Mick Jagger. Philip Norman

to come to the Station Hotel on a Sunday lunchtime and watch the Stones while Gomelsky shot further documentary footage of them onstage. ‘I met them in the bar, before they started playing,’ Jones remembers. ‘Mick was amiable and well spoken, but he stayed pretty much in the background. I thought Brian was the leader because he was the pushiest one, waving their single press cutting under my nose.’

      Peter Jones was ‘knocked out’ by the set that followed, but cautiously said he wanted his paper’s in-house R&B enthusiast, Norman Jopling, to give a more knowledgeable assessment. Nineteen-year-old Jopling turned up at the Crawdaddy’s next Sunday session, but without great expectations. ‘British bands who tried to play the blues all had this kind of worthy, post-Trad feel, so I expected them to be rubbish. But as soon as Mick opened his mouth, I realised how wrong I was. All I remember thinking as the Stones played was “This stuff doesn’t only belong to black guys in the States any more. White kids in Britain can play it just as well.”’

      When the band talked to Jopling afterwards, Brian again took the lead, quizzing him at length about what he could do for them in print. Mick was ‘a bit distant’, as if he resented his colleague’s assertiveness. ‘He knew Brian had started the band and was the leader, but he knew he was the guy people were looking at.’ Later, Jopling rode with them in Stu’s van to the house of a record producer, where Keith initiated an earnest discussion about Motown music and how disappointing Mary Wells’s latest single had been. ‘I remember that there were a lot of musical instruments lying around, Brian was picking them up and just playing them with that instinctive talent of his. But Mick was playing some, too – and I don’t mean only percussion instruments.’

      Jopling’s article in the next week’s Record Mirror was the stuff of which careers are made:

      As the Trad scene gradually subsides, promoters of all kinds of teen-beat entertainments heave a sigh of relief that they’ve found something to take its place. It’s Rhythm and Blues, of course. And the number of R&B clubs that have sprung up is nothing short of fantastic . . . At the Station Hotel, Kew Road, the hip kids throw themselves around to the new ‘jungle music’ like they never did in the more restrained days of Trad. And the combo they writhe and twist to is called the Rolling Stones. Maybe you haven’t heard of them – if you live far from London, the odds are you haven’t. But by gad you will! The Stones are destined to be the biggest group in the R&B scene if that scene continues to flourish . . .

      After engineering such a triumph, Giorgio Gomelsky might have expected formal ratification as the band’s manager in time to handle the consequent surge of interest from record companies and talent agents. But all Gomelsky’s unselfish work on their behalf was suddenly forgotten. Before the Norman Jopling article had even appeared, Brian asked Jopling’s Record Mirror senior Peter Jones whether he’d consider taking on the Stones’ management. Jones was not interested – but once again proved a crucial catalyst. A couple of days later, he happened to run into a business acquaintance, a young freelance PR man whose naked ambition was a byword throughout the music trade press. If the young PR man cared to check out the Crawdaddy Club’s house band, Peter Jones suggested, he might find something of interest. And until the Record Mirror’s rave appeared, the field would be clear. When Mick had played Jimmy Reed’s ‘I’ll Change My Style’ to his new Beatle friend John Lennon, he little imagined how prophetic the title would be.

       CHAPTER FOUR

       ‘Self-Esteem? He Didn’t Have Any’

      Long before the Rolling Stones turned into a new kind of band and Mick into a new kind of singer, Andrew Loog Oldham was a totally new kind of manager.

      Before Oldham, managers of pop acts – a pool of talent then 99.9 per cent male – had been older men with no interest in the music beyond what it might earn them, and no empathy with their young charges or with teenagers generally. Most in addition were homosexuals, which explains why so many early boy rock ’n’ rollers had the same rough-trade fantasy look of flossy blond hair, black leather, tight jeans and high-heeled boots. Andrew Oldham was the first manager to be the same age as his charges, to speak their language, share their outlook, mirror their rampant heterosexuality and seem motivated by their collective ideals as much as by financial gain. While engineering managerial coups that, at the outset, seemed little short of magical, he was naturally and undisputedly one of the band.

      Managers of the traditional kind had been content to stay in the shadows, counting their percentages. Oldham, however, craved stardom in his own right and, from the earliest age, possessed all the drive, ruthlessness and shamelessness necessary to win it. He was ahead of his time in nurturing such ambition despite possessing no abilities whatsoever as either a performer or musician and, indeed, no quantifiable talent in any direction. The talent he did have – one of the very highest order – would emerge only when he began managing the Stones, which at the outset he saw primarily as a means of projecting himself into the spotlight.

      The other two most celebrated managers in pop history, Colonel Tom Parker and Brian Epstein, both had little real comprehension of the artists under their control. With the Stones – particularly their singer – Oldham very quickly realised exactly what he had found and what to do with it. In all the annals of huckstering and hype, no one has possessed a shrewder understanding of both his product and his customers.

      It is a familiar music-business cliché to give the name ‘Svengali’ to any manager who radically remoulds a performer’s appearance or persona. Svengali is one of the scarier figures in Victorian gothic literature, a music teacher with a black beard and a hypnotic stare, combining the auras of Dracula and the Phantom of the Opera. In George du Maurier’s 1894 novel, Trilby, the eponymous heroine, an innocent young artist’s model, allows Svengali to take her over, heart and soul, in exchange for transforming her into a world-famous operatic diva.

      The analogy is always made with both Colonel Parker and Epstein, even though the managerial reshaping of Presley and the Beatles was purely cosmetic, impermanent, and reached neither their hearts nor their souls. In pop’s premier league, the Svengali–Trilby scenario has actually been played out just once: when Andrew Loog Oldham met Mick Jagger.

      When it happened, it would stir yet more foreign influences into the making of Mick. Oldham’s arrestingly hybrid name commemorated his father Andrew Loog, a Dutch-American air-force lieutenant, shot down and killed while serving in Britain during the last years of the Second World War. His mother, born Cecelia Schatkowski, was the daughter of a Russian Ashkenazi Jew who, like Mick’s mother’s family, had emigrated to New South Wales in Australia. After arriving in Britain aged four – the same age Eva Jagger did – Cecelia became known as Celia and, like Eva, preferred to draw a veil of pukka Englishness over her origins.

      Born in 1944, after his father’s death and out of wedlock, Oldham grew up in the literary-bohemian north London suburb of Hampstead and attended a first-rank private school, Wellingborough. Like his future Trilby, he possessed a keen intelligence but resolutely refused to live up to his academic promise, instead hungering for glamour and style and choosing the unlikeliest possible role models for a boy of his background. In Oldham’s case, these were not venerable blues musicians but the amoral young hustlers who swindled and finger-snapped their way through late 1950s cinema – Tony Curtis as Sidney Falco, the sleazy Broadway press agent in Sweet Smell of Success; Laurence Harvey as Johnny Jackson, the prototype ‘bent’ British pop manager in Expresso Bongo.

      When London first began to swing, Andrew Loog Oldham – by now a strawberry-blond nineteen-year-old with an educated accent and a killer line in suits and tab-collared shirts – was perfectly placed to hop aboard the pendulum. He became an odd-job boy at Mary Quant’s Bazaar boutique while working nights as a waiter at Soho’s Flamingo Club (where he could easily have sighted Mick but somehow never did). Given his mania for attention seeking, it was inevitable he should end up in public relations, a field until then also dominated by much older men and therefore largely uncomprehending of teenage music and culture.

      Among