The Stones: The Acclaimed Biography. Philip Norman

having managed to billet himself with the parents of his girlfriend, Linda Lawrence, at their house in Windsor. The arrangement was, of course, based on the idea that Brian’s intentions towards Linda were honourable. Before the opposite proved to be the case, the Lawrences showed him every consideration. He was allowed to use Mr Lawrence’s car whenever he wished. The name of the house was even changed, in Brian’s honour, to ‘Rolling Stone’. And he did seem infatuated with Linda. On tour, he would shower her with postcards – to ‘darlin’ Linda’ – and on his return buy her expensive presents. These included a French poodle and a goat which Brian liked to take for walks through Windsor on a lead.

      His passion for Linda seemed to fade in proportion to the progress of her pregnancy. He was soon on the move again, forsaking the Lawrences’ hospitality for a small flat in Chester Street, Belgravia. The birth of a son to Linda completed the alienation process. Brian was seldom other than indifferent to the baby, to whom, in a mood of mischievous malice, he gave the same name as his child by Pat Andrews – Julian Mark. ‘He was so rude about that poor little kid,’ Shirley Arnold, the Stones’ fan club secretary, remembers. ‘He used to call it Broad Bean Head.’

      As Brian tired of Linda, his indifference curdled into physical cruelty. On her visits to him in Chester Street, he would sometimes knock her about so violently that his downstairs neighbours – another group, the Pretty Things – could hear bumps and crashes through the ceiling.

      To Brian all that mattered was the living of his longed-for role as a pop star. He loved being famous, being recognized, pursued and mobbed by girls – for himself now, not as a counterfeit Beatle. He loved having money, having girls, having wine, having clothes. He loved the pop-star night life at clubs like the Ad Lib, the Establishment, Whipp’s and Scotch of St James’s. He loved the shopping raids on boutiques in corduroy, button-down blocks on either side of Carnaby Street. Brian was the Stone nominated as Rave magazine’s Best-Dressed Pop Star of the Week. He thought nothing of spending £30 on one French Jacket from Cecil Gee’s, £10 on a single silk shirt from Just Men. What he did not buy he would cheerfully steal. The striped jersey, copied by boys all over Britain after Brian wore it on Ready, Steady, Go, had in fact been stolen from the wardrobe of one of his Pretty Things neighbours.

      The Pathé newsreel film, shot backstage at Hull ABC cinema, shows what a masterly performer Brian was offstage as well as on. In that film, he appears choirboy innocent, concerned only with tuning his guitar. He would sit down with pimply teenage provincial journalists, the soul of amiability, speaking in that voice so soft, it was almost effeminate, his gold-fringed eyes open wide with incredulity at the attitude of the latest hotel to refuse the Stones accommodation, though – as likely as not – it would have been Brian’s own behaviour that precipitated the ban. ‘The Scotch Corner Hotel … near Darlington … ooh, that’s a terrible place. So aggressive.’

      Within the Stones, in their claustrophobic tour life, Brian was invariably the source of any disagreement or disruption. They were all waiting in the wings one night when Keith went for him with both fists, shouting, ‘Where’s my chicken, you bastard?’ Brian, before the show, had filched and eaten Keith’s portion of the only food they would be likely to get that night.

      Brian continued to regard himself as leader of the Rolling Stones, and as such entitled to a higher pay-out and superior hotel rooms, all the time in blissful unawareness that his secret negotiations and subterfuges were well known to the other four. In those heady early days, the others were content to take out their resentment of ‘Mr Shampoo’ in comparatively harmless ways. Mick and Keith both developed impersonations of Brian based on his physical defects – the too short legs he attempted to hide on stacked-up Cuban heels; the foreshortened neck which made his chin rest, never quite comfortably, on the roll-top of his sweater. The subtle ragging of Brian increased on a trip with Oldham to Northern Ireland to make a documentary film, directed by Peter Whitehead and entitled – in honour of its least willing participant – Charlie Is My Darling. ‘Brian really went over the top whenever Peter Whitehead’s camera was on him,’ Oldham says. ‘He’d do these long soliloquies to camera. “Why am I a musician … and who am I?” He didn’t realize the others were sending him up rotten.’

      What no one could deny was the strength and drive Brian gave to the Stones by sheer musicianship. His preposterous egotism, his amoral willingness to do anyone down and filch anything, were forgotten as soon as he picked up his slide guitar or played harmonica, his cheeks filling and hollowing with the quick, light, dancing breath that kept the whole sound together.

      ‘Brian was a power in the Stones as long as he could pick up any instrument in the studio and get a tune out of it,’ Oldham says. ‘As soon as he stopped trying, and just played rhythm guitar, he was finished.’

      The process had already begun which was to define the power structure within the Stones, binding Mick and Keith together in their unstoppable alliance and leaving Brian irretrievably out in the cold. It began on the night that Andrew Loog Oldham locked his two flatmates in the kitchen of their Willesden basement and threatened not to let them out until they had written a song.

      For Oldham, it was a matter of sheer convenience. He was tired of rummaging through Chappell’s r & b song catalogue in the perpetual search for material acceptable to the Stones’ purist conscience and to Decca’s A & R department. Their two Top Twenty singles seemed to confirm what Oldham told them with ever increasing frequency: ‘You can’t be a hit group just on rhythm and blues.’ Nor – it was implicitly added – could Oldham himself become the teenage Svengali of British pop just by sorting through sheet music and listening to song pluggers’ demo tapes.

      The necessity of putting together a twelve-track LP, to capitalize on their singles’ success, intensified Oldham’s fear that the Stones were in imminent danger of running out of material. Yet again, he looked enviously towards the Beatles, whose own original songs had comprised a good 50 per cent of their second, million-selling album, With The Beatles. Mick and Keith, too, though far from convinced they could concoct a song together, had been deeply impressed by the exercise in instant Lennon–McCartney composition that had produced I Wanna Be Your Man. So, when their manager locked the kitchen door on them in Willesden, they agreed, for the moment, not to kick it down.

      Their first attempts at songs were ballads of a glutinous sentimentality, quite unsuitable for the Stones’ repertoire, or for anyone else’s, despite all Oldham’s bullish attempts at syndication. The first ever Jagger-Richard composition, It Should Be You, was eventually recorded by an obscure white soul artist named George Bean. Slightly more success befell another early ballad, That Girl Belongs to Yesterday, when recorded by Gene Pitney, their erstwhile session pianist. Pitney had a minor hit with the song only after drastic rearrangement to suit a piercing voice which, it was said, hit notes that only record engineers and gods could hear.

      Only one Jagger-Richard song, Tell Me, was considered good enough for the album released by Decca in April 1964 (although two more tracks bore the Stones’ collective songwriting name, Phelge). Tell Me has curio value as a heavy-handed attempt by Mick and Keith to imitate the Mersey Beat sound of the numerous post-Beatle groups from Liverpool. Strange it is to hear the Stones trying to sound Beatle-ish, with tolling bass drum, minor chords and chocked-up close harmony. Mick Jagger’s ‘Whoa yeah’ rings out in patent embarrassment. Keith Richard descants him, a McCartney made of cigarette ash and Brillo pads.

      The other eleven tracks are a belligerently alive memento of the Stones as an r & b band, the way they used to sound at Ken Colyer’s or the Crawdaddy. Given the limitations of a tiny, primitive studio, and severely rationed time there, they could do little else but blast out the best of their club repertoire, imagining an audience in place of Regent Sound’s egg-box walls and Oldham’s agitated eye on the clock. ‘Andrew told us we couldn’t afford retakes,’ Bill Wyman says. ‘The only time we broke was for food, or to let Mick run out and get sheet music for the words of Can I Get a Witness?’

      The tracks are a squirming medley from the soul and blues bag: Chuck Berry’s Carol, Bo Diddley’s Mona, Jimmy Reed’s Honest I Do, Willie Dixon’s I Just Wanna Make Love to You. Even then, they could not find quite enough songs, and were forced to throw in a lengthy