Mick Jagger by Philip Norman Page A

like Berry’s; in this authentic instrumental setting, he now became Chuck almost to the life.
    With Keith’s arrival, the band finally acquired a name, Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys. His guitar had the name “Blue Boy” inside it, and “Little Boy Blue” was a pseudonym of the blues giant Sonny Boy Williamson. There was also a hint of giggle-making double entendre (“Little Boy Blue, come blow up your horn”) and an ironic nod to The Blue Boy, Thomas Gainsborough’s eighteenth-century portrait of an angelic youth in sky-colored satin. In other words, they could not have dreamed up anything much worse.
    Away from the band, not all Mike’s friends were quite so accepting of Keith. Alan Etherington recalls that in their wider ex–Dartford Grammar School circle, there would sometimes be parties to which Mike’s Teddy Boy friend was pointedly not invited. That used to upset Mike, showing his bandmates a more sensitive, caring person than they previously had taken him for. He adopted a protective attitude toward Keith—who was not nearly as tough as he pretended, and in many ways a rather sensitive, vulnerable soul—while Keith, in return, followed him with almost doglike devotion.
    Mike, for his part, crossed over to Keith’s side of the tracks without any problem. The Richardses’ cozy, untidy council house on Spielman Road was the pleasantest possible contrast to the spotless and regimented Jagger home in The Close. Keith had no vigorous dad around to insist on weight training or team washing up, and Doris was motherly and easygoing in a way that Eva Jagger, for all her sterling qualities, had never been. When the Richardses went away for the weekend to Beesands in Devon that summer, Mike accompanied them in their battered old Vauxhall car. Keith took his guitar, and the two friends entertained customers at the local pub by playing Everly Brothers songs. Otherwise, Doris Richards remembered Mike being “bored to tears” and repeatedly moaning, “No women … no women.” On their marathon return journey, the car battery failed and they had to drive without lights. When finally they drew up outside the Jagger house four or five hours late, a tight-lipped Eva showed little sympathy.
    Mike had always soaked up other people’s accents and mannerisms, usually in a mocking spirit, sometimes in an admiring one. Now, outside of college—and home—he abandoned his rather goody-goody, stripe-scarfed student persona and began to dress and carry himself more like Keith, no longer speaking in the quiet, accentless tone of a nicely brought-up middle-class boy, but in brash Kentish Cockney. Around Keith, he ceased to be known as “Mike,” that name so redolent of sports cars, Harris tweed jackets, and beer in pewter mugs at smart roadhouses on Sunday mornings. Now, instead, he became “Mick,” its defiantly proletarian butt end, redolent only of reeking public bars and mad-drunk Irishmen. It was the tough-nut prefix for which “Jagger” seemed to have been waiting all these years; joined together, the three syllables were already practically smashing windows.
    While Keith’s arrival in the band widened their repertoire and gave their sound an extra bite, it did not make them any more ambitious or purposeful. They continued to practice together in a vacuum, still not trying to find live playing gigs or acquire a manager who might do so for them. Early in 1962, at Alan Etherington’s house, they used the Philips Joystick recorder to tape Mike’s—or Mick’s—better Chuck Berry takeoffs with Keith on lead guitar: two versions apiece of “Beautiful Delilah,” “Little Queenie,” and “Around and Around” and one each of “Johnny B. Goode” and “Down the Road Apiece,” plus Billy Boy Arnold’s “I Ain’t Got You” and Ritchie Valens’s “La Bamba.” The tape was not submitted to a record company or talent agent, however, but simply analyzed for instrumental and vocal faults, then