Philip Norman - Mick Jagger

The numerous media Cassandras who predicted rock ’n’ roll would be over in weeks rather than months found speedy corroboration in Little Richard. Touring Australia in 1958, he saw Russia’s Sputnik space satellite hurtle through the sky, interpreted it as a summons from the Almighty, threw a costly diamond ring into Sydney Harbour and announced he was giving up music to enter the ministry. When the story reached the British press, Mike asked his father for six shillings and eight pence (about thirty-eight pence) to buy ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’ because Richard was ‘retiring’ and this must be his farewell single. But Joe refused to stump up, adding, ‘I’m glad he’s retiring,’ as if it would be a formal ceremony complete with long-service gold watch.

In America, a coast-to-coast network of commercial radio stations, motivated solely by what their listeners demanded, had made rock ’n’ roll ubiquitous within a few months. But for its British constituency, to begin with, the problem was finding it. The BBC, which held a monopoly on domestic radio broadcasting, played few records of any kind, let alone this unsavoury one, in its huge daily output of live orchestral and dance-band music. To catch the hits now pouring across the Atlantic, Mike and his friends had to tune their families’ old-fashioned valve wireless sets to Radio Luxembourg, a tiny oasis of teen tolerance deep in continental Europe whose nighttime English language service consisted mainly of pop record shows. Serving the occupying forces braced for nuclear attack by Communist Russia, there were also AFN, the American Forces Network, and the US government’s ‘Voice of America’, both of which sweetened their propaganda output with generous dollops of rock and jazz.

Seeing American rock ’n’ rollers perform in person was even more problematic. Bill Haley visited Britain only once (by ocean liner) and was greeted by cheering multitudes not seen since the coronation three years earlier. Elvis Presley was expected to follow hard on his heels but, inexplicably, failed to do so. For the overwhelming majority of UK rock ’n’ roll fans, the only way to experience it was on the cinema screen. ‘Rock Around the Clock’ had originally been a soundtrack (to a film about juvenile delinquency, naturally). No sooner was Presley launched than he, too, began making movies, further evidence to his detractors that his music alone had no staying power. While most such ‘exploitation’ flicks were simply vehicles for the songs, a few were fresh and witty dramas in their own right, notably Presley’s King Creole , and The Girl Can’t Help It , featuring Little Richard with new white heartthrobs Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent. For Mike, the epiphany came in the companionable darkness of Dartford’s State cinema, with its fuzzy-faced luminous clock and cigarette smoke drifting across the projector beam: ‘I saw Elvis and Gene Vincent, and thought, “Well, I can do this.”’

Such American acts as did make it across the Atlantic often proved woefully unable to re-create the spellbinding sound of their records in the cavernous British variety theatres and cinemas where they appeared. The shining exception was Buddy Holly and his backing group, the Crickets, whose ‘That’ll Be the Day’ topped the UK singles charts in the summer of 1957. As well as singing in a unique stuttery, hiccupy style, Holly played lead guitar and wrote or co-wrote songs that were rock ’n’ roll at its most moodily exciting, yet constructed from the same simple chord sequences as skiffle. Bespectacled and dapper, more bank clerk than idol, he was a vital factor in raising rock ’n’ roll from its blue-collar status in Britain. Middle-class boys who could never hope or dare to be Elvis now used Holly’s songbook to transform their fading-from-fashion skiffle groups into tyro rock bands.

His one and only British tour, in 1958, brought him to the Granada cinema in Woolwich, a few miles north of Dartford, on the evening of 14 March. Mike Jagger – already skilled at aping Holly’s vocal tics for comic effect – was in the audience with a group of school friends, all attending their very first rock concert. Holly’s set with the Crickets lasted barely half an hour, and was powered by just one twenty-watt guitar amplifier, yet reproduced all his record hits with near-perfect fidelity. Disdaining musical apartheid despite hailing from segregated west Texas, he freely acknowledged his indebtedness to black artists like Little Richard and Bo Diddley. He was also an extrovert showman, able to keep the beat as well as play complex solos on his solid-body Fender Stratocaster while flinging himself across the stage on his knees, even lying flat on his back. Mike’s favourite number was the B-side of ‘Oh Boy!’, Holly’s second British hit fronting the Crickets: a song in blues call-and-response style called ‘Not Fade Away’, whose quirky stop-start tempo was beaten with drumsticks on a cardboard box. The lyrics had a humour previously unknown in rock ’n’ roll (‘My love is bigger than a Cadillac / I try to show it but you drive me back . . .’). This, Mike realised, was not just someone to copy, but to be .

Yet still he made no attempt to acquire the electric guitar needed to turn him into a rock singer like Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran or Britain’s first home-grown rock ’n’ roller, the chirpily unsexy Tommy Steele. And though attracted by the idea, along with countless other British boys, he did not seem exactly on fire with ambition. Dartford Grammar, it so happened, had produced a skiffle group named the Southerners who were something of a local legend. They had appeared on a nationwide TV talent show, Carroll Levis Junior Discoveries , and then been offered a recording test by the EMI label (which lost interest when they decided to wait until the school holidays before auditioning). Easily managing the transition from skiffle to rock, they were now a washboard-free, fully electrified combo renamed Danny Rogers and the Realms.

The Realms’ drummer, Alan Dow, was a year senior to Mike, and in the science rather than arts stream, but met him on equal terms at the weekly basketball sessions run by Mike’s father. One night when Danny and the Realms played a gig at the school, Mike sidled up to Dow backstage and asked if he could sing a number with them. ‘I was specially nervous that night, because of appearing in front of all our school mates,’ Dow recalls. ‘I said I’d rather he didn’t.’

He had no better luck when two old classmates from Wentworth Primary, David Spinks and Mike Turner, started putting together a band intended to be more faithful to rock ’n’ roll’s black originators than its white echoes. Mike suggested himself as a possible vocalist, and auditioned at David’s home in Wentworth Drive. Much as the other two liked him, they felt he neither looked nor sounded right – and, anyway, lack of a guitar was an automatic disqualification.

His first taste of celebrity did not have a singing or even a speaking part. Joe Jagger’s liaison duties for the Central Council of Physical Recreation included advising television companies about programmes to encourage sports among children and teenagers – implicitly to counter the unhealthy effects of rock ’n’ roll. In 1957, Joe became a consultant to one of the new commercial networks, ATV, on a weekly series called Seeing Sport . Over the next couple of years, Mike appeared regularly on the programme with his brother Chris and other hand-picked young outdoor types, demonstrating skills like tent erecting or canoeing.

A clip has survived of an item on rock climbing, filmed in grainy black-and-white at a beauty spot named High Rocks, near Tunbridge Wells. Fourteen-year-old Mike, in jeans and striped T-shirt, reclines in a gully with some other boys while an elderly instructor soliloquises droningly about equipment. Rather than studded mountaineering boots, which could damage these particular rock faces, the instructor recommends ‘ordinary gym shoes . . . like the kind Mike is wearing’. Mike allows one of his legs to be raised, displaying his virtuous rubber sole. For his father’s sake, he can’t show what he really thinks of this fussy, ragged-sweatered little man treating him like a dummy. But the deliberately blank stare – and the tongue, flicking out once too often to moisten the outsize lips – say it all.