'I know this won't last. I give the Stones another two years. I'm saving for the future'
 Mick Jagger, 1964

The extent to which they courted trouble, knowingly or not, may be measured in one detail: hair. Today's pony-tailed navvy would find it astonishing that, early in 1964, 'Well, he had long hair, hadn't he?' had been the plea of a man at Aldershot Magistrates Court, accused of assaulting a complete stranger - and that eleven boys were suspended from a Coventry secondary school for having 'Mick Jagger' haircuts - i.e. just about touching the collar and with ears still visible - and a general open-necked scruffiness that they imagined was shared with the Stones. A few months earlier, there'd been a slew of viewers' complaints about the group's appearance - neat by comparison - after they'd first flashed into living rooms on ITV's /Lucky Stars Summer Spin/.

The Rolling Stones weren't, however, created solely to upset.  Visually, they seemed to be taking a next reasonable and logical step after the moptopped Beatles - as the more hirsute Pretty Things would after the Stones. Musically too, they were not so much innovative as the exploiters of already existing possibilities. Nonetheless, the flavour of deliberate rebellion cannot be easily dismissed - nor can Average Joe's historical fear of what he finds difficult to comprehend.  The accelerating if unwilling absorption of head-scratchingly artistic outrage since as far back as the so-called 'Gay 'Nineties'.  Since then, the associated bohemianism and /l'art pour l'art/ asceticism propagated by the likes of Gautier, Flaubert and the persecuted Oscar Wilde had combined with the rapid increase in the minority embracing it as far as they were able.

Call it an 'underground' if you like, but this expression, however, was becoming a misnomer as, by the 1960s, it was being pushed into your face and ears via television, radio and the cinema. On emerging from the security of London's more specialist clubs - and with many /aficionados/ refuting vainly any suggestions that they were becoming a pop group - The Rolling Stones weren't to mask the fundamental nonconformity that lurked beneath brief concessions to how a TV producer in those naive times expected pop entertainers to look.  There was none of that self-aware amusement that Tony Hancock had displayed in 1960 movie /The Rebel/ when, for instance, he explains to a crowd of squatting Parisian beatniks, all dressed in the same black garb, that one of the reasons he had to leave London was because he couldn't stand the sartorial uniformity in the accountancy office where he'd worked. As he leaves them, one beatnik comments to another, 'It must have been very soul-destroying for him. Imagine: everyone looking the same.' 'Art' - if that's what you called it - wasn't somehow a proper trade to the ordinary working man, whether ledger clerk or navvy, laughing at Hancock's antics in /The Rebel/. If you shone at painting or music at school, it was often treated as a regrettable eccentricity - and, if you wanted to be a pop musician, trying to con money out of government aid to do so, or applying to take a degree course in pop, belonged to an unthinkable future.

California State University's inauguration of a degree course in 'rock studies' was to be a sign that academia was ceasing to sweep pop under the carpet - and it was soon to begin its infiltration of school curricula. It was remarkable that, unlike film, jazz and other disciplines pertaining to that Coca-Cola century, it had taken until then for higher education to take seriously music that has been recorded for the masses since before the death of Queen Victoria.  That's as maybe, but in the mid-1960s, fathers would switch off /Top Of The Pops/ automatically if the Stones or anyone like them were on, and, as late as 1970, when I was nineteen, my own mother swore she'd die of shame if ever I walked on stage with a pop group. Her tone wasn't humorous, far from it. Not long after that, an inner devil spoke to her when, to take the edge off her relentless and unforgiving moaning about my hair - which wasn't even as long as Jagger's had been in 1964 - I trusted her to trim an inappreciable few millimetres. Probably the fault's all mine for not getting over it, but that hateful morning and its prelude and aftermath will be with me to the grave. Even in my mid-fifties, I experience slight but definite trauma, and my hand wanders involuntarily to the nape of my neck, usually at twenty to eleven - the approximate time she seized the entire overhanging hank at the back of my thick blond hair in her fist, and hacked it off almost to the crown. My tone wasn't humorous either, far from it.

Such a incident - which she said 'did you some good' - epitomised indirectly how the reaction of an older public to the coming of The Rolling Stones and the long-haired creators of depraved cacophony that flowered (or not) in their wake had become enduringly pathological as it engendered a belief that extreme strategy was a citizen's right, even some sort of moral duty as a defence against  ...what? Communism? Anarchy? The end of western civilisation? Reading at the dining table? The Beatles being more popular than Jesus? Going to the cinema on the Sabbath? Having fun? For those disenfranchised by the Swinging Sixties, did an element of suppressed envy translate into the bitterest priggishess? In Britain, nowhere was this emotion, whatever it was, more fiercely overt than in the provinces. While the pastime of shocking the 'establishment' took on at times a playful aspect in London and the bigger cities with accepted traditions of counter-culture, it was carried on with an uncompromising seriousness in towns like Cheltenham or Dartford where middle-class grammar school boys like Brian Jones and Mick Jagger had gazed glumly through lace curtains and wondered if this was all there was.

Before the Sixties began Swinging elsewhere too, local newspapers reported on whist drives, the Opera Society's production of /HMS Pinafore/ and Jack 'PC Dixon' Warner opening a new High Street department store; there was fuss about the gypsies camped on the disused aerodrome and the Borstal runaway hiding somewhere in the everglades, and gossip sufficed for harder news that came via /Melody Maker, /the /New Musical Express/ and /Record Mirror/ for youths who, on a flaming August afternoon, would be shuttered up inside the coffee bar, making a cup of frothy coffee last for hours, while once upon a greensward buried beneath that very building, archers rehearsed for Agincourt. Though Bill Wyman became a National Serviceman, for Brian, Mick, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and most of the Stones who were to fall by the wayside before the group Hit The Big Time, there seemed to be nothing as horribly exciting as the prospect of slaughtering foreigners on the horizon, no apparent avenue of deliverance from mortgage-paying but humdrum jobs with a gold watch on retirement to tick away the seconds before the silence of eternity. 

Yet, for all the suffocating mundanity they contained, these decades are at least as intriguing as any of the more exalted and chronicled eras that followed the period from the Stones' scattered wartime childhoods to 1964 when a world beyond Britain opened up and swallowed them like an anemone. We would, however, like the impossible: DVDs, for example, of domestic scenes within the dingy Chelsea flat where most of the Stones dwelt in the months prior to the national breakthrough with a 1963 chart entry, or sampling with their own sensory organs keyboard player Ian Stewart's feelings about being reduced from onstage Stone to glorified road manager.

Origin Of The Species explores, nevertheless, previously uncharted territories in the light of both refinement and alteration of previously-held perspectives and new information gleaned from recorded conversations with such as Rick Huxley, Jagger's cousin by marriage, and bass guitarist with The Dave Clark Five; John Keen, musician friend of the teenage Brian Jones; Mike Cooper, who was approached to join the Stones in 1962; Brian Poole, Ricky West and Dave Munden of The Tremeloes, who Decca wished the Stones to regard as role models; Don Craine and Keith Evans from The Downliners Sect; Yardbirds Jim McCarty, Chris Dreja and Paul Samwell-Smith; Phil May of The Pretty Things, and, in particular, Dick Taylor of The Pretty Things too, but also a founder member of the Stones, and, in 2005, central figure in an edition of a BBC 1 series, /My Best Friend Is.../, in which he discussed Dartford Grammar classmate Mick Jagger against a backdrop of old haunts. 

The book draws too on taped reminiscences, insight and argument from Alan Dow (former school acquaintance of Jagger and Taylor), Mick Avory (of The Kinks, but once among the Stones' first drummers), Pat Andrews (Brian Jones's first 'serious' girlfriend), Richard Hattrell (Jones's best friend), Trevor Hobley (president of the Brian Jones Fan Club - and the late Art Wood, confrere of the early Stones and brother of latter-day member Ronnie. Art was also a mainstay of the Eel Pie R&B Club, founded at the turn of the millennium 'to preserve and continue the heritage of Richmond Rhythm & Blues in the area where it all began in the 1960s'.  Convened in a pub functions room in Twickenham, it was a celebratory occasion that, if not musically ambitious, had a friendly, down-home atmosphere. Yet no-one could pretend that this is what it must have been like when the Stones, The Pretty Things, The Yardbirds, The Downliners Sect and The Artwoods were at large in the Craw Daddy, the Marquee and, once a stone's throw away, Eel Pie Island dance hall - and earlier at the 'Moist Hoist' in Ealing where Art, Mick Jagger, Charlie Watts, Dick Heckstall-Smith and others who loomed large in the legend performed with Blues Incorporated, formed by Alexis Korner and
Cyril Davies as the kingdom's first major all-blues ensemble.