young men with sports cars. ‘Mike Jagger’ would henceforward be a creature only in the memory of his earliest friends. It was Mick Jagger who hung around with Keith Richards, talking in broad Cockney and affecting some of Keith’s chaotic nonchalance and street-tough recklessness.
The mimicry was not completely one-sided. Keith on occasion could become thoughtful, self-effacing, even shy. It was as if each provided the other with a role he had desired but never dared assume before. Dick Taylor noticed what was to become a regular interchange of identities. ‘One day, Mick would become Keith. But then on another day, Keith could go all like Mick. You never knew which way round it would be.
‘But from then on, Mick and Keith were together. Whoever else came into the band or left, there’d always be Mick and Keith.’
Before Alexis Korner and his wife Bobbie went to bed in their flat in Moscow Road, Bayswater, they would be careful to leave the kitchenette window slightly ajar at the bottom. Next to the window was a table positioned in such a way that the late-arriving or unexpected guest could enter by rolling sideways across it. When Alexis and Bobbie got up next morning, four or five sleeping figures might be peacefully disposed under the table, against the cooker legs or among the food bowls of the Korners’ several cats.
The sleepers were American blues musicians on tour, for whom Alexis and Bobbie Korner provided refuge and hospitality in an otherwise bewildering land. Big Bill Broonzy, Muddy Waters, T-Bone Walker, the guitar giants so often visualized by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in their windy and harsh Chicago heaven, might be sitting barely twenty miles from Dartford in that Bayswater kitchenette, eating the Southern-style ham hocks that Bobbie Korner had learned to cook.
Alexis Korner’s antecedents were as richly cosmopolitan as the syllables of his name suggest. His father was Austrian, a former cavalry officer, and his mother was Greco-Turkish. By his father’s first marriage he had a Russian step-grandmother. He himself was born in Paris and spent his early childhood in Switzerland and North Africa. There was something more than a little Moroccan in his dark skin and tightly curled hair, and the vibrant, husky voice which only accidental circumstance was to bend into the brogue of suburban West London.
His father, the former cavalry officer, was an autocratic, distant figure, vaguely connected with high finance and – Alexis later thought – international espionage. ‘I know he lost a lot of money in the Twenties, when Britain went off the gold standard, and he couldn’t live as well as he had before. He was also supposed to have had something to do with the scandal surrounding the Zinoviev Letter. I’m sure he’d done something pretty major to earn the gratitude of the British government. When war broke out in 1939, we were living in England; my father could have expected to be interned as an enemy alien. Instead, he got his naturalization papers as a British subject virtually overnight.’
One Saturday in 1940, Alexis, a pupil of St Paul’s School, went from his home in Ealing to nearby Shepherd’s Bush market to indulge in the boyish pastime of pilfering from the stalls. His haul that morning included a record by the blues pianist Jimmy Yancey. ‘From that moment,’ he remembered later, ‘I only wanted to do one thing. I wanted to play boogie-woogie piano.’
When he attempted to do so on the family piano, his father would come along in a fury and slam down the lid. Nor was the elder Korner any better pleased when Alexis brought home his first guitar. ‘My father used to say the guitar was a “woman’s instrument”. He imagined it in operettas, tied with pink ribbon.’
Two years’ military service brought relief from this parental prejudice. Alexis served with the British Army in West Germany and – as well as playing football for his regiment – became a part-time announcer over the Forces’ radio network. He could saturate himself, not only in the music played to British troops, but also in the far more exciting output of AFN, the American Forces Network. As surreptitiously listening German boys already knew, AFN broadcast the very best in jazz and swing and even types of black music not available to civilians back home in the States. So the blues took root, on NATO bases and, later, in local clubs, amid pornographic bookshops, strip joints and mud-wrestling pits.
Back in London, working in the shipping firm owned by his mother’s Greek family, Alexis gravitated naturally to that first postwar ‘younger generation’, which haunted the Soho cellars, avid for politics and traditional jazz. ‘We were elitist – and highly political. We used to speak quite seriously in those days of founding a “fourth class”. There’d be the upper class, the middle class, the working class and us. That was how the blues came into it. When we heard a Leadbelly song or a Woody Guthrie song, we knew we were listening to a powerful political protest.’
The principal jazz bandleaders of the period did what they could to bring blues to the larger Dixieland audience. Humphrey Lyttelton, trumpeter, Old Etonian and friend of royalty, had brought Big Bill Broonzy to Britain as early as 1953. Ken Colyer, most pure of all the jazz and folk purists, featured some of the greatest American bluesmen at his London club, Studio 51, just off Leicester Square.
Chris Barber remained the music’s most passionate, consistent champion – the only one, in Korner’s words, to ‘put his money where his mouth was’ and plough actual cash into keeping blues alive. Barber, in the early Fifties, had been the moving spirit behind a formal conservation body, the National Jazz League. The league flourished, acquiring sufficient capital to buy its own Soho club, the Marquee in Wardour Street.
Alexis Korner joined the Barber band as banjoist during Lonnie Donegan’s absence on National Service. When Donegan returned and Rock Island Line became a hit, Korner was well placed, had he desired, to participate in the nine days’ skiffle wonder. He almost joined another successful skiffle group, the Vipers, signed up at the 2 I’s coffee bar by a then obscure EMI-label executive called George Martin. Instead, he formed his own group, bowing to commercial pressure with the word ‘skiffle’ only for its first extended-play record. Thereafter, the group was to be known as Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated.
The first band in Britain to play nothing but blues was a curious amalgam of fervent fantasy wedded to unlikely and incongruous human shapes. Its chief member, after Korner himself, was Cyril Davies, a fifteen-stone panel beater from South Harrow, a virtuoso on blues harmonica and twelve-string guitar, whose every waking moment was clouded by chagrin that he had not been born a black man. On saxophone there was Dick Heckstall-Smith, who in aspect and manner bore a passing resemblance to Lenin. On double bass there was the future bass guitar maestro, Jack Bruce. The drummer – when Alexis could persuade him to sit in – was a sad-faced boy called Charlie Watts. ‘I’d met Charlie at the Troubadour in Brompton Road, and always liked his playing. I’d said to him, “If I ever form a blues group, would you come in as drummer?” But he’d only do it part-time. He was too busy, studying commercial art in Harrow.’
It was Korner’s plan from the beginning to start his own club, as Ken Colyer and other musicians had, to protect their chosen music from the jibes or hostility of rival factions. Soho cellars or pub backrooms in those days could be hired for a few shillings a night. Alexis Korner’s first such venture, grandly styled the London Blues and Barrelhouse Club, was a room at the Round House pub in Wardour Street. The residency was sometimes interrupted by disputes between Korner and Cyril Davies, which led one or other to storm off and play in some rival club like the Troubadour.
As Blues Incorporated became more established, they started to receive bookings further and further outside London. One night, towards the end of 1961, Alexis found himself playing the blues to a rapturous crowd at a municipal hall in the genteel spa town of Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.
After the performance, a boy came up to Alexis in the pub across the road and talked to him earnestly – but with evident authority – about the blues and bluesmen. The boy was short but broadly built, and looked well-to-do in his smart Italian suit, white tab-collar shirt and Slim Jim tie. He spoke
