within months. Mainly because my old man, I guess, I should imagine, for a woman, he’d be incredibly boring to live with. He worked, still does, I believe, at an electronics factory, as a supervisor or something, he’s worked his way, been there since he was twenty-one or so. Always very straitlaced, prudish – never got drunk, very controlled, very hung up. I should say he was very hung up. And the bastard – what’s really weird about it, because I like him still, I find certain things about him rather endearing – he’s refused to acknowledge me since he split with my mother, because, I think, I was still on friendly terms with my mother after she split. So he immediately gets all uptight, I guess, and thinks – I dunno, I’ve written to him a couple of times. I wrote to him when I got busted, ’cause I wanted to explain that thing to him, I didn’t want him to just get it all out of the newspapers. But I didn’t get an answer, which rather pissed me off. Haven’t heard from him since ’63. Seven years.’
‘Were you very close to him as a kid?’
‘No, it wasn’t possible to be that close to him, he didn’t know how to open himself up. He was always good to me.’
‘Was he strict on things like your going out as you got older?’
‘He tried to be, but he kind of gave up, you know? I think because of my mother, who had this tendency to give in to me, especially as I got older. And also because – I think he just gave up on me. I’ve disappointed him incredibly.’
‘You turned out to be a Dupree instead of a Richards—’
‘Exactly. I really didn’t turn out to be anything like he wanted.’
‘Where does he live?’
‘As far as I know, he still lives in, where we all used to live, this fucking horrible council house in Dartford. It’s eighteen miles to the east on the edge of London, just outside the suburbs where the country starts creeping in. He really had no sense of taking a gamble on anything. Fucking soul-destroying council estate. A mixture of terrible apartment blocks and horrible new streets full of semi-detached houses, all in a row, all new, a real concrete jungle, a really disgusting place. And because he wouldn’t take a chance on anything, he wouldn’t try to get us out of there, which is what I think eventually did my mother in as far as he was concerned. I’m gonna have to go and see him one day, just because I’m not gonna be as stubborn as him. One day I’m just gonna get hold of him and try to make contact, whether he likes it or not.’
‘He hasn’t married again?’
‘Far as I know, no. I can’t even imagine him gettin’ himself together to find another woman. He’d just rather stay bitter and feel sorry for himself. It’s a shame. As far as I’m concerned, I’d like to have him down here. He’s a gardener, he could look after the place, and he’d love to do it if he was really honest with himself. And I’d really dig it if he’d just live here and look after this place.’
(Ten years later, Keith would make his father part of the family again, but with no false feeling on either side. When, in 1983, Bert Richards answered the phone at Keith’s house in Jamaica, the friend calling said, ‘You must be so proud of him.’ ‘Well . . .’ Keith’s father said, refusing to commit himself.)
‘How did you feel about school?’
‘I wanted to get the fuck out of there. The older I got, the more I wanted to get out. I just knew I wasn’t gonna make it. In primary school you didn’t do that much, but later, when I went to that fucking technical school in Dartford, the indoctrination was blatantly apparent. I went to primary school, which in England is called, or was then, infant school, from five to seven. When I started going to school, just after the war, they taught you the basics, but mainly it was indoctrination in the way schools were run, who’s to say yes to who and how to find your place in class. It’s what you’ve let yourself in for for the next ten years.
‘When you’re seven you go to junior school. They had just started building a few new schools by the time we’d finished the first one, so we went to a new one nearer where we lived. That’s where I met Mick, ’cause that’s where he went too, Wentworth County Primary School. He happened to live near by me, I used to see him around . . . on our tricycles.
‘In junior school they start grading you each school year, each section of kids into three sections, fast, average, and slow. When you’re eleven you take an examination called the eleven plus, which is the big trauma, because this virtually dictates the rest of your life as far as the system goes. It probably includes more psychology now, but then they were just trying to see how much you knew and how quick you learned it and whether you could write it down. That decided whether you went to grammar school, which is where you receive a sort of semiclassical education for the masses, or to what they call a technical school, which I ended up in, which is actually for kids that are usually pretty bright but that just won’t accept discipline very well. The school for kids that don’t stand much of a chance of doing anything except unskilled or semiskilled labor is called secondary modern. For those who had the bread there were plenty of public schools, but this was the system for state education.
‘After eleven I lost touch with Mick because he went to a grammer school and I went to this technical school. I lost touch with Mick for – it seemed a long time, actually it was about six years.’
Keith Richards, the youngest of the original Rolling Stones, was born on December 18, 1943. Michael Philip Jagger was born in the same year and the same town, Dartford, on July 26. When she was four years old, Mick’s mother had come to Dartford from Australia, where six generations of her family had lived. ‘The women in my family went to Australia to get away from the men,’ she said. She married Joseph Jagger, a physical education teacher who came to Dartford from a family of strict nondrinking Baptists in the north of England. Their son Michael was from an early age interested in athletics and in earning money.
‘When I was twelve years old,’ Mick said, ‘I worked on an American army base near Dartford, giving other kids physical instruction – because I was good at it. I had to learn their games, so I learned football and baseball, all the American games. There was a black cat there named José, a cook, who played R&B records for me. That was the first time I heard black music. In fact that was my first encounter with American thought. They buried a flag, a piece of cloth, with full military honors. I thought it was ridiculous, and said so. They said, “How would you feel if we said something about the Queen?” I said, “I wouldn’t mind, you wouldn’t be talking about me. She might mind, but I wouldn’t.”’
We talked in many places – movie sets, motel rooms, airplanes, at Mick’s house on Cheyne Walk, with Marsha Hunt, the Afro-American actress, pregnant with Mick’s first child, wearing her bosom Scotch-taped into a hippie-Indian dress.
One night at Keith’s London house, a few doors up from Mick’s, Keith, Mick, Anita, and I were talking, and Anita mentioned that Mrs Jagger often speaks of how Mick used to enjoy camping and the outdoor life. In a high-pitched, proper voice, imitating Mrs Jagger, I said, ‘As a child, Mick was very butch.’
‘Yeah, I was butch,’ Mick said. ‘But she was always butcher.’
‘Technical school was completely the wrong thing for me,’ Keith said. ‘Working with the hands, metalwork. I can’t even measure an inch properly, so they’re forcing me to make a set of drills or something, to a thousandth-of-an-inch accuracy. I did my best to get thrown out of that place. Took me four years, but I made it.’
‘You tried to get yourself thrown out how? By not showing up?’
‘Not so much that, because they do too many things to
