Mick Jagger. Philip Norman

on the road outside 102 Edith Grove, ferociously casual and cool with their corduroy jackets, polo necks and ever-smouldering cigarettes, but, to twenty-first-century eyes, not mustering a shred of meanness or nastiness between them. Mick stands out only for his lighter-coloured jacket with raglan lapels; if anyone seems the star of the group, it’s sleek, enigmatic-looking Charlie Watts.

      Having been dubbed the next big thing by London’s most influential music trade paper, the Stones were as good as guaranteed a contract with a major record label. Theoretically, of course, they were still bound to IBC studios by the demo tape on which they had given Ian Stewart’s friend, Glyn Johns, a six-month option. Eric Easton’s advice was that the agreement would have no validity if they could get back the tape’s only copy. Adopting Brian’s habit of bare-faced lying, they therefore told Johns they’d decided to break up the band but would like to keep the tape as a souvenir. An unsuspecting Johns handed it over in exchange for its recording cost: £109.

      Among Britain’s few record labels in 1963, the mighty Decca company was the Stones’ almost inevitable destination. Having dominated the UK music market for thirty years, Decca had seen its arch-rival, EMI, achieve the equivalent of a Klondike gold strike with the Beatles. To compound the agony, Decca’s head of ‘artists and repertoire’, Dick Rowe, had had first chance to sign the Liverpudlians but had passed on them. So desperate was Rowe to rescue his reputation that the Stones (whose demo tape his department had also rejected a few months earlier because of Mick’s vocals) walked into Decca without the customary studio audition.

      A well-worn procedure now lay ahead, which even the otherwise mould-breaking Beatles had followed – and continued to follow. The new signees would go into their record company’s own studios in the charge of a staff producer, who would choose the material they recorded and specify how it should be performed. Though Rowe, in his thankfulness, offered a significantly higher royalty than EMI had given the Beatles (it could hardly have been lower), the Stones would still receive only a tiny fraction of the sale price of each record, and that at a far-distant date, after labyrinthine adjustments and deductions.

      Andrew Oldham had other ideas, absorbed from his American entrepreneurial idol, Phil Spector. The artists who helped constitute Spector’s Wall of Sound were recorded privately by the producer at his own expense and free from any interference by third parties. The master tapes were then leased to the record company, which manufactured, distributed and marketed the product but had no say in its character or creative evolution and, crucially, did not own the copyright. In Britain’s cosily exploitative record business, a tape-lease deal was still a rarity. Such was Decca’s terror of losing another next big thing that they complied without a murmur.

      Again following Spector’s lead, Oldham appointed himself the Stones’ record producer as well as co-manager, undaunted by his indifference to their sacred music – or by never having set foot in a recording studio other than as a PR minder. Decca were already agitating for a début single to catch the ever-rising tide of hysteria around the Beatles and beat groups generally. With no clue what that début should be, Oldham simply told his charges to pick out their five best R&B stage numbers and they would make the choice democratically between them. A session was booked at Olympic Sounds, one of central London’s only three or four independent studios, on 10 May. Mick arrived straight from a London School of Economics lecture with a pile of textbooks under one arm.

      The decision about the single’s A-side – the one to be submitted for radio play and review in the trades – proved problematic. The Stones’ best live numbers were uncommercial blues like Elmore James’s ‘Dust My Broom’ or Chuck Berry anthems like ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, which by now had become the staple of many other bands, not least the Beatles. Finally they chose Berry’s ‘Come On’, a serio-comic lament about a lost girlfriend, a broken-down car, and being rudely awoken by a wrong number on the telephone. Released two years earlier as the B-side to ‘Go Go Go’, it had made little impact in Britain, and had a slightly more pop feel than Berry’s usual output.

      There was little time for any radical reinterpretation of the track at Olympic Sound. Oldham, using Eric Easton’s money, had booked the studio for three hours at a special rate of £40, and was under strict orders from his co-manager not to run over time. That sense of haste and compromise permeated the Stones’ ‘Come On’; indeed, Berry’s languid vocal was so speeded up by Mick, it sounded more like some tongue-twisting elocution exercise. With an eye to the mass market, he also toned down the lyrics (an act of self-censorship never to be repeated), singing about ‘some stupid guy tryin’’ to reach another number rather than ‘some stupid jerk’. Brian Jones’s musicianship was limited to a harmonica riff in place of Berry’s lead guitar, and a falsetto harmony in the chorus. Even with a key change to spin it out, the track lasted only one minute and forty-five seconds. For the unimportant B-side, the band could return to their comfort zone with Willie Dixon’s ‘I Want to Be Loved’.

      The session wrapped in just under three hours, so sparing Eric Easton a £5 surcharge. As the participants left, the single engineer – whose services were included in the price – asked Oldham what he wanted to do about ‘mixing’. Britain’s answer to Phil Spector did not yet know this to be an essential part of the recording process. Still fearful of being charged overtime, he replied, ‘You mix it and I’ll pick it up tomorrow.’

      Everyone involved realised how unsatisfactory the session had been, and there was neither surprise nor protest when Decca’s Dick Rowe judged both the tracks to be unreleasable in their present form and said they must be re-recorded at the company’s West Hampstead studios under the supervision of a staff producer, Michael Barclay. The wisest thing would have been for Mick to start afresh with a new A-side, but instead he continued trying to pummel some life into his hepped-up yet watered-down version of ‘Come On’. The infusion of technical expertise and extra time made so little audible difference that Decca’s bureaucracy decided to stick with the Olympic Sound version, and this was duly released on 7 June 1963.

      To drum up advance publicity, Oldham took his new discoveries on an exhaustive tour of the newspaper and magazine offices to which he had easy access thanks to his former connection with the Beatles. As well as the trade press, these included magazines catering to a female teenage audience, like Boyfriend, whose Regent Street offices were just around the corner from Decca. ‘After Andrew first brought them in, the Stones just used to turn up – usually at lunchtime,’ recalls former Boyfriend writer Maureen O’Grady. ‘I remember Mick and Brian going round the office, trying to cadge a sandwich from our packed lunches. They were obviously ravenous.’

      When it came to getting television exposure, the ‘Ernie’ Eric Easton proved to have his uses. Among Easton’s more conventional clients was Brian Matthew, the host of British television’s only significant pop performance show, Thank Your Lucky Stars. Transmitted in black-and-white early each Saturday evening from ABC-TV’s Birmingham studios, it featured all the top British and American chart names lip-synching their latest releases and, in this era of only two UK television channels, pulled in a weekly audience of around 13 million. Six months earlier, while Mick, Brian and Keith were shivering at Edith Grove, the show had broken the Beatles nationally, sending their second single, ‘Please Please Me’, straight to No. 1.

      Easton spoke to Brian Matthew, and as a result Thank Your Lucky Stars booked the Stones to perform ‘Come On’ on the show to be recorded on Sunday 7 July and aired nationally the following Saturday. The catch was that they would have to look like a conventional beat group, in matching black-and-white-checked bumfreezer jackets with black velvet collars, black trousers, white shirts and Slim Jim ties. Mick and Keith protested in outrage to Andrew Oldham their supposed soul mate, but to Oldham exposure on this scale far outweighed a little compromising clobber; if they wanted the spot, they must wear the check.

      Thus did Britain receive its first sight of Mick Jagger – far down a bill headlined by the teenage songstress Helen Shapiro and introduced by Brian Matthew in the kind of cut-glass BBC tones that traditionally commentated on Royal funerals or Test cricket matches. By today’s standards, it was hardly a provocative début. The Stones in their little checked jackets appeared on a two-sided set formed of giant playing cards, with Mick standing on a low plinth to the rear