It was some time in my late teens that I found myself in a student house – and even now I hesitate to give the location for fear of reprisals – when someone put on Start Me Up by the Rolling Stones.
I can hear you snicker. I am fully aware of what sophisticated people are supposed to think about those first three siren-jangling chords.
But I could feel myself being transformed from this shy, spotty, swotty nerd who had spent the past hour trying to maintain a conversation with the poor young woman who was sitting next to me.
I won’t say that I leapt to my feet and beat my chest and took the girl by the hand. But I can’t rule it out – frankly, I can’t remember the details – because to this day I have only to hear that opening riff, and that feeling comes back.
That is how it is for billions of human beings. It is one of the hundreds of snatches of rock/pop music that remain on our mental iPods to intensify our experience and provide the soundtracks of our lives.
I would assert without fear of contradiction that rock/pop was the most important popular art form of the 20th century and continues to occupy that rank today.
It is therefore one of the great triumphs of British culture that this music had its most beautiful and psychedelic flowering in London in the 1960s.
London has produced some of the world’s great poets, playwrights, novelists, painters, architects, scientists, libertines, orators and lexicographers. But in the almost 2,000-year history of the city, there aren’t that many moments when we could say Londoners were the acknowledged global leaders in music.
In the second half of the 20th century, however, the musical scene was like the 16th-century cyclotron of theatrical talent that produced William Shakespeare. There were at least two flashes seen around the world: the Beatles, the most musically influential group of the last hundred years (okay, they were from Liverpool, but London was where they made their name), and their fractionally more energetic rivals, the Rolling Stones.
Middle-aged Stones fans tend to be either votaries of Mick Jagger (like former prime minister Tony Blair), or they think, as I have since quite a young age, that Keef is the man.
Keith has spent decades shooting and snorting such prodigious quantities of chemicals that he looks like some Inca mummy; and all that while he has produced work of such quantity and originality that he has changed the face of rock music as decisively as he has changed his own.
He has become very rich. Between 1989 and 2003, for instance, he helped the Rolling Stones to earn £1.23 billion. And yet he still fizzes with so much energy – well into his sixties – that Johnny Depp borrowed his camp, be-ringed and bangled style for the blockbusting Pirates of the Caribbean. If he didn’t look so epically raddled, you might be tempted to say that he was an advertisement for the health-giving properties of very pure heroin and cocaine.
In preparing to write about him, I have been all over Keith Richards’ London. I once went to open a riverside park in Twickenham, looked over toward the cottages and houseboats of Eel Pie Island and tried to imagine those magical sixties evenings when the air was full of the yowling of Keith’s guitar.
I have been to the 100 Club in Oxford Street, and even tried to help a campaign to keep it open.
I have nosed around the chewing-gummed alley off Ealing Broadway where Alexis Korner had his famous club and where 50 years ago this week – on July 12, 1962 – Mick and Keith first played with Brian Jones, and the Rolling Stones effectively came into being.
For years I have snuffled on his spoor, but never come across a trace of the man himself; until not long ago, when fate dealt me the most incredible slice of luck.
I was due to attend a ceremony in Covent Garden to make a short speech in honour of the noble and learned Lord Sebastian Coe – athlete, politician and chair of the committee that organized the Olympic Games about to open in London – and to give him a prize.
When I reached the Royal Opera House, the road was jammed with huge limos and, even though it was well after 10 p.m., there were still large crowds of autograph hunters, cheering and yelling at anyone who went through.
“I am sorry I am so late,” I gasped to an impossibly tall, thin, yet curvaceous, hostess.
“It’s all right,” she said. “Stephen Fry spoke for so long that we are running a bit behind.”
I can hear you snicker. I am fully aware of what sophisticated people are supposed to think about those first three siren-jangling chords.
But I could feel myself being transformed from this shy, spotty, swotty nerd who had spent the past hour trying to maintain a conversation with the poor young woman who was sitting next to me.
I won’t say that I leapt to my feet and beat my chest and took the girl by the hand. But I can’t rule it out – frankly, I can’t remember the details – because to this day I have only to hear that opening riff, and that feeling comes back.
That is how it is for billions of human beings. It is one of the hundreds of snatches of rock/pop music that remain on our mental iPods to intensify our experience and provide the soundtracks of our lives.
I would assert without fear of contradiction that rock/pop was the most important popular art form of the 20th century and continues to occupy that rank today.
It is therefore one of the great triumphs of British culture that this music had its most beautiful and psychedelic flowering in London in the 1960s.
London has produced some of the world’s great poets, playwrights, novelists, painters, architects, scientists, libertines, orators and lexicographers. But in the almost 2,000-year history of the city, there aren’t that many moments when we could say Londoners were the acknowledged global leaders in music.
In the second half of the 20th century, however, the musical scene was like the 16th-century cyclotron of theatrical talent that produced William Shakespeare. There were at least two flashes seen around the world: the Beatles, the most musically influential group of the last hundred years (okay, they were from Liverpool, but London was where they made their name), and their fractionally more energetic rivals, the Rolling Stones.
Middle-aged Stones fans tend to be either votaries of Mick Jagger (like former prime minister Tony Blair), or they think, as I have since quite a young age, that Keef is the man.
Keith has spent decades shooting and snorting such prodigious quantities of chemicals that he looks like some Inca mummy; and all that while he has produced work of such quantity and originality that he has changed the face of rock music as decisively as he has changed his own.
He has become very rich. Between 1989 and 2003, for instance, he helped the Rolling Stones to earn £1.23 billion. And yet he still fizzes with so much energy – well into his sixties – that Johnny Depp borrowed his camp, be-ringed and bangled style for the blockbusting Pirates of the Caribbean. If he didn’t look so epically raddled, you might be tempted to say that he was an advertisement for the health-giving properties of very pure heroin and cocaine.
In preparing to write about him, I have been all over Keith Richards’ London. I once went to open a riverside park in Twickenham, looked over toward the cottages and houseboats of Eel Pie Island and tried to imagine those magical sixties evenings when the air was full of the yowling of Keith’s guitar.
I have been to the 100 Club in Oxford Street, and even tried to help a campaign to keep it open.
I have nosed around the chewing-gummed alley off Ealing Broadway where Alexis Korner had his famous club and where 50 years ago this week – on July 12, 1962 – Mick and Keith first played with Brian Jones, and the Rolling Stones effectively came into being.
For years I have snuffled on his spoor, but never come across a trace of the man himself; until not long ago, when fate dealt me the most incredible slice of luck.
I was due to attend a ceremony in Covent Garden to make a short speech in honour of the noble and learned Lord Sebastian Coe – athlete, politician and chair of the committee that organized the Olympic Games about to open in London – and to give him a prize.
When I reached the Royal Opera House, the road was jammed with huge limos and, even though it was well after 10 p.m., there were still large crowds of autograph hunters, cheering and yelling at anyone who went through.
“I am sorry I am so late,” I gasped to an impossibly tall, thin, yet curvaceous, hostess.
“It’s all right,” she said. “Stephen Fry spoke for so long that we are running a bit behind.”
BOOK EXCERPT
The origin of rock/pop music, according to Boris Johnson
“Fine,” I said. “When am I on?”
“Not long now. You are speaking after the Writer of the Year, which is going to be Keith Richards. He’s just over there,” she said, in answer to my hoarse exclamation of disbelief.
“Where?” I goggled.
“There – up at the front,” and she pointed toward an unmistakable grey bird’s nest of hair.
For the next few minutes, I fixed my gaze on my prey and ran through the options.
(In my experience, impromptu interviews with an uber celeb are very hard to pull off. I once spent three days tailing Jacques Chirac across France. After repeated disappointments, I put myself in his path as he swept out of a rally. “President Chirac,” I cried, holding out my hand. “Boris Johnson, from London!” He paused for a nanosecond; he beamed; he gripped. “Jacques Chirac, from Paris!” he said, and then was gone.)
I knew I had better boil it down to one single, overwhelming question and thought about what I wanted to know.
I am a keen student of LIFE, the autobiography that earned Keith his award for writing. Reading it, I reckon I have an inkling about how it all happened.
Young, white Londoners could play black music in a way young white Americans might have found embarrassing. They saw nothing ridiculous or disrespectful – it was just a tribute to the music they loved.
So what happened with rock and roll in London was really the supreme example of the import-export process that made the city great. And that, I concluded, as the awards ceremony neared its climax, was the point I needed to put to Keef.
By now the black-tied crowd was getting tired. Then Keef was finally announced, and as he sauntered swayingly on stage – jacket sleeves rolled up to expose his sinewy wrists, head band making him look like an ancient John McEnroe – we were all lifted spontaneously to our feet.
His speech was short, droll, modest and, as soon as he had gyrated back to his seat, I knew that this was my moment.
Quickly, I did my own turn on stage, introducing Seb Coe, and then with some pushfulness I persuaded Keith’s agent to let me station myself by his side. “Just five minutes,” I pleaded.
(I was later informed that Keith’s people had somehow rebuffed Stephen Fry – in the mistaken belief that he was Prime Minister David Cameron.)
After decades of hoping, I found myself sitting inches from the kohl-eyed demigod, and I noticed that, though his face was as lined as Auden’s, his teeth were American in their whiteness.
We began with some small talk. But the crowd around us was jostling and jabbering ever more insistently, and I knew that I must blurt it out.
“Er, Keith,” I stumbled.
“Mr. Ma-yor,” he said, in his courtly way.
‘I’ve got this theory that, er …’ and I gasped out the story, as told by Joe Walsh, the god-gifted guitarist of the Eagles, that he had never even heard of Muddy Waters until he went to hear a Stones concert.
“That’s right,” Keith said, nodding.
And so, I went on, you could argue that the Stones were critical in the history of rock and roll – by now I was half-shouting – because they gave back the blues to America.
“I’ll go with that,” he said, with infinite affability.
And I’ll go with it, too, Keith. As 19th-century London took in sugar and oranges and sold them back to the world as marmalade, so 20th-century London imported the American blues and re-exported them as rock/pop. It was a great trade.
Now it was time for Keith Richards to leave and as his entourage climbed into some vast limo, I thought how much London had changed since he hit the scene.
The old counterculture has been adopted and expanded and has permeated society in a way that is good both for London and its economy.
Where once we had Mary Quant hacking away with her scissors in a bedsit, we now have a London fashion industry worth £21-billion and employing 80,000 people. We have young artists charging quite fantastic sums for diamond-studded skulls.
The Colony Room is still going, but it is now supplemented by the Groucho Club and dozens of other posh-washroomed venues occupied by people with some sort of creative talent – London is one of the world’s most important centres for the “creative, culture and media” industries.
But one art form more than any other helps to make a city cool – and that is music.
Excerpted from Johnson’s Life of London: The People Who Made The City That Made The World (2012) written by Boris Johnson and published courtesy of Harper Collins Canada.
“Not long now. You are speaking after the Writer of the Year, which is going to be Keith Richards. He’s just over there,” she said, in answer to my hoarse exclamation of disbelief.
“Where?” I goggled.
“There – up at the front,” and she pointed toward an unmistakable grey bird’s nest of hair.
For the next few minutes, I fixed my gaze on my prey and ran through the options.
(In my experience, impromptu interviews with an uber celeb are very hard to pull off. I once spent three days tailing Jacques Chirac across France. After repeated disappointments, I put myself in his path as he swept out of a rally. “President Chirac,” I cried, holding out my hand. “Boris Johnson, from London!” He paused for a nanosecond; he beamed; he gripped. “Jacques Chirac, from Paris!” he said, and then was gone.)
I knew I had better boil it down to one single, overwhelming question and thought about what I wanted to know.
I am a keen student of LIFE, the autobiography that earned Keith his award for writing. Reading it, I reckon I have an inkling about how it all happened.
Young, white Londoners could play black music in a way young white Americans might have found embarrassing. They saw nothing ridiculous or disrespectful – it was just a tribute to the music they loved.
So what happened with rock and roll in London was really the supreme example of the import-export process that made the city great. And that, I concluded, as the awards ceremony neared its climax, was the point I needed to put to Keef.
By now the black-tied crowd was getting tired. Then Keef was finally announced, and as he sauntered swayingly on stage – jacket sleeves rolled up to expose his sinewy wrists, head band making him look like an ancient John McEnroe – we were all lifted spontaneously to our feet.
His speech was short, droll, modest and, as soon as he had gyrated back to his seat, I knew that this was my moment.
Quickly, I did my own turn on stage, introducing Seb Coe, and then with some pushfulness I persuaded Keith’s agent to let me station myself by his side. “Just five minutes,” I pleaded.
(I was later informed that Keith’s people had somehow rebuffed Stephen Fry – in the mistaken belief that he was Prime Minister David Cameron.)
After decades of hoping, I found myself sitting inches from the kohl-eyed demigod, and I noticed that, though his face was as lined as Auden’s, his teeth were American in their whiteness.
We began with some small talk. But the crowd around us was jostling and jabbering ever more insistently, and I knew that I must blurt it out.
“Er, Keith,” I stumbled.
“Mr. Ma-yor,” he said, in his courtly way.
‘I’ve got this theory that, er …’ and I gasped out the story, as told by Joe Walsh, the god-gifted guitarist of the Eagles, that he had never even heard of Muddy Waters until he went to hear a Stones concert.
“That’s right,” Keith said, nodding.
And so, I went on, you could argue that the Stones were critical in the history of rock and roll – by now I was half-shouting – because they gave back the blues to America.
“I’ll go with that,” he said, with infinite affability.
And I’ll go with it, too, Keith. As 19th-century London took in sugar and oranges and sold them back to the world as marmalade, so 20th-century London imported the American blues and re-exported them as rock/pop. It was a great trade.
Now it was time for Keith Richards to leave and as his entourage climbed into some vast limo, I thought how much London had changed since he hit the scene.
The old counterculture has been adopted and expanded and has permeated society in a way that is good both for London and its economy.
Where once we had Mary Quant hacking away with her scissors in a bedsit, we now have a London fashion industry worth £21-billion and employing 80,000 people. We have young artists charging quite fantastic sums for diamond-studded skulls.
The Colony Room is still going, but it is now supplemented by the Groucho Club and dozens of other posh-washroomed venues occupied by people with some sort of creative talent – London is one of the world’s most important centres for the “creative, culture and media” industries.
But one art form more than any other helps to make a city cool – and that is music.
Excerpted from Johnson’s Life of London: The People Who Made The City That Made The World (2012) written by Boris Johnson and published courtesy of Harper Collins Canada.
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