Apathy for the Devil Read Free Page B

their spot. Suddenly the mood in the hall became more charged and disruptive. The predominantly female audience had been polite in their reception of the other acts but now they were becoming distinctly agitated. Screams started erupting in the hall followed by a succession of adolescent females leaving their seats and rampaging around the building in fierce packs.
    I was seated in the front row just as the lights went down to herald the group’s onstage arrival and was suddenly confronted by a demented young woman who angrily demanded that I
vacate my place for her. When I refused, she took off one of her shoes and positioned the stiletto heel against my neck like a shiv forcing me to acquiesce to her demand. One of the bouncers saw what was going on and pulled her off me, but by that time complete pandemonium had set in everywhere I looked. I was surrounded on all sides by young women in a collective state of extremely heightened sexual psychosis. They were touching themselves in inappropriate places and letting forth primeval howls. My eyes were popping out of my head.
    This was the first time I’d ever come face to face with ‘sex’ - never mind raging mass sexual hysteria - so you can understand that the moment had more than a lingering impact on my naive little psyche. They were scary broads too but I instinctively understood the root cause of their dementia because the Rolling Stones’ presence in the room had also sucked me into something equally life-scrambling. The Rolling Stones never smiled and physically they were the polar opposite of everyone else on the bill. No ties, no Brylcreemed hair slicked back to better define the young male forehead. The Rolling Stones didn’t have foreheads. Just hair, big lips and a collective aura of rampaging insolence.
    They slouched onto the stage and stared witheringly at the crowd before them as they donned their instruments. The house compère hastily announced them only to have his utterances drowned in screams. Then they began playing. It could have been ‘Not Fade Away’, the Buddy Holly song they’d release a week later, thus securing their first top-10 placing and their full-on ascension to the status of rebel-prince youth phenomenon.
    All I can recall in my mind now is a vibrant, irresistibly all-embracing sonic churn - ‘the very churn of sedition itself’, I’d later come to call it. It was raucous and primordial and it sent
young women into an instant state of full-on demonic possession. Something that had previously been forbidden in white culture was being let loose here: a kind of raw tribal abandoning of all inhibitions that held the key to a new consciousness still emerging. Within the space of their twenty-minute-long performance, my childhood’s end was preordained and the door to adulthood held tantalisingly ajar. I remember it now like someone reaching into my brain and turning a switch that suddenly changed my fundamental vision of life from grainy black and white into glorious Technicolor.
    They played ‘Route 66’, ‘Road Runner’ and ‘Walking the Dog’ and they were right at the top of their game. Brian Jones hadn’t yet fallen by the wayside as a musical contributor and he, Jagger and Keith Richards presented a unique three-pronged attack as live performers. Jones - the most conventionally good-looking - minced menacingly on the left whilst Keith perfected a kind of big-eared borstal strut to his far right, endlessly winding and unwinding his coiled frame around the guitar rhythms he was punching out.
    The two of them perfectly bookended Jagger, who at that point in time was one scary motherfucker to behold. No one had seen features quite like his before: the pornographic lips, the bird’s nest hair. The Stones had a disturbing ‘Village of the Damned’ quality about their combined physical presence but Jagger had the most radically alien looks of the quintet.
    And his was by far the most overtly malevolent presence in the house.