Mick Jagger by Philip Norman Page B

forgotten—until thirty years later, when it was put up for auction as a unique glimpse of a superstar and supergroup in embryo, and sold for a fortune.
    ON MARCH 15, 1962, Little Boy Blue and his bandmates discovered they were not alone after all. Scanning that Thursday’s edition of Melody Maker, they lit on an advertisement for what was described—wholly justifiably, in their view—as “The Most Exciting Event of This Year.” In two evenings’ time, a club dedicated to blues music would open in the west London suburb of Ealing.
    The club’s founder, Alexis Korner, was the first in a succession of characters from exotic regions far outside Kent who would assist Mike’s transfiguration into Mick. Born in Paris of an Austro-Russian father and a Greco-Turkish mother, Korner spent his infancy in Switzerland and North Africa before growing up in London and attending one of its most exclusive schools, St. Paul’s. He became addicted to the blues as a schoolboy, rejecting all his various heritages to learn boogie-woogie piano, banjo, and guitar, and feeling—much like our Dartford schoolboy in later years—an almost sacred mission to keep the music alive.
    As a result, thirty-three-year-old Korner, a genial man with a shock of Afro hair before its time and an uneroded public school accent, now led Britain’s only full-time blues band, Blues Incorporated. The name had no twenty-first-century big-business associations, but had been inspired by Murder Inc., a Humphrey Bogart film about American gangsters—which, indeed, was very much how Korner’s musical contemporaries viewed him.
    In 1962, any popular musician who wanted to make it in Britain had first to make it in Soho. The maze of narrow Georgian streets at the heart of London’s West End contained what little music industry the capital could yet boast, harboring song publishers, pluggers, talent scouts, agents, and recording studios—plus almost all the live venues that mattered—among its French restaurants, Italian groceries, cigar stores, and seedy strip clubs. Rock ’n’ roll and skiffle had each been launched in the nation from Soho, and anyone in search of pop stardom, as well as of a flash of naked breasts, an espresso, or coq au vin, instinctively headed there.
    Since the Trad jazz boom, however, Soho was no longer a center of musical pioneering but of entrenchment and prejudice. It was now where “pure” jazz enthusiasts gathered—nowhere more fervently than at the National Jazz League’s own Marquee Club, a cellar designed (by the surrealist photographer Angus McBean) to resemble the interior of a tent. In this siege atmosphere, the blues was no longer recognized as a first cousin to jazz, but looked down on as disdainfully as was Trad, or even rock. Alexis Korner had formerly played banjo with the Barber band, which made his decision to put syncopated music behind him, and form a band essentially playing only twelve bars and three chords, all the more reprehensible.
    Despite repeated rejections from Soho club managements—the brusquest from the Marquee’s manager, Harold Pendleton—Korner remained convinced there was an audience for blues who were at present totally excluded from London’s live music scene and would beat a path to Blues Incorporated’s door, if he could just provide them with one. Hence his decision to open his own club in the hopefully friendlier environs of the suburb where he’d grown up.
    Like Dartford, Ealing had never previously been regarded as a crucible for the blues. It was an affluent, sedate, and almost wholly “white” residential area, best known for its eponymous film studios—maker of British screen classics like Kind Hearts and Coronets and Passport to Pimlico—and for having a “Broadway” rather than just an ordinary High Street. Korner’s Ealing Club (a name more suggestive of golf or bridge than visceral music) was situated almost directly opposite Ealing Broadway tube station, underneath an