The sweet smell of success in swinging London

Stoned by Andrew Loog Oldham (Secker & Warburg, £16.99)

By Christopher Hawtree

02 June 2000

Lucy Partington's skull aside, the most startling moment in Experience is Martin Amis's visit to Philip Larkin at All Souls in Oxford. The poet had "a copy of the Rolling Stones' live LP, Get Yer Ya-Yas Out. We agreed that it had clear strengths - particularly 'Stray Cat Blues'."

Larkin enjoyed the early Beatles and was well rewarded by Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited, but one had not imagined him swigging gin to the Stones. Then again, he relished John Lee Hooker, Big Bill Broonzy and Robert Johnson ("a rough and rather hag-ridden stylist") - all palpable influences on a group which might not have got beyond the Station Hotel, Richmond, but for the chancer Andrew Loog Oldham. The Stones' first manager was a public-school tearaway in whose manic-depressive genes there mingled his mother's Australian and Jewish antecedents alongside those from her fling with a Louisiana airman, shot down over the Channel seven months before the child's birth.

Opposite in style to Brian Epstein, Oldham was certain that the scruffs on stage could rival the Beatles. He realised that this meant making them even scruffier or, for instance, revelling in their arrest for wallside micturation. Such incidents have been chronicled often and at length. Oldham's memoirs - of which Stoned is the first of two or more volumes - will be even longer than Bill Wyman's woolly Stone Alone. Yet their immediacy confounds the title page: "Written and Produced by Andrew Loog Oldham. Interviews and research by Simon Dudfield. Edited by Ron Ross."

This is not a narrative a such; it shovels up gobbets of talk by Oldham and many others. It may seem more cacophony than chorus, but - as Experience shows - there are many ways of assembling a memoir. Some of Stoned has a familiar ring, but time and again it pulls one up short. Far wilder than Mick Jagger are many of the motley crew around Oldham, who modelled himself on Tony Curtis in Sweet Smell of Success. "He looked like one of the Kinks," says the great-humoured Kenny Lynch, "but better."

Here is that 1960s London in which public transport worked or, when splashing out on an Aston Martin, one was not held up in traffic. Among the surprises is Lionel Bart helping out on the lyrics of "Satisfaction". Equally astonishing, journalist Chris Hutchins remembers that "Andrew took me to lunch with Phil Spector and we went to the Angus Steak House... That was the hip place then, just the fact that you had the money and could afford to buy steak." Could retro take a terrible twist?

Spector, alas, has not chipped in, but his presence haunts the book's second half. He eggs on the teenage Oldham who, chutzpah incarnate, has already epitomised the period between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP. Kitted out by his quondam employer, Mary Quant, Oldham moves through a King's Road where the underworld met the elite. Vidal Sassoon proves to be a jazz buff and, as for Oldham's (probably) murderous driver, one can never look at a sash window in the same way again.

With scenes in the south of France (step forward Picasso, joint in mouth, by a store window), here is a portrait of a capital ready to swing. By the end, with Oldham a mere 20-years old, we have only reached the period of "As Tears Go By". There is just a passing mention of the Stones' future manager, Allen Klein, and the rancour ahead, but the pace is terrific. It is caught well by Oldham's first wife, Sheila: "It was a very fast lane. I wouldn't say he used people, he just used them up. There was nothing left after Andrew went through them, me included. It took me 10 years to recover from our relationship." As for Mary Quant's partner, "it was by virtue of the talks that I used to have with Andrew that I became a Samaritan".

Most pop books are as funky as a Woolworth's LP, but these outlandish, even touching anecdotes (including a great one about Sinatra) demand to be read aloud. Enjoy them to the sound of the Stones at their current best: Charlie Watts's jazz bands, and Bill Wyman's Rhythm Kings.