The pace of the Rolling Stones 1963 UK tour, as an up-and-coming opening act for Little Richard and The Everly Brothers, was brutal. The band faced a jam‑packed thirty‑two‑day schedule, two shows daily, followed by onerous travel in road manager Ian “Stu” Stewart’s van on a circuit that hopscotched all over the UK. Shitty roads, shitty hotel rooms, shitty food, shitty promoters who begrudged them shitty dressing rooms and shittier sound systems. All for a shitty forty pounds a day.
Their “shitty little suits” were the first things to go. The band felt embarrassed wearing those lame outfits. They looked like choirboys in them—worse, like Herman’s Hermits. Slowly but surely, the suits ceased to exist—they were either sabotaged with food stains or got “accident-ally” left behind. By the third night of the tour, the Stones’ new look was their street clothes.
“That look really changed things,” said Terry O’Neill, whose stark, black‑and‑white photographs of the band broke new ground. “Some people in the industry and television were really confused by it, but the kids who were following them just felt this was how to be cool.”
Image was taking on new importance. Clothes, hairstyles, sexuality—the way one carried oneself and interacted with others—held immense sway with the young postwar generation. It was all part of the new scene in the fall of 1963.
The shows were another matter. The tour had been packaged by tough‑guy Don Arden, who had overstuffed it with cheap talent, what he called “a bunch of unknowns,” in addition to the headliners. Mickie Most opened the show each night. Most, who would later become a prolific producer of Top 40 hits, sang Pat Boone–style covers of rock ’n roll hits (not very well). He was followed by the Flintstones, a London pop group created by Arden protégé Peter Grant, who’d later achieve notoriety as manager of Led Zeppelin. Julie Grant, a client of Eric Easton’s min-ing the Top 40 for pop covers, followed the Flintstones.
Few appreciated the performance more than Mick Jagger, who watched from the wings as Little Richard lit up the crowd.
Enter the Rolling Stones. Pow! They exploded—the first half of their show was a super‑charged set. This is what the kids had come to see, a band that looked like them, playing music that was harder and edgier than anything else they’d heard that night. It’s hard now to imagine the physical sensation it produced in the audience. Keith described it as “a sort of hysterical wail, a weird sound that chicks make when they’re coming.”
After the first few dates, promoters were rethinking the billing.
The Everly Brothers simply weren’t cutting it. They were great singers who’d made great records, but their day as headliners had passed. They had to follow the Rattles, a German Beatles rip‑off, and the human tornado Bo Diddley. By the time Don and Phil Everly took their turn, the audience was spent.
Bad word of mouth was hurting advance ticket sales. Don Arden sought to rescue the tour by enlisting Little Richard to rile things up. No performer could bring a crowd back to life like Richard could. His show was a relentless barrage of explosive hits—“Tutti Frutti,” “Long Tall Sally,” “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” “Lucille,” “Keep A‑Knockin’.” He would pound away at the piano with both hands and a foot while flinging off his clothes, piece by piece.
Few appreciated the performance more than Mick Jagger, who watched from the wings as Little Richard lit up the crowd. Mick’s experimentation with theatrics was in its developmental stage, and he was taking notes. It was clear from Richard’s campy, homoerotic gestures that you could wander across sexual lines without freaking out your audience. Mick was more than comfortable blurring established gender roles. At Edith Grove, he often paraded around the flat in a linen house-coat with a hairnet, stockings, and high heels. Occasionally, he painted his toenails. He had no problem playing that part on stage. But Little Richard had upped the ante; with Richard, Mick saw how far he might take it. He rolled the campy behavior right into his act.
That early tour gave the Rolling Stones a real education.
“Mick’s performance,” said Phil May, “forever changed the sexual nature of rock ’n roll audiences.” He already had the girls panting like puppies, but he also stirred something similar in the boys. “I’m not just talking about homosexual boys—Mick aroused heterosexual guys as well.”
Bill Wyman understood the confusion it inspired. “I mean, if I were in the audience,” he explained, “I would have thought he was a little queer.”
Mick also studied Jerome Green, one of Bo Diddley’s sidemen. “All he did was play maracas,” Keith recalled. This was another way a singer could expand his participation. Mick wasn’t satisfied with simply being a vocalist. “He didn’t play four maracas in each hand, like Jerome could do, but a lot of [the same] moves are relevant.”
That early tour gave the Rolling Stones a real education. “In those six weeks,” Keith said, “we learnt what might have taken us a couple of years to figure out if you hadn’t worked with people like that.”
They also got a taste of what it was like to travel and live in close quarters with their mates. Personal quirks could have a greater impact. Their intrepid and autocratic driver, Ian Stewart, stubbornly refused to make pit stops on long road trips so the guys could have a pee. Bill insisted on occupying the front passenger seat of the van due to severe motion sickness. (It wasn’t until ten years later they discovered his excuse was bullshit.) And band cofounder Brian Jones was a continual challenge.
“The thing about Brian,” Mick said, “is that he was an extremely difficult person.” Brian was obsessed with being the Rolling Stones’ leader but had grown moody ever since Keith’s allegiance shifted to Mick. “He was desperate for attention,” Mick said. It was just as evident on stage, when Brian pushed himself out front, competing with Mick for the audience’s attention.
“He could be really evil on stage,” Alexis Korner recalled. “You’d see him dancing forward with a tambourine and snapping it in your face and sticking his tongue out at you.” Brian had the right look, he had charisma, but he wasn’t a natural showman. Mick was the star. He had snatched the band’s spotlight.
Brian couldn’t cope. He felt threatened, first by Mick but also with Andrew Oldham taking over the decision‑making. Brian had enjoyed being in control of the band. He’d arranged their gigs, negotiated their deals, served as their spokesman; he was their emissary with the press, making regular visits to Record Mirror and Melody Maker. “In interviews, he was the most articulate and thoughtful Rolling Stone,” Bill recalled. Suddenly, those responsibilities had been taken out of his hands, and he didn’t handle it well. Brian’s solution was to divide and conquer.
“He was quite a manipulator, angling one clique against the other,” Keith said. “We were working so hard that eventually no one had the time for it.”
But the Stones, who were breaking out in a huge way, needed his undivided attention.
A tipping point came midway through the tour. It had irked the other Stones that Brian traveled with his new girlfriend, sixteen‑year-old Linda Lawrence, and stayed at better hotels than the rest of the band. Then Stu discovered that Brian had talked Eric Easton into paying him five pounds more a week as the leader of the band. When the others found out, the shit hit the fan. They’d always split everything equally, all for one and one for all. Brian had violated that code, the very essence of fairness—and behind their backs. It caused a serious rift.
Keith had run out of patience with him. On October 3, at a gig in Southend, Keith had left a chicken dinner in the dressing room, which disappeared while he was otherwise engaged. Brian turned out to be the obvious culprit. “Where’s my bit of chicken?” Keith wondered moments before the band went on stage. “Have you eaten it, you cunt?” Without waiting for an answer, he threw a punch that found Brian’s right eye. Somehow, they managed to play their set, but as it progressed, Brian’s eye swelled to the point where he could barely see out of it.
Andrew wasn’t around to referee. Instead of managing the tour, where his subtle skills were needed, he had gone to the south of France, leaving the day‑to‑day business to Eric Easton. When Andrew returned to London, instead of rejoining the Stones, he busied himself setting up a stealth company, Andes Sound, to trade on his budding success. He spent his energy trying to develop a number of sad wannabes: a Mick Jagger clone named Doug Gibbons; Bobby Jameson, a blond Paul McCartney lookalike; and George Bean, a refugee from the Ealing Club, whose cover of “Secret Love” gave Andrew the chance to showcase the production tricks he’d cadged from Phil Spector. Andrew was determined to mimic Spector’s skills, to prove that he wasn’t a one‑trick pony. But the Stones, who were breaking out in a huge way, needed his undivided attention.
The day after the tour ended, they were on the road again, invading the Beatles’ home turf by playing the Cavern in Liverpool, where twenty-five girls fainted, then taking it to the Club a’Gogo in Newcastle‑upon-Tyne, appearing with the hot house band, the Alan Price Combo, soon to be rebranded as the Animals. Without a hit to their credit, they were one of the most talked about bands in the UK, with a pretty good following.
A new single—Lennon and McCartney’s spunky “I Wanna Be Your Man”—was helping. It didn’t matter that the critics mostly frowned. Melody Maker complained that Mick’s vocals were buried, while Disc’s reviewer grumbled that the record itself sounded “fuzzy and undisciplined, complete chaos.” Neither publication was up on the rougher-edged direction rock ’n roll was taking. Pretty pop records produced with studio musicians and a string section—the kind Johnny Tillotson and Brian Hyland were making—were meant for an altogether different audience. Rock ’n roll had moved on and so had its fans. In that respect, “I Wanna Be Your Man” caught the zeitgeist and began climbing the charts.
Over the remainder of 1963, in November and December, the Stones played fifty‑eight gigs, in a different city almost every day. Even on November 22, when news of John F. Kennedy’s assassination shut down a shell‑shocked England, the Stones rocked an unruly crowd in Greenwich’s Town Hall. They’d also appeared on Ready Steady Go!, a different kind of television show to go with a different kind of audience.
They weren’t slick and shiny, and they had attitude; in fact they didn’t seem to give a fuck. The kids at home got one look at the Stones and—fell hard.
Ready Steady Go! was a breakthrough for British TV. Unlike its staid, variety‑show predecessors, there was no paste‑up scenery, no corny costumes, and no announcers with Oxbridge accents. The cameras weren’t hidden, they intermingled with the audience to create visual intimacy. The show was broadcast live and had a free‑wheeling atmosphere established by its revved‑up theme song, the Surfaris’ “Wipe Out,” and a slo-gan, “The weekend starts here!” It set a new standard for fashion, worn by its hip young studio audience and by the rock ’n roll stars who appeared each week. For anyone who was interested in the London music scene, you didn’t miss watching Ready Steady Go! on Friday nights.
The show gave England its first glimpse of the unscripted and un-varnished Rolling Stones. They weren’t slick and shiny, and they had attitude; in fact they didn’t seem to give a fuck. The kids at home got one look at the Stones and—fell hard.
Watching the show, Andrew Oldham had an epiphany: It was the group’s image that set them apart. The music was coming along nicely. “I Wanna Be Your Man” was selling more briskly than “Come On” had; Decca seemed happy and was making noises about an EP. But the Roll-ing Stones’ image was their ticket to stardom. They weren’t heartthrobs. They weren’t pretty like Cliff Richard or the Beatles. They didn’t crack jokes. They looked rough and ready. They were . . . it had come to Andrew at once . . . the anti-Beatles. If they didn’t realize that now, they would after he got done with them.
Not that the Beatles hadn’t flirted with the bad‑boy image. When Brian Epstein first locked eyes on them, they were fresh from Hamburg and clad head‑to‑toe in black leather. Epstein realized the Beatles needed to be freshly scrubbed in order to play in the spaces controlled by the entertainment elders who booked bands and controlled the old‑school show‑business platforms. The Beatles obediently played along. They dressed for success and followed the rules.
The Stones, Andrew decided, were going to turn that on its head. He could make a virtue out of their difference from the Beatles. He’d already tried cleaning up the Stones to no avail. If they rebelled against that and wanted to look au natural, even scuffed up, then why not go all the way. Let’s antagonize the mums and dads, he thought. Let’s project the band as a sort of gang, like Brando’s in The Wild Ones. Local newspapers were already reporting the Stones’ appearance as “stupefying . . . a jumbled assortment of jeans, silk cardigans, camel jackets or sloppy sweaters.” Bad boys was the term most commonly used.
“They were all bad boys when I found them,” Andrew acknowledged. “I just brought out the worst in them.”
Oldham knew the Beatles played primarily to hordes of screaming girls. The audience behaved differently at a Stones gig. There was a bit of screaming by girls, but the boyfriends who went along wanted to listen to the band. So the boys liked what they were hearing and the girls liked what they were seeing. It was time to tie that reality to the image.
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From The Rolling Stones by Bob Spitz, to be published on April 21st, 2026 by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright (c) 2026 by Bob Spitz.
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