduate named Paul Pond who led a blues group called Thunder Odin’s Big Secret. Paul Pond subsequently became Paul Jones, singer with the Manfred Mann group, ‘Brian was terribly smart in those days,’ Jones says. ‘Italian box jacket, winklepicker shoes, never a hair out of place. Whenever he passed through Oxford, he’d sleep on my couch. I remember waking up one morning to hear this awful wheezing and snorting from the next room. Brian was lying on the couch, hardly able to breathe. He gasped out that he’d got asthma and had left his inhaler at the party we’d both been to the night before. I had to jump on my bike and go dashing off to get it back for him.’

      After sitting in with Thunder Odin’s Big Secret a few times, Brian decided that ‘P. P. Pond’ was the blues partner he needed. The two made a tape which impressed Alexis Korner so much he gave them the job of interval band at the Ealing club. It happened that P. P. Pond was singing Dust My Blues, accompanied by Elmo Lewis on slide guitar, when Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Dick Taylor walked through the door together.

      On Keith especially, the effect was instant hero worship, heightened by Keith’s tendency to mix up one name with another. ‘It’s Elmore James,’ he kept whispering to the others. ‘It is, man – really! It’s fuckin’ Elmore James!’

      They met up with Brian, afterwards and, over half pints of beer, talked blues for the rest of the night. To the Dartford boys, he seemed a raffish figure, only a year older