Free Mick Jagger by Philip Norman

future publisher and peer Matthew Evans, had won his place despite passing only one A-level and with a far more modest cache of O-levels, including woodwork. More important was that he’d taken part in the famous CND protest march to the nuclear weapons research establishment at Aldermaston, Berkshire.
    On the same BSc degree course was Laurence Isaacson, in later life a highly successful restaurant tycoon who would quip that if he’d sung or played an instrument, his future might have been very different. Born in Liverpool, he had attended Dovedale Primary School like John Lennon and George Harrison and then, like Lennon, gone on to Quarry Bank High School; now here he was actually sitting next to another future legend of rock. The two were doing the same specialist subject, industry and trade, for the second paper in their finals. “That meant that if Jagger missed a lecture, he’d copy out my notes, and if I missed one, I’d copy out his,” Isaacson says. “I seem to recall he used to do most of the copying.”
    Like Evans, Isaacson remembers him as “obviously extremely bright” and easily capable of achieving a 2:1 degree. At lectures, he was always quiet and well mannered and spoke “like a nice middle-class boy … The trouble was that it still all felt a bit too much like school. You had to be very respectful to the tutors and, of course, never answer back. And the classes were so small that they always had their eye on you. I remember one shouting out, ‘Jagger … if you don’t concentrate, you’re never going to get anywhere!’ ”
    Barely two years into a new decade, London had already taken huge strides away from the stuffy, sleepy fifties—though the changes were only just beginning. A feeling of excitement and expectation pulsed through the crusty old Victorian metropolis at every level: from its towering new office blocks and swirling new traffic overpasses and underpasses to its impudent new minicars, minivans, and minicabs and ever-lengthening rows of parking meters; from its new wine bars, “bistros,” and Italian trattorias to its sophisticated new advertisements and brand identities and newly launched, or revivified, glossy magazines like Town, Queen, and Tatler; from its young men in modish narrower trousers, thick-striped shirts, and square-toed shoes to its young women in masculine-looking V-necked Shetland sweaters, 1920s-style ropes of beads, black stockings, and radically short skirts.
    Innovation and experimentation (once again the merest amuse-bouche from the banquet to come) flourished at new theaters like Bernard Miles’s Mermaid and Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Royal, Stratford East; in the plays of Arnold Wesker and Harold Pinter; in mold-shattering productions like Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett, and Jonathan Miller’s Beyond the Fringe and Lionel Bart’s Oliver! The middle-aged metropolitan sophisticates whose posh accents always ruled London’s arts and media now began to seem laughably old-fashioned. An emergent school of young painters from humble families and provincial backgrounds—including Yorkshire’s David Hockney, Essex’s Allen Jones, and Dartford’s Peter Blake—were being more talked and written about than any since the French Impressionists. Vogue magazine, the supreme arbiter of style and sophistication, ceased employing bow-tied society figures to photograph its model girls, instead hiring a brash young East End Cockney named David Bailey.
    Only in popular music did excitement seem to be dwindling rather than growing. The ructions that rock ’n’ roll had caused among mid-fifties teenagers were a distant, almost embarrassing memory. Elvis Presley had disappeared into the U.S. Army for two years, and then emerged shorn of his sideburns, singing ballads and hymns. The American music industry had been convulsed by scandals over payola and the misadventures of individual stars. Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran were dead; Little Richard had found