Philip Norman - Mick Jagger

So let’s flick through those yesterdays in hopes of refreshing his memory.

PART I CONTENTS Cover Title Page Dedication TO SUE, WITH LOVE Prologue: Sympathy for the Old Devil PART I: ‘THE BLUES IS IN HIM’ ONE India-Rubber Boy TWO The Kid in the Cardigan THREE ‘Very Bright, Highly Motivated Layabouts’ FOUR ‘Self-Esteem? He Didn’t Have Any’ FIVE ‘“What a Cheeky Little Yob,” I Thought to Myself’ SIX ‘We Spent a Lot of Time Sitting in Bed, Doing Crosswords’ SEVEN ‘We Piss Anywhere, Man’ EIGHT Secrets of the Pop Stars’ Hideaway NINE Elusive Butterfly TEN ‘Mick Jagger and Fred Engels on Street Fighting’ PART II: THE TYRANNY OF COOL ELEVEN ‘The Baby’s Dead, My Lady Said’ TWELVE Some Day My Prince Will Come THIRTEEN The Balls of a Lion FOURTEEN ‘As Lethal as Last Week’s Lettuce’ FIFTEEN Friendship with Benefits SIXTEEN The Glamour Twins SEVENTEEN ‘Old Wild Men, Waiting for Miracles’ EIGHTEEN Sweet Smell of Success NINETEEN The Diary of a Nobody TWENTY Wandering Spirit TWENTY-ONE God Gave Me Everything Postscript Picture Section List of Searchable Terms Acknowledgements Also by Philip Norman Copyright About the Publisher

‘THE BLUES IS IN HIM’ CONTENTS Cover Title Page Dedication TO SUE, WITH LOVE Prologue: Sympathy for the Old Devil PART I: ‘THE BLUES IS IN HIM’ ONE India-Rubber Boy TWO The Kid in the Cardigan THREE ‘Very Bright, Highly Motivated Layabouts’ FOUR ‘Self-Esteem? He Didn’t Have Any’ FIVE ‘“What a Cheeky Little Yob,” I Thought to Myself’ SIX ‘We Spent a Lot of Time Sitting in Bed, Doing Crosswords’ SEVEN ‘We Piss Anywhere, Man’ EIGHT Secrets of the Pop Stars’ Hideaway NINE Elusive Butterfly TEN ‘Mick Jagger and Fred Engels on Street Fighting’ PART II: THE TYRANNY OF COOL ELEVEN ‘The Baby’s Dead, My Lady Said’ TWELVE Some Day My Prince Will Come THIRTEEN The Balls of a Lion FOURTEEN ‘As Lethal as Last Week’s Lettuce’ FIFTEEN Friendship with Benefits SIXTEEN The Glamour Twins SEVENTEEN ‘Old Wild Men, Waiting for Miracles’ EIGHTEEN Sweet Smell of Success NINETEEN The Diary of a Nobody TWENTY Wandering Spirit TWENTY-ONE God Gave Me Everything Postscript Picture Section List of Searchable Terms Acknowledgements Also by Philip Norman Copyright About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE CONTENTS Cover Title Page Dedication TO SUE, WITH LOVE Prologue: Sympathy for the Old Devil PART I: ‘THE BLUES IS IN HIM’ ONE India-Rubber Boy TWO The Kid in the Cardigan THREE ‘Very Bright, Highly Motivated Layabouts’ FOUR ‘Self-Esteem? He Didn’t Have Any’ FIVE ‘“What a Cheeky Little Yob,” I Thought to Myself’ SIX ‘We Spent a Lot of Time Sitting in Bed, Doing Crosswords’ SEVEN ‘We Piss Anywhere, Man’ EIGHT Secrets of the Pop Stars’ Hideaway NINE Elusive Butterfly TEN ‘Mick Jagger and Fred Engels on Street Fighting’ PART II: THE TYRANNY OF COOL ELEVEN ‘The Baby’s Dead, My Lady Said’ TWELVE Some Day My Prince Will Come THIRTEEN The Balls of a Lion FOURTEEN ‘As Lethal as Last Week’s Lettuce’ FIFTEEN Friendship with Benefits SIXTEEN The Glamour Twins SEVENTEEN ‘Old Wild Men, Waiting for Miracles’ EIGHTEEN Sweet Smell of Success NINETEEN The Diary of a Nobody TWENTY Wandering Spirit TWENTY-ONE God Gave Me Everything Postscript Picture Section List of Searchable Terms Acknowledgements Also by Philip Norman Copyright About the Publisher

India-Rubber Boy CONTENTS Cover Title Page Dedication TO SUE, WITH LOVE Prologue: Sympathy for the Old Devil PART I: ‘THE BLUES IS IN HIM’ ONE India-Rubber Boy TWO The Kid in the Cardigan THREE ‘Very Bright, Highly Motivated Layabouts’ FOUR ‘Self-Esteem? He Didn’t Have Any’ FIVE ‘“What a Cheeky Little Yob,” I Thought to Myself’ SIX ‘We Spent a Lot of Time Sitting in Bed, Doing Crosswords’ SEVEN ‘We Piss Anywhere, Man’ EIGHT Secrets of the Pop Stars’ Hideaway NINE Elusive Butterfly TEN ‘Mick Jagger and Fred Engels on Street Fighting’ PART II: THE TYRANNY OF COOL ELEVEN ‘The Baby’s Dead, My Lady Said’ TWELVE Some Day My Prince Will Come THIRTEEN The Balls of a Lion FOURTEEN ‘As Lethal as Last Week’s Lettuce’ FIFTEEN Friendship with Benefits SIXTEEN The Glamour Twins SEVENTEEN ‘Old Wild Men, Waiting for Miracles’ EIGHTEEN Sweet Smell of Success NINETEEN The Diary of a Nobody TWENTY Wandering Spirit TWENTY-ONE God Gave Me Everything Postscript Picture Section List of Searchable Terms Acknowledgements Also by Philip Norman Copyright About the Publisher

To become what we call ‘a star’, it is not enough to possess unique talent in one or another of the performing arts; you also seemingly need a void inside you as fathomlessly dark as starlight is brilliant.

Normal, happy, well-rounded people do not as a rule turn into stars. It is something which far more commonly befalls those who have suffered some traumatic misery or deprivation in early life. Hence the ferocity of their drive to achieve wealth and status at any cost, and their insatiable need for the public’s love and attention. While awarding them a status near to gods, we also paradoxically view them as the most fallible of human beings, tortured by past demons and present insecurities, all too often fated to destroy their talent and then themselves with drink or drugs or both. Since the mid-twentieth century, when celebrity became global, the shiniest stars, from Charlie Chaplin, Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe and Edith Piaf to Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Michael Jackson and Amy Winehouse, have fulfilled some if not all of these criteria. How, then, to account for Mick Jagger, who fulfils none of them?

Jagger bucked the trend with his very first breath. We expect stars to be born in unpromising locales that make their later rise seem all the more spectacular . . . a dirt-poor cabin in Mississippi . . . a raffish seaport . . . the dressing room of a seedy vaudeville theatre . . . a Parisian slum. We do not expect them to be born in thoroughly comfortable but unstimulating circumstances in the English county of Kent.

Southern England has always been the wealthiest, most privileged part of the country, but clustered around London is a special little clique of shires known rather snootily as ‘the Home Counties’. Kent is the most easterly of these, bounded in the north by the Thames Estuary, in the south by Dover’s sacred white cliffs and the English Channel. And, rather like its most famous twentieth-century son, it has multiple personalities. For some, this is ‘the Garden of England’ with its rolling green heart known as the Weald, its apple and cherry orchards and hop fields, and its conical redbrick hop-drying kilns or oast houses. For others, it conjures up the glory of Canterbury Cathedral, where ‘turbulent priest’ Thomas à Becket met his end, or stately homes like Knole and Sissinghurst, or faded Victorian seaside resorts like Margate and Broadstairs. For others, it suggests county cricket, Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers , or ultra-respectable Royal Tunbridge Wells, whose residents are so famously addicted to writing to newspapers that the nom de plume ‘Disgusted, Tunbridge Wells’ has become shorthand for any choleric elderly Briton fulminating against modern morals or manners. (‘Disgusted, Tunbridge Wells’ will play no small part in the story that follows.)

In the two thousand years since Julius Caesar’s Roman legions waded ashore on Walmer Beach, Kent has mainly been a place that people pass through – Chaucer’s pilgrims ‘from every shire’s ende’ trudging towards Canterbury, armies bound for European wars, present-day traffic to and from the Channel ports of Dover and Folkestone and the Chunnel. As a result, the true heart of the county is difficult to place. There certainly is a distinctive Kentish burr, subtly different from that of neighbouring Sussex, varying from town to town, even village to village, but the predominant accent is dictated by the metropolis that blends seamlessly into its northern margins. The earliest linguistic colonisers were the trainloads of East End Cockneys who arrived each summer to help bring in the hop harvest; since then, proliferating ‘dormitory towns’ for city office workers have made London-speak ubiquitous.