Stones: Acclaimed Biography, The

by Norman, Philip

  Immediate’s chief in-house asset was the songwriting team of Mick Jagger and Keith Richard. To stimulate this all-important commodity, Oldham encouraged both Mick and Keith to make their first essays as record producers. Jagger’s debut was with Chris Farlowe, a bulky young r & b shouter, singing Out of Time from Aftermath. Farlowe’s version, laden with more scornful pity than even Jagger’s, became the new label’s first number one in August 1966. Keith’s first production was the ‘Arandbee’ (r & b) Orchestra, playing a medley of past Stones hits grandiosely entitled Today’s Pop Symphony. The aim was to prove that Jagger-Richard songs made melodies as durable as Lennon and McCartney’s.

  Immediate Records operated from a small flat in Ivor Court, Marylebone. With Tony Calder established here too, in an office comparably luxurious, the only space available for employees like Shirley Arnold was corners and cubby-holes. ‘It was terrible, really,’ Shirley says, ‘but we put up with it. The worst part of any office job is boredom. With Andrew, at least you knew you’d never be bored.’

  Since fainting at Ken Colyer’s club and awakening to find herself secretary of the Rolling Stones fan club, Shirley Arnold had become indispensable within the Oldham empire. The Stones all liked her for her cockney good sense, her obligingness and a concern for them far beyond the call of secretarial duty. While they were on tour, Shirley would keep in touch with their parents, relaying messages, delivering assurances that this or that new press scandal was no cause for maternal alarm. ‘I never really did much care for Mrs Jagger. She was always complaining. But Doris Richards was great. She was so game and ready for anything. She’d even smoked a joint with Keith, just to see what it was all about.

  ‘The funny things was, the Stones did everything they could to stop me ever taking any drugs. Especially Keith – even at the time when he was pouring everything into himself. Someone offered me something in the office once, and Keith forbade me to touch it.’

  Shirley had been fond of Eric Easton and had regretted his brutal dumping when Oldham teamed with Allen Klein. Her first sight of Klein was not reassuring. ‘I saw him in the office in a T-shirt, swigging from a bottle of whisky. When I got to know him, though, I liked him. He was always nice to the girls in the office, and never missed buying us presents at Christmas. Once, I remember, he gave each of us a rather dainty little china pomander.’

  Oldham’s new status as music mogul, on theoretically equal terms with Decca’s Sir Edward Lewis, had prompted him to change his ferociously casual Mod malchick look for boardroom suits and pebble-lensed spectacles and a downward-turning moustache, such as Mexican bandits had sported in the Saturday morning movies of his boyhood. He had also dismissed Reg the Butcher as his chauffeur-bodyguard in favour of a more upmarket protector named Eddie.

  Behind the Zapata moustache and the shawl-like jacket lapels, he was still – as Eric Easton had sorrowfully remarked – a very naughty boy. One of his favourite pastimes while being driven by Eddie in his Rolls was to invite a fellow passenger to open a door, hang out of the speeding vehicle and peep underneath it at Oldham, hanging from the door on the other side. He was playing that game one night with the stage designer Sean Kenny, unaware that a police car was close on Eddie’s tail. ‘When the cops eventually stopped us, they thumped both of us,’ Oldham remembers. ‘I suppose I had been a bit cheeky to them as well.’

  In addition to the full-size Rolls, he acquired a miniature version, grafted on to a Mini Minor chassis, the ultimate expensive and pointless Sixties toy. ‘There were only two of them in the country,’ Shirley Arnold says. ‘John Lennon had the first one, so Andrew couldn’t be happy until he’d got one, too. It had stereo music speakers on the outside. Andrew took a couple of us out for a ride in it one lunchtime. I’ll never forget zooming round the West End in that little tiny Rolls with the speakers pounding and people leaping out of Andrew’s way.’

  The Immediate office thronged with youths whose potential as singers and songwriters seemed to matter less than their personal prettiness. ‘We never thought Andrew was actually gay,’ Shirley Arnold says. ‘But he did like to have pretty boys working for him.’

  As an employer, Shirley remembers, he could veer wildly from outrageous indulgence to almost psychopathic cruelty. ‘He came in one day, wearing this beautiful brand-new suede coat. A boy in the office admired it, and Andrew just took it off and gave it to him. “Suede never did suit me,” he said. Another time, there was someone in the company he’d decided to get rid of. Andrew waited until this person was out and then went in and wrecked his office.’

  Oldham’s executive roles as label boss and film tycoon led him increasingly to delegate and dissipate the Stones’ management. With Allen Klein booking them in America and Tito Burns handling European tours, there was no longer any need to travel with them. Over the past two years, an entirely separate road organization had grown up around the Stones, responsible for transporting their equipment and, more crucially, preventing their being torn limb from limb. The faithful Ian Stewart was reinforced by Tom Keylock, a hulking Londoner whose eyes swam mistily behind thick bifocal glasses. Keylock’s one-man car hire company provided the Stones with the Austin Princess limousine they used for travelling between engagements. From chauffeur, he had progressed to bodyguard, using muscles, and combat techniques, acquired in the army paratroopers.

  By late 1966, Oldham found himself too busy even to go on devising the publicity stunts with which he had maintained the Stones’ notoriety in the British press. That fictitious five million dollar lawsuit was his PR swansong. Thereafter, he gave the Stones’ media image into the charge of Les Perrin, a middle-aged, thoroughly conventional Fleet Street publicist, whose hiring was to prove one of the best things Oldham ever did for the Stones.

  His own dealings with the band now tended to be mainly in recording studios, at those unpredictable moments when they could break from touring to work on tracks for a new album. Here, even he began to notice the influence of the bodyguard Tom Keylock, especially over Keith, who had an incurable weakness for tough guys, and Brian, who was pathetically grateful even for so changeable an ally. There was also ‘Spanish Tony’ Sanchez, a Soho narcotics dealer who was Brian and Keith’s chief supplier of hash and pills.

  ‘I got impatient with all that courtier stuff, the chauffeurs and the bodyguards,’ Oldham says. ‘It was like being back at public school. You had to be in Mick’s house or Keith’s house or Brian’s house. It all started when they got involved with the so-called society people – the Frasers, the Donald Cammells. And I didn’t like the drug thing, because it got in the way. It interfered with business.’

  Oldham claims that his quick thinking saved the Stones from a drugs bust somewhat in advance of their famous one, when they had met at Olympic Studios in Barnes to work on a track that eventually became Let’s Spend the Night Together.

  ‘Everyone was up in the control room, smoking away. You could look out from there, down the whole length of the studio, which was a pretty big, long room. Suddenly, at the far end, I saw about eight policemen come through a door and across the studio towards us.

  ‘I ran out of the control room and stopped the first two. “Quick,” I said. “Have you got truncheons?” Both of them brought out their truncheons. “Right,” I said, “now hit them together.” The coppers hit their truncheons together. “That’s perfect,” I said. “Just what we need on the track. Could you sit down here and do it when we record?” They all sat down, dead chuffed – forgetting all about trying to bust us – and we recorded two of them, hitting their truncheons together. It even stayed on the finished track, I think.’

  It was Christopher Gibbs who first introduced Brian and Anita to Morocco. They would accompany the antiques dealer when he visited Tangier or Marrakesh to buy carpets, fabrics and curios for his Chelsea shop. In Tangier, they would stay at the exquisite Hotel Minzah and spend days with Gibbs in the Grand Socco bazaar, wandering through the noisy labyrinths striped over by a latticework of sun. At nigh
t, they ate kebabs and couscous, and watched the acrobats and silver-hung belly dancers, taking turns to draw on a bubbling hookah of dunglike tobacco mingled with the more fragrant ancient Eastern substance which Moroccans were only just learning to call ‘shit’.

  Morocco in the 1940s was to American literary men what Paris had been in the 1920s. The great William Burroughs, panjandrum of New York’s avant-garde, lived in Tangier, ruling over a court of artist-expatriates that included Paul Bowles the novelist and Brion Gysin the painter. The Sixties brought a further influx from America and Europe to sample Morocco’s now half-admissible delights of kif and prostitutes. On the Tangier seafront, you might see Joe Orton, the young British playwright, sunning himself with his lover and future killer Kenneth Halliwell. In the High Atlas, you might well come across Truman Capote, escaping – or pursuing – his latest drama-ridden love. At the Minzah, you might see the great Cecil Beaton, socialite, designer and photographer breakfasting alone beside the fountain.

  Morocco affected Brian Jones more profoundly than anything since he had first heard Elmore James. It was not just the hashish, jetted up through a hookah or smouldering in the bowl of an intricately carved pipe. It was not just the clothes, caftans, djellabahs, cloaks and waistcoats, beaded with glass or silver, which Anita and he bought by the trunkful, along with cushions, footstools, copperware, gold and beaten metal lamps for their new studio apartment. In Morocco, Brian found a country whose daily life, both spiritual and secular, is indivisible from music. He was fascinated to see, in Tangier’s Grand Socco, in the green and white ceramic city of Fez, especially in the great red clay marketplace at Marrakesh, musicians playing subtle and delicate thousand-year-old Berber melodies on pipes and drums that were the natural descant to trade, conversation, worship and argument. From Brion Gysin he heard of the master musicians of Jajouka, in the foothills of the Rif mountains, whose pipe music, dating from before Islam, had so affected Gysin he swore he could not let even a day pass without hearing it again. Brian had begged Gysin to take him to Jajouka to hear the master musicians and, possibly, learn something from them about making records with the Stones.

  Christopher Gibbs remembers that summer 1966 trip chiefly for the constant bickering between Brian and Anita. ‘They fought about everything – cars, prices, restaurant menus. Brian could never win an argument with Anita, although he always made the mistake of trying. There would be terrible scenes with both of them screaming at each other. The difference was that Brian didn’t know what he was doing. Anita did know what she was doing. I think that in a more gracious age, Anita would have been called a witch.’

  Among Brian’s more unlikely Moroccan holiday chums was the Welsh actor Victor Spinetti, who had appeared in the Beatles’ film Help!. Spinetti tells the story of finding the Stone red-eyed and sniffing with a mild dose of flu and offering him a Beechams powder. ‘Thanks, man,’ Brian said, tearing open the packet and inhaling its innocent white powder with one snort. In Tangier he appeared with a bandaged right hand which, the Stones’ London office announced, he had broken ‘while mountain climbing’. In fact, as Christopher Gibbs remembers, it was the result of another fracas with Anita in their hotel room. Brian had aimed a blow at her, missed and slammed his fist into a metal window frame.

  Mick Jagger’s love affair with Marianne Faithfull began late that summer, by such cautious and slow degrees that Marianne herself was for some time hardly aware of it. For Mick, even so decisive an act was necessarily hedged about with ambiguity and equivocation. Most of his friends believed that when he broke away from Chrissie Shrimpton, it would be for another girlfriend named Tish. Even when he took the plunge at last and asked Marianne to meet him secretly in Paris, he seemed to be keeping his options still open. Donald Cammell the film producer remembered, at a party there, how Mick strove part of the time to keep up a pretence that he and Marianne were together only by coincidence.

  Soon afterwards, he nerved himself to tell Chrissie, at last, that it was all over between them. Chrissie took it badly, at one point even trying to kill herself at Harley House while Mick was out. It would not be the last time that attempted suicide thwarted his desire, at all times, to keep up appearances.

  He declared his involvement with Marianne in the most oblique way possible, taking her on an extended cruise in a hired yacht along the French Riviera. At night, they would come ashore and dance, unnoticed, in the seafront discotheques. ‘We got very friendly with this particular disc jockey,’ Marianne says. ‘One night, I asked him if he’d got any speed.’ The disc jockey poured a stream of Italian-made amphetamines into her hands.

  By the time she returned to London, to move in with Jagger at Harley House, Marianne thought she had finished all the uppers the French deejay had given her. So she had – all but four, which remained where she had hidden the supply, in the pocket of a green velvet jacket of Jagger’s. She soon forgot all about them, and Jagger had no idea that they were there.

  EIGHT

  ‘THE OSCAR WILDE MISTAKE’

  Nowadays, sleazy British newspapers are two a penny. But in 1967, Sunday’s News of the World still occupied a unique position in the mean City of London thoroughfare and dark side alleys known collectively as Fleet Street. Actually, the News of the World’s headquarters were in Bouverie Street, just off Fleet Street, immediately adjacent to those of the humorous magazine Punch. When Malcolm Muggeridge became Punch’s eighth editor in the early 1950s, he would sit in his office, gloomily watching the huge bales of newsprint being hoisted into the News of the World’s premises for use that coming weekend. Gloomily, because from time to time Muggeridge tried to parody the paper’s style in his magazine, but always had his handiwork effortlessly surpassed by the next edition of the real thing. The News of the World was something beyond parody.

  Its proud masthead boast of ‘largest circulation on earth’ was no idle one. Its weekly sale was six million copies, its readership probably four times that figure. As George Orwell noted in the 1930s, it was an almost sacred ritual for some twenty-five million Britons each Sabbath to settle down in after-lunch torpor with a pot of tea stewing on the hob, unfold the old-fashioned broadsheet paper and immerse themselves in that familiar half-world, before newspapers dared call a spade a spade, where scandal and prurient smut co-existed with moral indignation reminiscent of the age of Gladstone.

  For three-quarters of a century, the News of the World had regaled its vast public with a scarcely changing diet of vicars exposed as ‘sex fiends’, scoutmasters revealed to be homosexuals, milkmen with seraglios on suburban housing estates and lay-preachers surprised in love nests in Streatham. Disgracing and crucifying these sad little people under the alibi of a concern for public morals was carried out with a gloating relish closer to true pornography than anything Soho’s meanest streets could offer. The same was true of the paper’s investigations into larger social evils, which had a monotonous tendency to focus on organized prostitution and were carried out by undercover teams using all the apparatus of the agent provocateur. No such enquiry was deemed successful unless a NoW reporter could write that, offered some forbidden favour, he ‘made an excuse and left’. In those far-off hot-metal printing days, the paper kept its favourite crowd-pulling headline permanently set in type: WE NAME THESE GUILTY MEN.

  Though the formula worked as well in 1967 as in 1907, the News of the World was always prepared to extend its righteous wrath to more current objects of suspicion, disapproval and envy. In January 1966, Brian Jones’s worst fears were realized when his Cheltenham girlfriend Pat Andrews applied to South-West London Magistrates’ Court for maintenance payments to their four-year-old son Julian. Next Sunday, the News of the World ran a full-page story, THE GIRL WHO LOVED A ROLLING STONE, about Pat in her present straitened circumstances as an eleven pounds per week shop assistant. This prompted the paper’s chief muck-raking competitor, the People, to a follow-up story (enigmatically headed BRIAN JONES HAS ANOTHER BABY) about Linda Lawrence and the out-of-court settlement
Brian had recently been compelled to make to her for support of his second son named Julian.

  It had been borne in gradually on the not very powerful minds in Bouverie Street that pop music offered the ingredient of lurid showbiz scandal and sententious moral crusading in one irresistible package. Pop music, to the Sunday newspaper reading public, increasingly meant drugs. It meant a perversion suddenly resurrected from Victorian novelettes to something one could practically hear issuing from one’s child’s transistor radio. Drugs and their increasing use by ‘young people’, with pop music’s manifest encouragement, had become a common Fleet Street obsession. But as yet the menace remained vague. No specific pop star stood condemned. So in February 1967, in its inimitable way, the News of the World set out to name the guilty men.

  If the Stones had wanted to set themselves up as number one target, they could hardly have gone about it better. In January, uproar swept through the British popular press over the title of their new single, Let’s Spend the Night Together. A suggestive title certainly, but no more so than a dozen other songs proposing nocturnal activity, from Bing Crosby’s Blue of the Night to Elvis Presley’s One Night With You. The Stones were merely repeating what young boys nowadays found easy to say to girls – and vice versa. One could not, of course, expect Fleet Street to comprehend anything so simple. In America, the outrage was proportionately greater. Performing the song for Ed Sullivan, Mick Jagger had to amend the words to ‘Let’s spend some time together’.