phrase ‘rock and roll’ was black slang for energetic fucking. Even in America, its origin had scarcely been realized. In Britain it was simply the most exciting noise that ever confused an adolescent’s glands. A British tour by Haley and the Comets in 1956 left a trail of wrecked theatres and slashed cinema seats. Music became, for the first time, a source of conflict between the young, who adored this outrageous new noise, and their parents, who loathed it and strove to extinguish it by every possible means.
A few months earlier, the British Decca label had released a record which, though quieter than Haley’s joyous gibberish, was destined to transform many lives more permanently. The record – one of the newfangled ‘long playing’ kind – was New Orleans Joys, by the Chris Barber Jazz Band.
Barber, twenty-five, led Britain’s most commercially successful Dixieland band. He remained, however, principally an archivist, devoted to keeping alive sources and style that might otherwise have been overlooked in the current ‘Trad’ boom. His New Orleans Joys LP included two blues songs played in the ‘skiffle’ style evolved in the Depression years, when musicians were often reduced to instruments extemporized from household utensils. The songs, Rock Island Line and John Henry, were performed by a primitive rhythm section of double bass, kitchen washboard and banjo, the last played by a skinny Glaswegian named Tony Donegan who had changed his name to Lonnie in honour of the American bluesman Lonnie Johnson.
The two songs, released on a single in 1956, became a stupendous British Top Ten hit. Haley and his group, in their plaid jackets and bow ties, owed their appeal to outlandish remoteness. But Donegan, with his nasal whine, his ex-serviceman’s haircut and backing of mundane domestic implements, made comparably exciting sounds that anyone could reproduce. Within days of Lonnie Donegan’s first appearance on national television, acolyte skiffle groups had sprung up all over Britain. The craze centred on London’s Soho, its jazz cellars and newly fashionable espresso coffee houses, into whose gloomy recesses record-company talent scouts now plunged in a hectic search for ersatz Lonnie Donegans. For the first time ever, musical talent was held to be of secondary importance to looks. Any boy who played a guitar and wore a plaid shirt with the collar turned up, if he sat around long enough in coffee bars like the Heaven and Hell, the Gyre and Gimble or the 2 I’s, could hope to follow the starry path of Lonnie Donegan or ‘Britain’s First rock ’n’ roller,’ Tommy Steele.
All over Britain, in suburban living rooms, boys crouched together with their matchwood guitars, their mothers’ washboards and basses improvised from tea chests and wire, struggling to learn the blues songs made popular by Donegan and his successors, grateful for the easy chords and pattered tempo, blissfully unaware that the lyrics, as Woody Guthrie or Huddie Leadbetter had written them, were violent political tracts; that Midnight Special was a cotton slave’s suicidal lament or that Lonnie Johnson’s plaintively sweet Careless Love was a song about syphilis, ending with murder.
Eva Jagger remembers that even as a very small boy her elder son would stand in front of the family wireless set, singing along to music with words made up in his head. Most of all he seemed to like Latin American rhythms, which he would accompany with a stream of Spanish-sounding nonsense. At the age of ten, on a Spanish holiday with Joe and Eva, he posed for a snapshot in a straw sombrero, playing a toy guitar. Sombrero tipped back, guitar flourished flamenco-style, the pose was, even then, self-consciously theatrical.
The skiffle craze swept through Dartford Grammar as through almost every other British school. Two of Mike’s friends, Bob Beckwith and Alan Etherington, acquired guitars and began practising together. But Mike, though he too had a guitar, joined none of the ad hoc classroom skiffle groups that would strum together, perched on desks during break time.
He never really liked Bill Haley, or even Elvis Presley, after the gold-suited, magical lout had superseded Haley as the corrupter of Britain’s youth. His first fan worship, significantly, was for Little Richard, the original black rock ’n’ roll star whose r & b beginnings were now camouflaged in a demented scream, a wobbling drape suit and an aura – though few perceived it then – of sexual ambiguity.
He did succumb, as most did, to the charm of Buddy Holly and the Crickets. Holly is blessed by countless guitar demigods for having first showed them the way from skiffle to rock ’n’ roll, in simple but inventive chord sequences through G and E. As his enormous output shows, he was a stylistic chameleon, equally at home with Texas rockabilly and black r & b. Soon to die, he visited Britain on tour only once, in March 1958. Mike Jagger went with another Dartford Grammar School friend, Dick Taylor, to see the Holly stage show at the Granada Cinema, Woolwich. Buddy Holly that night played one of the more esoteric items in his repertoire – a song called Not Fade Away, set to a halting, staccato beat invented by the blues star Bo Diddley. Dick Taylor remembers what an impression that song in particular made on Mike Jagger.
A wispy, amiable boy, son of a plumber in nearby Bexleyheath, Dick Taylor came nearer than most to penetrating the Jagger reserve. For Dick knew about American music far more exotic and exciting than Elvis and Little Richard. What Dick Taylor liked was real blues – the scratched and blurred master sketches that the rock ’n’ roll industry had turned into glib cartoons. It was at Dick Taylor’s house that Mike Jagger listened to Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed, Howlin’ Wolf, giants of the urban blues with heart-shivering voices, calling and answering their virtuoso guitars, that could change the view beyond the lace curtains from Kentish suburbia to the dark and windy canyons along Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive. From then on, the blues became Mike’s consuming passion.
Part of the music’s attraction was its sheer unavailability. Simply hearing it was complicated enough. You could not buy blues records in the Dartford or Bexleyheath record shops. As with all truly worthwhile things, it involved a trip to London. Mike and Dick would spend their Saturday afternoons at the jazz record shops in Charing Cross Road, thumbing through the blues ‘import’ stock in sleeves already dog-eared and thumbed in their wandering journey across the cultural hemispheres. The very label logos excited them – not boring British Decca and Philips, but Okeh and Crown and Chess and Sue and Imperial and Delmark.
If listening to blues was difficult, seeing it was virtually impossible. Though famous bluesmen like Big Bill Broonzy did perform in Britain during the late Fifties, news of their coming did not percolate down the line to Dartford. The only glimpse given to Dartford Grammar School’s secret blues caucus involved sitting through Jazz on a Summer’s Day, a film documentary about the American Newport Jazz Festival. Almost at the end, a lanky young black man got up onstage and sang through a derisive grin and played a red guitar that dangled almost to the level of his wildly knocking knees. That, for Dick Taylor, Mike Jagger and countless other British boys, was their first tantalizing sight of Chuck Berry. The film sequence ended with Berry dodging a hail of flashbulbs thrown by photographers in fury that the pure jazz had been so disrupted.
Mike Jagger’s earliest attempt at blues singing was at the house of a boy named David Soames in Wentworth Drive, Dartford. David was trying to form a rhythm and blues group with Mike Turner, another ex-pupil of Wentworth County Primary School. Both quickly decided that Mike Jagger sang in far too strange a fashion to be their vocalist. He accepted the decision without rancour and afterwards walked home with Mike Turner, discussing their forthcoming GCE O-Level examinations.
Dick Taylor owned a second-hand drum kit, which gained him admittance to several small amateur groups otherwise top-heavy with guitarists. By his last year at Dartford Grammar, he was practising regularly with Bob Beckwith, Alan Etherington and Mike Jagger. It was hardly a group at all, since they had no equipment – only the Etheringtons’ radiogram to amplify the guitars – and because Mike Jagger, their singer, refused to play a guitar himself, as was customary. He just stood or sat there and sang, diffidently until his powers as a mimic came to his aid. ‘The first song I remember him doing was Richie Valens’s La Bamba,’ Dick Taylor says. ‘Mick used to come out with this stream of words that sounded just like Spanish. He’d just make them up as he went along.’
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