James imposture. As a guitarist, his rapport was initially with Keith. But Mick was equally impressed by his soft, lisping voice with no trace of West Country bumpkin; his superchic clothes and hair; his knowledge of music across the whole spectrum from pop to jazz; his surprising articulateness and literacy and wicked sense of humor; above all, his determination not to let his chaotic private life hinder him from, somehow or other, becoming a star.
Thereafter, when the Dartford boys drove to Ealing, they would make a lengthy detour to pick up Brian from his flat in Notting Hill Gate. He was supporting himself—and, to a minor extent, his girlfriend and third child—with day jobs in shops and department stores that usually ended when he was caught stealing from the cash register. Despite a seeming total lack of scruples, he had a knack of endearing himself to honest people with what Alexis Korner termed “a beautiful mixture of politeness and rudeness.” Whereas Mick was merely a visitor to the Korners’ flat—not always appreciated for his left-wing stridency and his patronizing way of calling thirty-something Bobbie Korner “Auntie Bobbie”—Brian treated the place virtually as a second home.
By now, the Ealing Club’s open-mic policy had produced other young blues singers, all similarly white and bourgeois, to challenge the kid in the cardigan. Brian—who, despite his Welsh antecedents, did not possess a singing voice—worked as a guitar/vocal duo with a sometime Oxford University student named Paul Pond (later to find fame as Paul Jones with the Manfred Mann band and, still later, as an actor, musical comedy star, and radio presenter). On some nights, the vocal spot with Blues Incorporated would be given to “Long” John Baldry, a hugely tall, sandy-haired former street busker whose father was a police officer in Colindale; on others, it went to a long-faced Middlesex boy named Art Wood whose kid brother Ronnie was among the club’s most devoted members, though not yet old enough to be served alcohol.
Occasionally, two or more vocalists at once took the stage in an implied talent contest that did not always seem to come out in Mick’s favor. Both Paul Pond and Long John Baldry had more recognizably “soulful” voices, while Long John, towering over him in a shared rendition of Muddy Waters’s “Got My Mojo Workin’,” brought his lack of inches into uncomfortable relief. Yet Mick was the vocalist Korner always preferred. The waspish Long John—openly gay at a time when few young Britons dared to be—dismissed him as “all lips and ears … like a ventriloquist’s dummy.”
Korner also began using Mick on Blues Incorporated gigs outside the club, paying him “a pound or ten bob [fifty pence]” per show. Some of these were for debutante balls at posh London hotels or country houses, in Buckinghamshire or Essex, whose front gates had porters’ lodges almost as big as the Jagger family home and front drives that seemed to go on forever. As far as Mick—or anyone in his social bracket—knew, the aristocracy had never taken the slightest interest in blues or R&B. But these young men in dinner jackets, Guards mess tunics or even kilts, proved as susceptible to Muddy, Elmore, T-Bone, and Chuck as any back in proletarian Ealing; the girls might have double-barreled surnames and horsey accents, but were no less putty in his hands when he threw his hair around. Despite the wealth all around, the gigs seldom earned him more than a few shillings—but at least he always got fed well.
The most memorable was a grand ball given by the youthful marquess of Londonderry at his ancestral home, Londonderry House in Park Lane, shortly before its demolition to make way for the new London Hilton Hotel. Among the guests was the future interior designer and supersocialite Nicky Haslam, then still a pupil at Eton. Though America’s legendary Benny Goodman Orchestra was the main musical attraction, Blues
Thereafter, when the Dartford boys drove to Ealing, they would make a lengthy detour to pick up Brian from his flat in Notting Hill Gate. He was supporting himself—and, to a minor extent, his girlfriend and third child—with day jobs in shops and department stores that usually ended when he was caught stealing from the cash register. Despite a seeming total lack of scruples, he had a knack of endearing himself to honest people with what Alexis Korner termed “a beautiful mixture of politeness and rudeness.” Whereas Mick was merely a visitor to the Korners’ flat—not always appreciated for his left-wing stridency and his patronizing way of calling thirty-something Bobbie Korner “Auntie Bobbie”—Brian treated the place virtually as a second home.
By now, the Ealing Club’s open-mic policy had produced other young blues singers, all similarly white and bourgeois, to challenge the kid in the cardigan. Brian—who, despite his Welsh antecedents, did not possess a singing voice—worked as a guitar/vocal duo with a sometime Oxford University student named Paul Pond (later to find fame as Paul Jones with the Manfred Mann band and, still later, as an actor, musical comedy star, and radio presenter). On some nights, the vocal spot with Blues Incorporated would be given to “Long” John Baldry, a hugely tall, sandy-haired former street busker whose father was a police officer in Colindale; on others, it went to a long-faced Middlesex boy named Art Wood whose kid brother Ronnie was among the club’s most devoted members, though not yet old enough to be served alcohol.
Occasionally, two or more vocalists at once took the stage in an implied talent contest that did not always seem to come out in Mick’s favor. Both Paul Pond and Long John Baldry had more recognizably “soulful” voices, while Long John, towering over him in a shared rendition of Muddy Waters’s “Got My Mojo Workin’,” brought his lack of inches into uncomfortable relief. Yet Mick was the vocalist Korner always preferred. The waspish Long John—openly gay at a time when few young Britons dared to be—dismissed him as “all lips and ears … like a ventriloquist’s dummy.”
Korner also began using Mick on Blues Incorporated gigs outside the club, paying him “a pound or ten bob [fifty pence]” per show. Some of these were for debutante balls at posh London hotels or country houses, in Buckinghamshire or Essex, whose front gates had porters’ lodges almost as big as the Jagger family home and front drives that seemed to go on forever. As far as Mick—or anyone in his social bracket—knew, the aristocracy had never taken the slightest interest in blues or R&B. But these young men in dinner jackets, Guards mess tunics or even kilts, proved as susceptible to Muddy, Elmore, T-Bone, and Chuck as any back in proletarian Ealing; the girls might have double-barreled surnames and horsey accents, but were no less putty in his hands when he threw his hair around. Despite the wealth all around, the gigs seldom earned him more than a few shillings—but at least he always got fed well.
The most memorable was a grand ball given by the youthful marquess of Londonderry at his ancestral home, Londonderry House in Park Lane, shortly before its demolition to make way for the new London Hilton Hotel. Among the guests was the future interior designer and supersocialite Nicky Haslam, then still a pupil at Eton. Though America’s legendary Benny Goodman Orchestra was the main musical attraction, Blues
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