rock group called the Ramrods. What he really wanted to do, he told Alexis, was play Delta-style slide guitar with a band like Blues Incorporated. Alexis said – as Alexis always did – that if Brian Jones ever came to London, he was welcome to sleep on the Korners’ kitchen floor.
In March 1962, tired of battling against the prejudice of the Soho jazz crowd, Alexis Korner decided to see how a new blues club would go in his own West London suburb, Ealing. The venue was a small room under the ABC teashop, just across the road from Ealing Broadway station. The first session, March 17, was announced by a small display ad in the New Musical Express.
The ad caused astonished excitement twenty miles away in Kent, among a self-defeatingly modest group called Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys, to whom it still had not occurred that anyone else in Britain shared their musical fixation. The following Saturday, crammed into Alan Etherington’s father’s Riley ‘Pathfinder’ car, they set out for Ealing to investigate the extraordinary possibility that other people were playing the blues, to an audience, for money.
‘WELL, THE JOINT WAS ROCKIN’ …’
It truly was happening, in a poky downstairs room between the ABC bakery and a jeweller’s shop: their secret music, the contraband repertoire of Muddy Waters, Otis Spann and the Chicago bluesmen, translated from inconceivable distance to deafening propinquity by the oddest imaginable group of men. Blues Incorporated performed, like jazz musicians, with almost professorial seriousness. Alexis Korner, curly-haired and moustachioed, in a white business shirt and tie, occupied the foreground with his Spanish guitar, seated on a chair. Cyril Davies stood next to him, sucking and coaxing the blues ‘harp’ with a breathy passion that made his pleated trousers wobble. Their audience stood around the tiny recessed stage in equal formality, nursing half pints of beer. As ‘Squirrel’ ended his harp solo, snatched the silver slide from his mouth and mopped his streaming brow, he received a round of polite applause like a speaker at a temperance meeting.
The instant success of the Ealing club proved to Alexis what he had always suspected – that the blues music, for some reason, had its most devoted following in suburban West London. After the second or third night at Ealing, something even more satisfactory happened. Alexis had brought Blues Incorporated away from Soho partly to escape the hostility of the traditional jazz faction. Now, the very clubs that had rejected him were starting to lose business, as more and more of their customers made the long Saturday night trek to Ealing. Even the purist National Jazz League could not ignore the commercial possibilities implied. Harold Pendleton, manager of the league-owned Marquee Club, came out to Ealing to hear Blues Incorporated, and afterwards offered Korner – whom he had previously not admired – a regular Thursday night engagement at the Marquee.
The band, at that time, had no regular vocalist. ‘I’d sing lead – or Squirrel would,’ Korner later remembered. ‘But we didn’t really believe in words. We were instrumentalists. The words just got in the way.’
Each Saturday night audience, in any case, was filled with young men, eager to exchange their world of Magicoal electric fires and Bournvita cocoa for the blues shouter’s world of tin tenements and dance-hall queens. Anyone who wanted to sing with Blues Incorporated was welcome to try, though Alexis knew from long experience that the results were generally terrible. Then one night, a 6 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
