Philip Norman - The Stones - The Acclaimed Biography

His own home, though welcoming to his friends, did not suggest itself as a practice place for Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys. Eva Jagger was not discouraging. She had nothing against their music, she told them – it was just that the neighbours might mind the noise. Joe Jagger’s main concern, as always, was keeping his son up to the mark in physical education. Once, when Mike was going off with Dick Taylor, his father called out, ‘Michael – don’t forget your weight training.’ Mike turned back obediently, went into the garden and exercised with barbells for a conscientious quarter of an hour.

He had passed his GCE O-Levels in a respectable enough seven subjects, and had qualified for entry into the Sixth Arts form to do Advanced Level English, History and French. He also became a school prefect, despite the headmaster’s manifest disapproval. The head, Mr Hudson, had never quite forgiven him for leading what seemed like an organized insurrection by lower-school boys against compulsory enrolment in the school Army Cadet Force.

He stuck out the two-year A-Level course with no idea what he was working for, beyond a vague notion that journalism might be interesting. For a brief time, too, he toyed with the idea of becoming a radio disc jockey. A London record producer named Joe Meek was currently advertising for would-be deejays to submit demonstration tapes. Robert Wallis remembers copying out Meek’s address from a newspaper and passing it on to Mike Jagger. But the project languished, apparently under parental discouragement.

His A-Level passes in English and History were only mediocre but by then it did not matter. He had already secured himself a place at the London School of Economics, to follow a two-year course in the subject that seemed best suited to his indecisive talents. ‘I wanted to do arts but thought I ought to do science,’ he says now. ‘Economics seemed about halfway in between.’

So, each morning, from the autumn of 1961, Mike Jagger, in his striped student scarf, joined the daily crowd of business people at Dartford railway station, his face turned towards a future that still seemed to lie only a little way up the commuter line to Victoria.

Each morning, from the top deck of the green Kentish bus, Dick Taylor would see the same thin, slouching figure trailing reluctantly up the long hill to Sidcup Art College. Winter or summer, Keith Richards wore the same tight blue jeans, Italian pointed shoes, denim jacket and the violet-coloured shirt that never seemed to be given a rest or a wash. In summer as well as winter, he contrived to look pinched and cold, his bullet head accentuating protuberant ears, his nose red raw, his mouth specked with teenage pimples. In one hand, he held a Player’s Weights cigarette; in the other, his only possession, a guitar. Dick Taylor knew it would be another day of abandoned study, and of rock ’n’ roll practice in the college lavatories.

Guitars, and loving them, are among Keith’s earliest memories. His mother’s father, Theodore Augustus Dupree – the family were originally Huguenots from the Channel Islands – led a small semi-professional dance band in the 1930s and himself played several instruments including saxophone, violin and guitar. The guitar still stood in ‘Grandfather Gus’s’ house, in a corner of the sitting room. Keith remembers with what excitement, even as a tiny boy, he would approach it and draw his hands with a soft thrum across its untuned strings.

‘He was a great character, my grandfather Gus. At that time, when I was small, he had a job in some tailoring sweatshop – he’d always be bringing little squares of felt out of his pocket and showing us. He carried on playing music, too, right up to the Sixties – touring the American air force bases with a country band. He’d got a job as janitor at Highgate School where Yehudi Menuhin’s son was a pupil. My grandfather, in the end, got to know Yehudi; they’d even have a bit of a scrape together on their violins. What a fantastic hustler!’

Bert Richards, Keith’s father, was a very different character, quiet and cautious with a reserve that – his son thinks now – was created largely by overwork and exhaustion. Bert worked as a supervisor at Osram’s light bulb factory in Hammersmith. He got up each day at 5 a.m. and did not come home in the evening until six. ‘He’d have something to eat, watch TV for a couple of hours, then go to bed, absolutely knackered,’ Keith says. ‘He must have been horrified to see what a thug he’d produced in me.’

The boy born in December 1943 thus grew up closest to his mother, Doris, a warm and jolly woman who had inherited the Dupree fondness for music and romance. Keith remembers how, as Doris did the housework, the radio would constantly pour out American big band music. When he first started school and was too nervous to walk there, Doris carried him all the way, bundled lovingly in her arms. From his earliest childhood, she encouraged him to do, and be, exactly what he wanted.

As a small boy, Keith had a beautiful soprano voice, good enough to be heard in Westminster Abbey itself. ‘Only three of us, in our white surplices, used to be good enough to do the hallelujahs. I was a star then – coming up by coach to London to sing in the inter-schools competition at the Albert Hall. I think that was my first taste of show business: when my voice broke and they didn’t want me in the choir any more. Suddenly it was “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.” I think that was when I stopped being a good boy and started to be a yob.’

Doris and Bert Richards lived in Chastillian Road, Dartford, just a street or two away from the Jaggers in Denver Road. Keith attended Wentworth County Primary School and was taught by Ken Llewellyn. He had met Mike Jagger, too, briefly, in the scream and jostle of the infants’ playground. Jagger, who customarily affects to remember nothing past, can none the less recall what a strong impression Keith made on him. ‘I asked him what he wanted to do when he grew up. He said he wanted to be a cowboy like Roy Rogers and play a guitar. I wasn’t that impressed by Roy Rogers, but the bit about the guitar did interest me.’

That first acquaintance was to be short-lived. Doris and Bert moved soon afterwards from Chastillian Road to a house on a new council estate on the other side of Dartford. Thereafter, Keith Richards became the very last kind of companion Joe and Eva Jagger could have wished for their elder son.

The Richardses lived on the Temple Hill Estate, in a small semi-detached house, 6 Spielman Road, the estate was brand new, dumped down on raw new tarmac roads without amusements or amenities. Bert Richards, as before, got up at five each morning to go to work at Osram’s in Hammersmith. Doris worked part-time in a Dartford baker’s shop. And Keith, between his father’s indifference and his mother’s over-indulgence, began to go resolutely to the bad.

It was not that he lacked ability – even talent. He could be, Ken Llewellyn remembers, a bright, attentive boy, responsive especially to words and language. He enjoyed cricket, swimming and – most surprisingly – tennis. He was, besides, good-natured and open, with a mischievous wit that made even schoolmasters unbend towards him.

What he could not do was accept discipline in any form. It was a lawlessness partly compounded of running wild on the estate; partly of his mother’s soft-hearted pampering. Doris did not mind if he failed to do his homework or went AWOL from cross-country runs or – as increasingly happened – if he failed to turn up for school altogether. She would leave him money at home to buy fish and chips for his lunch. Even when he dumped the fish and chip leavings in the kitchen sink, newspaper and all, Doris cleared up after him without complaint.