reason.
‘Brian’s just about making enough to keep us from being chucked out of this place, and it’s winter, it’s like the worst winter ever. Brian and me sitting around this gas fire, wondering where to get the next shilling to put in it to keep the fire going. Collecting beer bottles and selling them back to the pubs, getting like three shillings, and going to pads where we knew there’d been parties on, walkin’ in sayin’ Hello, how nice, we’ll help you clean up, and we’d steal the bottles and whatever food we could find lying around the kitchen and run for it. It’s gettin’ really sick, down to pickin’ people’s pockets, in fact that’s why these two LSE cats leave. They split, and we get this other cat in who’s worth a brief mention ’cause he was as horrifyingly disgusting as Brian and myself at the time and also ’cause he used to call himself Phelge, which was just a nickname, but he insisted on being called Phelge.
‘Nanker Phelge’ – listed as the writer of the Stones’ original songs on their first records – ‘was a creation of Brian’s. This guy who called himself Phelge was going through this incredible scene at the time – everybody went through it in a way, Mick went through his first camp period, he started wandering round in a blue linen housecoat, wavin’ his hands everywhere – “Oh! Don’t!” A real King’s Road queen for about six months, and Brian and I used to take the piss out of him. Mick was on that kick, and this guy that we lived with, Phelge, was into being the most disgusting person – he was going through being the most disgusting thing ever. Literally. You would walk into this pad, and he would be standing at the top of the stairs, completely nude except for his underpants, which would be filthy, on top of his head, and he’d be spitting at you. It wasn’t a thing to get mad about, you’d just collapse laughing. Covered in spit, you’d collapse laughing.
‘And this pad is getting so screwed up, for like six months we used the kitchen to play in, just rehearse in, because it was cold, and slowly the place got filthy and started to smell, so we bolted the doors and locked them all up, and the kitchen was condemned. I was at that time into making tapes, I had a tape recorder, reels and reels of tape in the bedroom. See, it was interesting, the place was built like if that was the bedroom, the stairs would be coming up here, and turn round and then come along here, and the kitchen would be off here, and the bog would be here. I used to have a bed here, and the window there, and the window to the bog would be there. All this was outside a courtyard in the garden. I had the microphone through the window in the cistern of the bog, and the tape recorder at the foot of the bed. And I had reels and reels of tapes of people goin’ to the bog. Chains pullin’. On cheap tape recorders, if you record the flushing of a john, it sounds like people applauding, so it would be like some incredible show Brian and I would make up, like with the chick from down-stairs: “And now, folks, Miss Judy Whatever.” Every time somebody would come into the bog, I’d switch the tape recorder on and go round to the bog door and knock, and they’d say “Wait a minute,” and you’d get these conversations going through the door, followed at the end by applause, and then the next person would come in. That’s the sort of thing we were into. Real down-home.
‘We’re trying to get this band off the ground without any real hope. At this time the Beatles’ first record comes out and we’re really brought down. It’s the beginning of Beatlemania. Suddenly everybody’s lookin’ round for groups, and we see more and more groups being signed. Alexis Korner gets a recording contract, splits from the Marquee Club, and who gets his spot, the Rolling Stones. For just about enough bread to keep alive.
‘We really need a bass player now. I’m not sure what happened to Dick Taylor. I think we kicked him out, very ruthless in those days. Nobody could hear him because he had terrible equipment and he seemed to have no way to get anything better. Everybody else had hustled reasonable-size amplifiers. There was the scene of how much bread you were makin’ and why split it with a cat who couldn’t be heard anyway. Advertised for a bass player. The drummer we’ve got says, ‘I know a bass player who’s got his own amplifier, huge speaker, plus a spare Vox 130 amp’ – which at the time was the biggest amp available, the best. He got one of those to spare, fantastic. So onto the scene comes—’ William Perks, a bricklayer’s son from Penger, in southeast London ‘—and we can’t believe him. He’s a real London Ernie, Brylcreemed hair and eleven-inch cuffs on his pants and huge blue suede shoes with rubber soles.’
Bill met the Stones at a pub called the Weatherby Arms, in King’s Road, Chelsea. ‘Bill came down there,’ Stu said, ‘and they were in one of their funny moods, and they didn’t even bother to talk to him, and Bill didn’t know what was going on. They were living in Edith Grove together and, um, I used to dread goin’ round there because of some of the weird things that used to go on. I used to think they were fuckin’ insane at times. When people live together all the bloody time they begin to develop virtually their own language and you’re never sure whether you’re gettin’ through to them, or whether they mean what they say or whether they’re laughin’ at you all the fuckin’ time. So Bill wasn’t one bit impressed.’
A few years older than the other Stones, Bill (born October 24, 1935) had received, along with his brothers and sisters (two of each), a sound musical education. By the time he was fourteen he could play clarinet, paino, and organ. ‘He was very good,’ his father said. ‘In fact, he was in line for the job of organist at our local church.’ The elder Mr Perks, who played accordion ‘just for fun’ at neighborhood pubs, told his children that ‘if they learned to play an instrument they’d never be short of a pound.’ But even though Bill’s parents both worked, his mother in a factory, at sixteen he had to leave Beckenham Grammar School to find a job. Drafted into National Service, Bill started playing guitar while stationed in Germany with the Royal Air Force as a file clerk.
After his discharge, Bill found a job with an engineering firm in Lewisham. When he met the Stones he had been married for a year and a half and had a year-old son, Stephen. Bill was working for the engineering firm and playing parttime with a rock and roll band called the Cliftons. ‘We had a drummer and three guitarists,’ Bill said. ‘One played rhytham, one lead, and I’d tune the top two strings of mine down seven semitones and play bass Chuck Berry–style. We got away with it, but then we’d hear groups with real basses, and we knew there was something wrong. So we bought a bass guitar from a fellow, cut it down, took all the metal off, made it very light and easy to play. I still use it sometimes.’ The Cliftons played weddings, youth-club dances, ‘picked up a fair amount of money, considering we weren’t all that good.’
Bill used part of the money to buy the equipment that the Stones admired. ‘They didn’t like me, they liked my amplifier,’ Bill said. ‘The two they had were broken and torn up inside – sounded great, really, but we didn’t know that then. But I didn’t like their music very much. I had been playing hard rock – Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis – and the slow blues things seemed very boring to me.’
But Stu ‘got on all right with Bill, really, and as I was the guy that was taking him home each night, I managed to sort of talk him into staying.’
‘It also turns out,’ Keith said, ‘that he can really play. At first it’s very untogether, but slowly he starts to play very natural, very swinging bass lines. But it’s not a permanent thing, he does play with us and he’s coming to rehearsals, but then he can’t make the gigs sometimes, because he’s married and’s got a kid, and he has to work. So it’s very touchy one way and the other.
‘Stu gets us a regular gig down where he lives, at this pub, the Red Lion, in Sutton. We’re playing around west London, Eel Pie Island. Nearly all the same people would follow us wherever we went, the first Stones fans, all doing the new dances. The clubs held a couple of hundred. Things were beginning to look up, we were making like fifty quid a week, playing about five nights a week, every week the same places, and it’s getting good. Brian’s trying to find out about recordings. We know that because of the Beatles thing that’s happening, there’s no time to lose if we want to get on records, which is what we
