This year marks 50 years since the formation of The Rolling Stones and, to begin a short series of posts in their honour, we are pleased to welcome renowned novelist – and almost equally renowned Stones fan – Ian Rankin back to The Spectator Arts Blog.
When I first heard the Rolling Stones, I hated them. The album was Let It Bleed. It belonged to my sister’s boyfriend. He had paid one pound-nineteen-and-eleven for it at a record shop in Kirkcaldy. It came with a poster, and the sleeve was interesting. I’d no idea who Delia Smith was, but she’d done a good job of that cake. I was a bit of a poster fanatic – my tiny bedroom was plastered with them, including the ceiling. I got them from the weekly music paper Sounds. There was a free colour poster in the middle pages of every issue. I didn’t know who half the bands were, but the posters went on the wall. Not the Let It Bleed poster though – that was already adorning my sister’s boyfriend’s bedroom.
I put my T Rex singles to one side and tried the album. Dear me, no. Not catchy enough by half. And what were those lyrics about – Monkey Men and Midnight Ramblers and Boston Stranglers? ‘You can come all over me,’ the singer rasped. Thanks but no thanks. I was eleven and just not interested in these comings and goings. But even then I could tell there was something sleazy, pungent and transgressive about the songs. They were messages from a world apparently free of taboos as well as basic hygiene.
By the time I was 13 I had moved from Bolan to prog. I bought Goat’s Head Soup (on cassette) with some Christmas money. I liked it, even though for the first couple of years I misheard the chorus to ‘Star, Star’ and thought it suitable for family listening over a game of Scrabble. Next up were Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main Street and Some Girls (on vinyl), and even a bootleg, which a shop was playing over its loudspeakers when I went in one day. I enjoyed charting the group’s evolution, from R’n’B through the Sixties counterculture and into the Showband Seventies.
Lewd and occasionally crude, they were also a brilliant singles band and a prodigious gatherer of all the talents. Philip Norman’s biography The Stones filled in a lot of the gaps in my knowledge. I sat there in my bedroom, hundreds if not thousands of miles away from ‘the action’, and felt connected to this world of outlaws, vagabonds and recidivists. If they were rebels, surely I, too, was a rebel, through the act of listening to their music.
In time I began to appreciate the actual musicianship: the way Brian Jones could learn any instrument handed to him; the transformation of a few licks by Keith Richards into instant anthems; the bluesy genius of Mick Taylor; the lubricious white boy howl of Jagger.
Though I lost touch with them for a time during punk, I dusted off the old albums again in my mid-twenties. Let It Bleed had become my favourite by then, and it still is. The story of the band had always seemed to take precedence over the story of the music, but as the group faded from public view (meaning the front pages of the newspapers) the music was allowed to speak more loudly and clearly. It took me back to the musicians who had influenced them in the first place, to the blues of Mississippi and Chicago.
When I began writing the Inspector Rebus novels, I knew Rebus would be a fan. He was a no-nonsense working-class guy who’d broken a few rules in his youth. The Stones would have appealed to him more than the Beatles. ‘She Loves You’ or ‘Paint It Black’? There could be only one winner. I even started nicking the titles of Stones albums for my books – Let It Bleed (of course), Black and Blue, Beggars Banquet.
This last was a collection of short stories, and there was one in there called ‘Glimmer’ (an in-joke for Stones fans), which started with the recording of ‘Sympathy For the Devil’ and ended with Altamont. A few years after it was published, I was invited to dinner with Bill Wyman. I handed him a copy of the book and he scanned the story, shaking his head occasionally and saying ‘That didn’t happen… nor that… wasn’t like that… or that.’
This flags up that the public image of the band blinded everyone to the more mundane realities of a life spent gigging and recording. As the band notches up 50 years as a going concern, Charlie Watts will probably affirm that he’s spent five years playing drums and 45 sitting around waiting for stuff to happen. Wyman, of course, got out and seems to enjoy touring with his Rhythm Kings, focussing on blues standards and rarities.
But he still sometimes plays (and sings) ‘Honky Tonk Women’.
I’ve seen the Rolling Stones play live only once – a ‘secret’ fan club gig in London. They were majestic, but not in the least Satanic. Last year, when Keith’s autobiography was published I managed a couple of minutes in his company, though I’ve almost no idea what I said. I got my book signed though, along with a vinyl copy of Exile on Main Street. He might be cracking on a bit, but he still defines much that was great about rock’s defining decade.
My one regret in almost 40 years of listening to the band is that I didn’t purloin my sister’s boyfriend’s copy of Let It Bleed. Complete with poster (and sticker informing the purchaser of said poster), it fetches around 300 quid these days on eBay. Not a bad return on one pound-nineteen-and-elevenpence…
The Rolling Stones 50th anniversary CD singles box set is released on the 11th of April.