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trouble.”
    By mid-1950s standards, he was not considered good-looking. Sex appeal then was entirely dictated by film stars, of whom the male archetypes were tall, keen-jawed, and muscular, with close-cut, glossy hair—American action heroes such as John Wayne and Rock Hudson; British “officer types” such as Jack Hawkins and Richard Todd. Mike, like his father, was slightly built and skinny enough for his rib cage to protrude, though unlike Joe he showed no sign of incipient baldness. His hair, formerly a reddish color, was now mousy brown and already floppily unmanageable.
    His most noticeable feature was a mouth which, like certain breeds of bull-baiting terriers, seemed to occupy the entire lower half of his face, making a smile literally stretch from ear to ear, and Cupid’s-bow lips of unusual thickness and color that seemed to need double the usual amount of moistening by his tongue. His mother also had markedly full lips—kept in top condition by the amount she talked—but Joe was convinced that Mike’s came from the Jagger side of the family and would sometimes apologize, not altogether jokingly, for having passed them on to him.
    As the boys in his year reached puberty (yes, in 1950s Britain it really was this late) and all at once became agonizingly conscious of their clothes, grooming, and appeal to the opposite sex, small, scrawny, loose-mouthed Mike Jagger seemed to have rather little going for him. Yet in encounters with the forbidden girls’ grammar school, he somehow always provoked the most smiles, blushes, giggles, and whispered discussions behind his back. “Almost from the time I met Mike, he always had girls flocking around him,” Alan Etherington remembers. “A lot of our friends seemed to be much better looking, but they never had anything like the success that he did. Wherever he was, whatever he was doing, he knew he never needed to be alone.”
    At the same time, his maturing looks, especially the lips, could arouse strange antagonism in males; teasing and taunting from classmates, sometimes even physical bullying by older boys. Not for being effeminate—his prowess on the sports field automatically discounted that—but for something far more damning. This was a time when unreformed nineteenth-century racism, the so-called color bar, held sway in even Britain’s most civilized and liberal circles. To grammar school boys, as to their parents, thick lips suggested just one thing and there was just one term for it, repugnant now but back then quite normal.
    Decades later, in a rare moment of self-revelation, he would admit that during his time at Dartford Grammar “the N-word,” for “nigger,” was thrown at him more than once. The time was still far off when he would find the comparison flattering.
    THOUSANDS OF BRITISH men who grew up in the 1950s—and almost all who went on to dominate popular culture in the 1960s—recall the arrival of rock ’n’ roll music from America as a life-changing moment. But such was not Mike Jagger’s experience. In rigidly class-bound postwar Britain, rock ’n’ roll’s impact was initially confined to young people of the lower social orders, the so-called Teddy Boys and Teddy Girls. During its earliest phase, it made little impression on the bourgeoisie or the aristocracy, both of whose younger generations viewed it with almost as much distaste as did their parents. Likewise, in the hierarchical education system, it found its first enraptured audience in secondary moderns and technical schools. At institutions like Dartford Grammar it was, rather, a subject for high-flown sixth-form debates: “Is rock ’n’ roll a symptom of declining morals in the twentieth century?”
    Like Spanish influenza forty years previously, it struck in two stages, the second infinitely more virulent than the first. In 1955, a song called “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and the Comets topped the sleepy British pop music charts and caused outbreaks of