Rolling with the Stones

'I have been offered an excellent opportunity in the entertainment world,' Mick Jagger wrote in a letter to Kent Education Authority in 1963, having decided after much deliberation to leave his degree course at the London School of Economics in order to become a fully fledged Rolling Stone. The man who went on to write 'Sympathy for the Devil' and 'Street Fighting Man' never quite surrendered his middle-class good manners and, as one of the many subtexts to Bill Wyman's glorified scrapbook illustrates, it was left to Jagger's songwriting partner, Keith Richards, to assume, and subsequently define, the notion of outlaw rock and roll that still attaches itself to the Stones almost 40 years later. Jagger's camp sexuality and Richards's wasted elegance reached their apogee in the late Sixties and early Seventies, making the group the most 'dangerous' rock group of their time and creating a template for a certain kind of louche, self-destructive imagery and behaviour that still underpins what passes for rock rebellion these days. For anyone who ever wondered what Bill Wyman was doing while his cohorts discovered hard drugs, occultism and, in Jagger's case, cosying up to the establishment, this book answers the question. He was watching, listening, taking notes and, in the manner of a true anorak, collecting. He collected Rolling Stones ticket stubs, posters, programmes, press cuttings and all the paraphernalia that attends excessive fandom. Put simply, Bill was his own band's biggest fan. It is left to the pictures and the memorabilia to tell the real story of how a bunch of grammar school boys absorbed the blues, transformed it into the quintessential hard rock sound of the seventies, then entered a long decline in which the legend of the Rolling Stones somehow survived their protracted attempts to run roughshod all over it both on record and in concert.