Rolling in the deep: Stones still going, 57 years after their live debut

I have, on many occasion, used this platform to write about my fascination with the suburban British roots of some of rock's biggest global superstars, especially Eric Clapton and others who (like me) emanate from the Surrey/south-west London borders. These suburbs also play a part in, arguably, the most enduring success story of London's musical product, The Rolling Stones, who are - as I write - in the midst of their delayed US 'No Filter' tour, heading for New Orleans (along with Hurricane Barry, which is about to batter the Louisiana coastline).

That the Stones are, in 2019, still rolling is all the more remarkable when you consider that they played their first official gig under the name 'Mick Jagger & The Rollin' Stones' on this very day, 57 years ago, at London's Marquee Club, as it once was at 165 Oxford Street.

"It is quite amazing when you think about it," Jagger told Rolling Stone magazine on the gig's 50th anniversary. "But it was so long ago. Some of us are still here, but it's a very different group than the one that played 50 years ago." The line-up that night included Jagger, Brian Jones and Keith Richards, but not Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman, who would join the Stones later.

The significance of that first gig is even more remarkable when you consider its chronological place: Jagger and Richards had only rekindled their childhood friendship the previous October, when they famously met on Platform 2 of Dartford railway station, the latter enamoured by the Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry records under crook of the future Stones frontman's arm. By the following spring they were members of the Blues Boys quintet, which later led to their involvement in Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated on the other side of London at the Ealing Jazz club, prompting Jagger and Richards to start jamming with the outfit (which also included Jones, Watts and eventual Stones keyboard player Ian Stewart). The jams led to the formation of a group playing cod covers of Berry and Waters numbers. Given the confected rivalry between the Stones and The Beatles, it should be remembered that the Liverpudlian band had, at this point, yet to sign with George Martin and Parlophone, or even release a single. The 'British invasion' was yet to commence.

By the time the new combo - which featured future Kinks drummer Mick Avory (according to Richards' autobiography Life) - managed to get booked for the Marquee, Jagger was still studying at the London School of Economics and just a couple of weeks shy of his 19th birthday. Like Richards, he was still living at home. The older Jones had migrated to London from Cheltenham and was already living the dream. The gig itself came about by a happy accident: Blues Incorporated were the Marquee's regular Thursday night band, but they'd been invited to do a live BBC radio broadcast elsewhere. Jones used his considerable charm to persuade the Marquee's owner, Harold Pendleton, to let their new group fill in. It was then, with Jones the band's de facto figurehead, that he got in touch with the local listings magazine Jazz News to plug the gig. When asked for the band's name, he caught a copy of Muddy Waters' Best Of album out of the corner of his eye, and saw the track listing for the song Rollin' Stone. A legend - one which remains to this day arguably the most enduring of the rock era - was born.

As for the gig itself, the Stones performed a sweaty 18 songs, all blues covers including Bright Lights, Big City, Kind of Lonesome and Blues Before Sunrise, ending with Elmore James' Happy Home. Jones pocketed six pounds in old money, while the rest took home five each. Even so, for those days and for their age, not a bad wage for a night's work, and the foundation of the money-making machine to which the Rolling Stones would become adept.

When celebrating the gig's 50th anniversary in 2012, Jagger was somewhat uneasy about the landmark: "Part of me goes, 'We’re slightly cheating,' because it’s not the same band, you know," he told Rolling Stone. "Still the same name. It's only Keith and myself that are the same people, I think. I've tried to find out when Charlie's first gig was, and none of us can really remember and no one really knows. But it's an amazing achievement, and I think it's fantastic and you know I'm very proud of it." Richards, ever the contrarian, was less fussed about the anniversary: "...[we] always really consider '63 to be 50 years, because Charlie didn’t actually join until January. So we look upon 1962 as sort of the 'year of conception'. But the birth is next year."

Even so, the now-near 60-year-old band, continuing to bowl over audiences over with their exuberant brand of blues, their showmanship, their sheer corporate might (The Rolling Stones BV is actually incorporated in Amsterdam for reasons, I'm told, of tax efficiency rather than Keith's proximity to the city's delights...). Even so, as they finally kicked off their No Filter tour earlier this week in Chicago - delayed due to Mick Jagger's heart surgery - the band, with a combined age of its core membership of 300, were every bit as dazzling as they've ever been, playing songs like Street Fighting Man, Tumbling Dice, Sympathy For The Devil, Paint It Black and a ten-minute version of Satisfaction with as much vibrancy as a band a quarter their age.

Picture: Facebook/The Rolling Stones

After all these years of mega tours like this one, not to mention the some 24 studio albums they've recorded (with another on the way), plus all the Glimmer Twins aggro and regular splits and spats, it would be easy to look upon the Rolling Stones as some vaudeville act still pounding the boards, six decades on from their first outing. Having seen them four times in my life (with the last one, in Amsterdam 13 years ago one of the best ever), I'd still like to see them one more time. For all their success, their wealth and all that comes with it, the Stones today are still, largely, the blues purists they were on this day in 1962. The Beatles and other contemporaries may have given way to psychedelia and progressiveness - and that's absolutely fine - but the Stones have never wavered from their core interest in 57 years (with the exception of the faux disco of Miss You), With that, they have retained and even reinvigorated their zest for what they do and have always done best. And, even if they have lost original members, inevitably like most of their contemporaries from the 1960s, the Stones today are still a force. A nature-defying one at that.

Time still on their side - the Rolling Stones' Blue & Lonesome

Three weeks ago I spent a delightfully indulgent morning in New York City trawling through the 54-year history of the Rolling Stones at Exhibitionism, their own lavish, Bowie Is-style showcase of memorabilia, which had crossed the Atlantic following a successful run in London during the summer.

At first it felt odd to be in New York's West Village looking at a history so seeped in London's musical heritage - such as the faithful recreation of the squalid Edith Grove flat shared by Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Brian Jones as The Greatest Rock'n'Roll In The World™ was being formed in 1962. It was in this "pigsty" (Richards' own word) that he and Jagger, his fellow Glimmer Twin, consolidated their love of blues music and, indeed, their enduring - if somewhat tempestuous relationship. That love of the blues had been forged somewhere east of their Chelsea digs, in suburban Dartford where, on October 17, 1961, the former friends from primary school were reacquainted on Platform 2 of the town's station, with Richards sparking up a conversation about the records his future partner-in-crime was holding: Chuck Berry's Rockin’ At The Hops and The Best of Muddy Waters.

Much has been written about how London's middle class suburbs not only succumbed to the music of the Mississippi Delta, but even exported it back there (the Stones famously turning up at Chess Studios in Chicago to record their 12x5 album and discovering Muddy Waters - their hero - up a ladder painting the building's front). While this might sound a little arriviste, the Stones have put back into America everything they took out of it, which is why the choice of Manhattan for Exhibitionism's second run seemed perfectly normal.

Even if the band's roots are firmly in London - in Dartford, Chelsea, the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond that they made their own - they long ago stopped being 'just' a British band. As the recently released tour film ¡Olé! Olé! Olé! depicted, they long ago became a global brand, perfectly at home in Buenas Aires, Caracas or São Paulo, and as much a religion in many of these places as they are rock royalty. One of the points underlined by the film is how, 54 years since their first gig at London's 100 Club, the Stones remain in rude health and still prepared to chart new ground (the film sees them touring Latin America, playing Havana, a rare occurrence for a Western rock band), making you question if any of today's X-Factor crop will be around in five years' time, let alone ten times that period.

The Rolling Stones' endurance, perhaps more so than Paul McCartney, who still tours, is that they are as vital and as invigoratingly entertaining today as a live act, as they ever have been, perhaps more so. They can't need the money, so let's leave that thought at the door, which makes the night-after-night playing of Honky Tonk Woman, Sympathy For The Devil or Satisfaction (and that riff) an endeavour of both consumate professionalism and an enduring love of doing so. Of course, being paid handsomely helps, too: this year they will earn some $65 million from touring alone which, even if you factor in the cost of touring (including wages for non-'full members', like bassist Darryl Jones - who, after 20 years feels he should be an official Stone), will still furnish Jagger, Richards, Charlie Watts and Ronnie Wood's bank accounts handsomely.

© Simon Poulter 2016

Snobs, cynical musos and the jealous might sniff at such business, with all that griping about how these and other heritage tour wrinklies are clogging up channels for younger artists. But the reality is that the world is a better place with the Stones continuing to perform, even if that means the only way of seeing them is to pay inflated ticket prices for vast stadium appearances.

No one would dispute that creatively, their best is behind them, as far back as those louche days of recording Exile On Main Street, Beggars Banquet and Sticky Fingers. But their mastery is undimmed. Richards is still inventing every day, be it chords or tunings, and in many respects is keeping the blues alive as the genre's originals continue to dwindle; Watts remains one of the sharpest drummers in the game, while Wood is a vastly underrated guitarist whose history goes back as long the as peer group of suburban six string-slingers like Clapton, Page and Beck; and Jagger, the ultimate frontman, a paradox of bandy-legged, arm-flailing 28-inch-waisted campness combined with the steely business sense of a corporate CEO.

With Jagger, Richards and Watts in their 70s, and Wood catching up at 69, it is still remarkable that, even with the slick circus around them, the Stones have the energy or the inclination to keep going. But they do, and if anything appear to be doing so with as much relish as ever. Which is why it might be tempting to expect Blue & Lonesome, their new studio album of blues covers, to be a lazy afternoon of bar room standards that any half decent pub band with a Stratocaster-playing lead could knock out. Thankfully, it's not. Instead, it's an accomplished, joyful jaunt through long forgotten songs, reanimating them with the right measure of authenticity, vintage amps and even more vintage guitars, and even Jagger himself demonstrating that, despite the knighthood and executive status, he is still a pure bluesman at heart. His harmonica work throughout Blue & Lonesome is some of the best you'll ever hear.

Recorded over the course of three days last December at British Grove Studios in Chiswick - just a couple of miles from the site of the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond where their residency established the band forever -  Blue & Lonesome's 12 songs dig deep into the artists that, as callow teens, the Stones soaked up, from blues harmonica master Little Walter, whose Just Your Fool kicks off the album, to the likes of Howlin' Wolf, Magic Sam and Little Johnny Taylor, whose Everybody Knows About My Good Thing includes a cameo by Eric Clapton, that other veteran from the south-west London blues scene.

© Simon Poulter 2016

Blue & Lonesome is no nostalgic meander, or even an attempt by the Stones to complete a 54-year cycle. This is more than homage, too, no faithful but predictable covers of standards, in the manner of those 'Pays Tribute To...' records K-Tel used to knock out via Woolies.

This is a band aware of their roots, reaching out to enjoy them again, as dynamically as they did in the first place. Then, it was with cheap instruments and an even cheaper home life, but always through the shared love of a music created many thousands of miles away amid the heat, sweat and toil of the American South.

The originals of the form may be all-but gone, but the music is being kept alive by, perhaps, the most famous exponent of the blues, the British band that became a global phenomenon and, six decades later, still are.