'Stoned'

Andrew Loog Oldham
The Boy Who Put the Roll in Stones

By Amanda Hallay

Rolling Stones aficionados will be well acquainted with the name Andrew Loog Oldham.  The band’s first manager, Oldham transformed the jazzy, R&B misfits he found playing in a smoky back room in Richmond into the ‘bad boys’ of British pop, The Beatles’ only rivals.  I am not a Rolling Stones aficionado, and had always assumed that Andrew Loog Oldham was some experienced, older man of the Lew Grade echelon, riding the Fab Four bandwagon via The Stones and ‘cashing in’ on the pop phenomenon as the passing fad many believed it to be.

How wrong I was.  When Andrew met The Stones, he was younger than any of the band’s members; he was 19.  (Mick Jagger was the ‘older man’ of 21.) And far from seeing pop music as a passing fad, Andrew Loog Oldham was perhaps the first (certainly the first Englishman) to recognise its potential – not as an ephemeral craze – but as and art form unto itself.

In his autobiography, Stoned, Andrew Loog Oldham tells the story of the birth of The Rolling Stones.  It is a small part of his story, just one of the many stunts the marvellous Oldham embraced in the decade when everything was possible.  Stoned is not the story of The Rolling Stones, nor is it the story of a young, illegitimate boy growing up in the bombsites of post-war London and ‘making it big’ with nothing but bravado and a pair of dark glasses.  It is the story of a country – of a culture – and that culture is not the ‘Swinging Sixties’ of Dr No, Barbarella and Austin Powers.  Oldham’s world was one of sketchy, Soho boozers, ‘artsy’ Hampstead cinemas, and – most importantly – the matchbox offices of Denmark Street, London’s ‘tin pan alley’, where the sixteen year old entrepreneur would spend his days hustling for a ‘break’ in the burgeoning world of rock n’ roll.

Presented in ‘soundbite’ format (both from Oldham and his friends, collaborators and detractors), Stoned tells the story of Britain’s first forays into rock n’ roll, those first, imitative steps leading to the world-famous British Invasion which saw Britannia ruling the musical waves, and England discovering its own ‘pop culture’.  Andrew Loog Oldham lived that progression; from a record plugger for Les Parnes and his famous ‘stable of stars’ (Marty Wilde, Billy Fury and Adam Faith), to his job with Mary Quant and Alexander Plunkett Greene at their newly opened Bazaar, the teenage Oldham was determined to place himself at the vanguard of what was starting to be called the ‘Youthquake’.  A remarkable boy, the teenage Andrew had the winning combination of boundless self-confidence and hopeless naivete, a formula which ‘adults’ found irresistible.  Doors opened for Oldham simply because he was so sure that they would.

With his omnipresent sunglasses (he didn’t like his eyes), Lord John wardrobe and ‘grown up’ swagger, Oldham soon found himself at the epicentre of the ‘scene’, his personal friends the likes of Chris and Terence Stamp, Jean Shrimpton, Vidal Sasoon, and – surprisingly – Pablo Picasso, whom he accosted on the Côte d’Azur.  A Marxist of Celebrity, Andrew Loog Oldham believed that all stars were equal and that nobody was ‘above’ him. Yet unlike many boastful boys who want to make it big, the teenage Oldham never asked for a ‘leg up’ or a ‘word in the ear’; instead, he convinced the rich and famous that they would be lost without him, that he had what they needed.

In short, that he was invaluable.  And in reality, he was.

Brian Epstein certainly thought so when he hired the eighteen year old Oldham to help manage The Beatles, and although happy to boss the biggest band in the land, Andrew wanted his own group to play with.  He found it in the form of the scruffy – yet compelling – ‘arsty’ band playing in the backroom of a pub in Richmond, Surrey.  The Rollin’ Stones gained both a ‘g’ and a manager, and the rest – quite literally – is history. 

I initially approached Stoned with a great deal of trepidation; I feared that the book would be nothing but tired anecdotes of wild parties, dull tales of drug taking, hot ‘birds’ and ‘what-Mick-Jagger’s-Really-Like’.  Instead, I found myself glued to the ever turning pages, the personable, self-deprecating tone of Oldham’s writing bringing the world of pre-Beatles London evocatively to life, that magical moment when post-war drab turned into swinging ‘fab’ as exciting in Stoned as it surely was in ‘real life’.

Much has been made of his split with The Stones, yet it is important to remember that the band were just one string on Oldham’s ever tuneful bow.  Forming his own record label, ‘Immediate’, Andrew was as interested in Marianne Faithful, Twice as Much and the U.S ‘imports’ he handled as he was in Mick and Keith.  If one is hoping for a ‘kiss and tell’ slag-off of the stars of Sixties England, Stoned is not the place to find it.  A gentleman to the last, Oldham definitely subscribes to the ‘If-You-Can’t-Say-Anything-Nice-About-Someone-Don’t-Say-Anything-At-All’ ethos; there is no ‘Foe’ section in Stoned.  There doesn’t need to be.  Oldham’s own life was so endlessly interesting that he has no need to reveal the shady aspects of the lives of others;  Stoned is simply too intelligent a work.

Now living in South America, Andrew Loog Oldham’s life took some dark turns in the Seventies and beyond. Stoned opens with a drug-induced Oldham waking up in a New York hotel room and deciding it is time to once again grab life by the horns; Stoned was the first step towards a happier Oldham.  Concluding in the early ‘70s, one can’t help hoping that there is a Stoned II* in the making.  Even if Oldham’s post-Stones life was less ‘glittering’ than his days in ‘Swinging London’, the man himself writes with such compelling fluidity that a chapter on how he woke up, took the bins out and then went to Safeways would keep one riveted.  In short, Andrew Loog Oldham may have been the ‘coolest’ of the cool, but he is so incredibly likeable that it is impossible to come away from Stoned without the impression that you’ve made a new friend.

Would Andrew Loog Oldham fare as well today as he did in the Sixties?  Probably not. The counter-culture scene the sixteen year old Andrew first encountered was not an ‘industry’. There were no pop moguls. There were no multi-corporates.  There was no product franchising. Pop was seen as a passing phase, a ‘fad’, a ‘craze’ – certainly nothing to plough money into, certainly nothing upon which to build a career.  Andrew Loog Oldham thought differently.  He recognised it for what it was destined to become; he helped turn this ‘passing fad’ into the forty-year ‘industry’ it is today.  Without the insight and commitment of people like Oldham, there would be no Virgin, there would be no Madonna.

 The irony is that – although he was the ‘first’ to do it – he was also the last.  Pop got too ‘big’.  As Giles Smith put it in his own autobiography (of someone who didn’t make it big in music); “One of pop’s best ideas was that it didn’t have too many ideas.” 

Stoned makes it clear who we have to thank for most of them.

• * Our wish came true: www.loog2stoned.com/

• Also: 2stoned - Information and extracts

• And: Random House - Book details for 2Stoned

• Official Andrew Loog Oldham Website: www.andrewloogoldham.com/

• A Memoir of London in the 1960s: Channeled by Modem

• See also the KIU Exclusive Interview with Andrew Loog Oldham