The Rolling Stones

This year it’ll be 48 years since Mick Jagger met Keith Richards again (they were former Wentworth Primary schoolmates) while on a train commuting from Dartford (Keith attended Sidcup Art College) to the LSE. Both start talking about music and Keith invited Mick over to his house to listen to Mick's albums. Soon after, Keith was asked to join Mick’s band Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys. The following summer, Mick joined Keith on holiday with Keith's parents in Devon, Southwest England, and the pair practiced daily. In a local pub Mick and Keith performed in public for the first time, doing an Everley Brothers routine to much acclaim.

In March 1962, Alexis Korner's group Blues Incorporated took up a Saturday night residency at Ealing’s Jazz Club in West London. For the first time, England heard and saw blues played by white people. Keith, Mick and Dick Taylor (later guitarist in The Pretty Things) become regulars and Mick soon became second-string vocalist for Blues Incorporated, standing in whenever Long John Baldry didn’t appear. One of the players who rotated in and out of the Blues Incorporated line-up was Brian Jones, performing under the pseudonym Elmo Lewis in honour of his slide-guitar playing hero, Elmore James. After watching him play, Mick and Keith asked Brian to set up a band with them. Also guesting on occasion was drummer Charlie Watts, whose expertise and jazz- and big band-influenced chops soon made him the most sought after blues drummer on the scene. Another regular guest singer was Art Wood, Ronnie's older brother, who would later take his sibling to the Crawdaddy Club to see the Stones in residency, of which Nik Cohn would write that they “beat out the toughest, crudest, most offensive noise an English band had ever made.” The original British garage punks, then!

In April, Mick, Keith and Brian set out to form the best blues band in Britain – the latter naming it The Rolling Stones, in homage to the Muddy Waters song – with Ian Stewart (still a shipping clerk at Imperial Chemical Industries) on piano and Dick Taylor on bass. They practiced three times a week above the Bricklayers Arms, in London’s Soho district, though Mick continued to sing regularly with Blues Incorporated until mid-June. By May, rehearsals moved to above the Wetherby Arms on the King’s Road and by July, they play the Marquee Club with The Kinks’ Mick Avory on drums. The band recorded demos at Curly Clayton Soound Studios in North London without a bass player – Taylor having quit – and with Tony Chapman as guest drummer. EMI passed, while Decca were non-committal. At the end of the year, after a tip off from Stewart, Bill Wyman auditioned with and then joined the band, his first gig on bass at St. Mary's Parish Church Hall Youth Club in Richmond.

In January 1963, Charlie Watts joined the Stones after seeing them play live at The Red Lion pub in Sutton. The band gigged constantly with residencies at venues like Ealing Jazz Club, Ken Colyer's Studio 51 and Eel Pie Island in Twickenham. The Stones recorded three tracks, including a Chuck Berry and a Bo Diddley cover at the tiny Regent Sound Studio in London's Denmark Street, also known as Tin Pan Alley, and, a week later, started on Buddy Holly's Not Fade Away as a potential single. Their Saturday night residency at the Crawdaddy Club at Richmond's Station Hotel gave them ecstatic reviews in the UK music press. Fellow budding blues-heads and emerging musicians Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend and, most famously on one night in April, all four Beatles were soon seen in the audience. By November the Stones played the Beatles’ home venue, The Cavern in Liverpool, and hundreds were turned away.

In March, the band recorded demos – Bo Diddley, Jimmy Reed and Willie Dixon covers – with producer Glyn Johns at London’s IBC Studios, including Dixon’s I Want To Be Loved, a re-worked version of which became the B-side of the band's debut single on June 7. A few weeks later the band signed a management deal with Andrew Loog Oldham and Eric Easton, the day after a storming Crawdaddy Club gig attended by the pair. In order to buy the IBC owned tapes, Jones sneakily claimed the band had folded and he wanted the tapes purely for nostalgic reasons. The studio agreed, charging a fee of £106, paid for by Oldham and Easton.

In May, the Stones were signed to Decca Records by Dick Rowe – infamous for being the A&R man who turned down the Beatles the year before - on a tip-off from George Harrison! Olympic Studios saw the Stones’ first "official" recording session with co-manager, wannabe svengali and self-styled “British Phil Spector” Andrew Loog Oldham producing. Come On b/w I Wanna (Want To) Be Loved was released as debut single and the Stones made their TV debut on Thank Your Lucky Stars a month later. Despite BBC regulations that saw all bands wear matching suits and “look neat”, Oldham and Easton asked that Stewart be dropped from the line-up because he looked "too normal". Despite compliance, complaints came in from viewers who considered the band too scruffy.

In September, Ronnie Wood entered the doors of Ealing Art College. Like fellow student Keith, Ron's prime interest was not so much drawing or painting – though he went on to become an acclaimed artist – but music. Ron’s eventful life (check out Ronnie, his recently published autobiography) has always featured such colourful characters such as Ronnie Lane, Rod Stewart and Mick ‘n’ Keith – the only surprise is that it took as long as it did for him to become a fully fledged Stone. When he finally did the band took on a new lease of life…

Keith became friendly with Ron in the spring of 1973 when Keith, via Ron’s first, now sadly late, wife, Krissie, joined Mick and Ron, who were jamming in the basement studio of the latter’s Richmond home, The Wick, and had begun songs It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll and I Can Feel The Fire among others. However it wasn’t until April 1974, when Ron asked Keith over to help him finish his solo album, I’ve Got My Own Album To Do (Atlantic Records), which features two Jagger/Richards compositions, Act Together and Sure The One You Need, and to some is virtually a lost Stones album, and Keith ended up staying for several weeks, that the friendship cemented. At the end of that year, Mick Taylor, who’d been in the Stones following Brian demise since June 1969, suddenly quit, By March 1975, Ron was a Stone.

Jump back to July 1971 and, after a spring UK tour finishing with ‘farewell England’ gigs at the Roundhouse, the success of April’s Sticky Fingers album and Mick’s marriage to Bianca in St. Tropez in May, the Stones assembled in the French Riviera at Nellcôte, a huge Romanesque villa rented by Keith, to record a new album, provisionally titled Tropical Disease (!) using the band’s new mobile recording studio, housed in a truck. The cast would include producer Jimmy Miller, Bobby Keys, Jim Price, Gram Parsons, Nicky Hopkins, Anita Pallenberg, Tony Sanchez, Keith’s dog Boogie and a boat named the Mandrax!

The result, the sprawling, epic, flawed masterpiece Exile On Main Street, wa a UK #1 album and a career highpoint – a rock ‘n’ roll touchstone to numerous musicians – in a run of dazzling albums from 1968’s post-psyche, gritty roots revival Beggars Banquet to 1983’s nihilistic Undercover, and including gems such as 1973’s Goats Head Soup (another UK #1) and 1978’s Some Girls, which would define post-Sixties rock and create, with their heady, eclectic mix of blues, R&B and hard rock, pop and new wave, gospel, soul and reggae, a catalogue to crown the Stones as the surviving sovereigns of their generation, godfathers to the next and keepers of the rock ‘n’ roll flame.

At the heart of the Stones is the enduring and immensely gifted songwriting partnership of Jagger & Richards, which sits alongside Lennon & McCartney, Bacharach & David, Goffin & King, Holland, Dozier & Holland, Townsend and Davies, in the premiership of contemporary music writers from the last half century.

EMI Music Publishing proudly publishes eight key studio albums by The Rolling Stones worldwide from 1972’s landmark double Exile On Main Street to 1983’s stinging Undercover. That’s nearly ninety songs, including stone cold classics such as Rocks Off, Torn And Frayed, Sweet Black Angel, Happy, Let It Loose, Soul Survivor, Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker), 100 Years Ago, Winter, Silver Train, It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll (But I Like It), Till The Next Goodbye, Fingerprint File, Memory Hotel, Fool To Cry, Hey Negrita, Miss You, Beast Of Burden, Shattered, When The Whip Comes Down, Imagination, Emotional Rescue, She’s So Cold, Summer Romance, Start Me Up, Waiting On A Friend, Black Limousine, Hang Fire, If I Was A Dancer, Everything Is Turning To Gold, Undercover Of The Night, Too Much Blood and She Was Hot. A handful, including Tumbling Dice, Loving Cup and Angie, are published by EMI in selected territories excluding the UK.

During 45 years of recording, the Stones have also covered quite a few blues, R&B and Motown classics published by EMI, including Fortune Teller, Money (That’s What I Want), Can I Get A Witness, You Better Move On (from 1964), Hitch Hike, Cry To Me, You Can’t Catch Me, Everybody Needs Somebody To Love (from 1965), My Girl, I Don’t Know Why, Ain’t Too Proud To Beg and Cherry Oh Baby.

Rolling Stones’ sets on world tours from this decade regularly feature many of these songs, as do live albums and Best Of compilations, and they remain some of the brightest stars in EMI Music Publishing’s galaxy.