The Independent from London, Greater London, England • 43

WEEKEND THE INDEPENDENT Saturday 23 June 1990 THE TRAVELLER 43 Street fighting men from the suburbs With the now middle-aged Rolling Stones due to play at Wembley stadium for five days from 4 July, Andy Bull traces their London connections back to a jazz club beneath an ABC in Ealing was touch and go whether Massimo Bonanno would make it to Bill Wyman and Mandy Smith's wedding reception. On 5 June 1989, while the oldest Stone and the youngest bride were celebrating their three-day-old wedding-in-secret with a party at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London's Park Lane, Mr Bonanno was working as a waiter at a golf club function in Surrey. Nobody missed him at the reception, because he was not invited. When he finally got to the hotel the place was besieged. The latest chapter in the avidly followed romance of Wyman (then aged 52, and known in the tabloids as a Wrinkled Rocker) and Mandy (19 and a Wild Child) had drawn reporters and fans in equal numbers, with dozens of police trying to control the scrum.

Clearly, it was going to be tough for anyone uninvited to get in. But Mr Bonanno was wearing a waiter's black trousers and white shirt. In his pocket was a bow tie. He put on the tie, slipped round to the back of the hotel, entered through the kitchen, picked up a tray and walked to the lift. When the lift reached the basement, where the party was being held, he was grabbed by two security men.

"Hey, what do you mean," he protested, "I'm a waiter." They let him in and he took off the bow tie, hid the tray, and spent the rest of the afternoon chatting to Mick Jagger and his brother Chris, who he discovered speaks excellent Italian. Mr Bonanno has been following the Stones often quite literally for 20 years. If Mick Jagger has been somewhere, Mr Bonanno has been standing outside. Eventually it occurred to him to convert this hobby obsession, perhaps into a moneyearning project. He has just published an exhaustive scrapbook called The Rolling Stones cle.

But 20 years is not long in the history of the and he was not around in when Mick Jagger and Richards travelled in a Riley Pathfinder from their town of Dartford to check club in Ealing, west where the cult music of and blues was performed. Ealing Jazz Club, a room neath the ABC Cafe opposite ling Broadway station, was first club in England at rhythm and blues was played. was a curiously suburban for such a metropolitan and tling new music. Upstairs all Camp coffee and rock downstairs, Alexis Korner's Incorporated and musicians cluding the singers Paul Jones Long John Baldry and Rolling Stones Brian Jones slide guitar, Ian Stewart on and Charlie Watts on drums. It was a revelation for two agers who had thought else in England liked this can urban black man's They came back every and it was here that Mick first sang in public and the Rolling Stones began to shape.

Today, the historic importance of the place goes unrecorded. upstairs is now a branch the Baker and Oven. To one grimy alley runs down a flight steps and gives access to the of the building, which boarded-up doors and ripped geon-wire. The building spans main railway line from ton to the West Country, must have provided an counterpoint to the music. Strange though it may The Rolling Stones are a ROCK HOLIDAYS of the suburbs.

One can chart their early development in a narrow band of west London. In addition to Ealing, there is Richmond, where they attracted real attention and were discovered by Andrew Loog Oldham, their Svengali of a manager, and Olympic Studios, Barnes, where much of their music has been recorded. Not so much "Street Fighting more "Semi-detached Suburban Mr Richmond meant the Crawdaddy Club, at the back of a pub then called the Station Hotel, now renamed the Bull and Bush. In 1963 the group, having completed its line with Bill Wyman on bass guitar, won a real following. It was all rather strange to the pop-music establishment.

The Record Mirror muttered darkly 000 3 Keith Richards's old house in Cheyne Walk: no plaque yet about 500 "hip kids" jammed into a tiny room and throwing themselves about to the new "jungle One of those in the crush was Glyn Johns, a young recording engineer at IBC Studios in Portland Place, London W1. Today he is recognised as one of the most successful pop producers. "I just thought they were fantastic," he says of his first sight of the group. "What attracted me to was the way they played rhythm and blues. I had never heard a white man sing like Jagger, let alone an Englishman.

I was knocked out. There was something different about them and about working with them. There was the music, of course, but it was also them, they didn't look like the pop stars we were brought up on. They were not terribly good looking, in fact they were pretty ugly. And their attitude: for the time they were just incredibly rebellious, and very strange.

"I had an arrangement that if I found groups that I thought were promising I could record them at IBC on the understanding that the masters were the property of the studio. The Stones came one evening and recorded four tracks, one of which was Chuck Berry's 'Come On'. I thought they were fantastic but IBC couldn't see it. Only two or three weeks later Andrew Loog Oldham became The Stones' manager and the studio sold the tapes to him. They re-did one, 'Come On', and it became a hit single.

It was no loss to me at all but it was taken out of my hands." Today, the Bull and Bush, at 1 Kew Road opposite, Richmond station, offers "Traditional Ales, Splendid Food" and has a sign on the door barring anyone under 21: which would have excluded the Stones (all except Bill Wyman) and prevented Andrew Loog Oldham, aged 19, spotting their potential and shaping them for success. Part of that shaping was to demote Ian Stewart to backroom boy, on the grounds that he looked too normal. The alley at the side which once gave on to the Crawdaddy Club, and in which Oldham first saw Mick Jagger, fighting with his 17-yearold girlfriend Chrissie Shrimpton, younger sister of the model Jean, now gives merely on to a back street. The back of the pub has become Boswell's Wine Bar and the former club is used for storage. Unlike the places at Ealing and Richmond, Olympic Studios in Barnes has endured as somewhere that plays a continuing part in The Rolling Stones' story.

Last year the Stones mixed their latest album, Steel Wheels, there. Massimo Bonanno was outside for most of the two weeks the work took and Keith Richards kept him abreast of progress on his way in and out. If there were just one memorial to The Rolling Stones this should probably be it, although Olympic was bought by Virgin Records in 1986 and the building gutted, only the shell remaining. Among the seminal tracks recorded here are "Let's Spend the Night "Ruby "We Love You" "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and parts of the Sticky Fingers album, which includes "Brown According to Massimo Bonanno, on the night in 1969 that Brian Jones drowned in the swimming pool of his country house the The Rolling Stones in their rebellious days, on Primrose Hill, photographed by Gered Mankowitz for the album cover of Between the Buttons, which came out in 1967 Chroni- particularly Stones, 1962 Keith friend's home out a London, rhythm beEa- the which It setting starit was cakes; Blues inand future on piano teennobody Amerimusic. Saturday, Jagger future take The of side a of back is all pithe Paddingwhich interesting seem, product BRIAN HARRIS Former Stones recording engineer Glyn Johns: 'They were fantastic pretty ugly very strange' Holiday safeguards that can trip you up SINCE the Court Line and Clarksons holiday companies collapsed in 1974 leaving thousands stranded abroad and thou- sands more without a holiday much has been done to improve protection for travellers.

People buying package trips including charter flights are protected by the government-operated Air Tour Organiser Licences managed by the Civil Aviation Authority. Separate bonding schemes are operated through the Passenger Shipping Association for ferry-inclusive holidays and the Bus and Coach Council for coach-inclusive holidays. Members of the Association of Independent Tour Operators, which includes leading specialists such as VFB Holidays, are also required to be bonded. The best-known bonding scheme is run by the Association of British Travel Agents, which covers both travel-agent and touroperator members. Abta's frequent reminders about the bene- group, from which he had recently been sacked, was in Olympic Studios recording "I Don't Know Glyn Johns was the recording engineer on many of the Stones' records up until the 1974 album Black and Blue, and has spent a good deal more time inside Olympic than Massimo Bonanno has spent outside it.

"A lot of it, looking back, was boredom, the group keeping us waiting for hours, or even days. I resented the fact that they would not let me produce them and the way they saw me as just the knobtwiddler because really I was making a contribution to the records and, as time went on, producing a lot of other people. Not that I am bitter or anything, it was fantastic we are here AOLS der the terms of the bond. He was told that the insurance company would carry forward the premiums to another holiday in 1990, but, he says: "This course of action was not open to me since I had already booked a replacement In what is likely to be a very tough year for the travel industry, the advice must be the old caveat emptor: let the buyer beware. to be a part of it.

I remember the first time I heard 'Satisfaction', that was quite a moment. I didn't engineer it, it was recorded in America, but I remixed it." Today 1 the Olympic building, once a public hall, looks quietly incongruous opposite a parade of shops with signs offering groceries and provisions and Lyons Tea. It is in Church Street, just off Barnes Common. At lunchtime, at least, no sound emanates. The other location essential to The Rolling Stones' London is Chelsea, with which they had close connections throughout the golden days of the Sixties and Seventies.

From 1962, Mick, Keith and Brian shared a flat at 102 Edith Grove. One night after a concert at the Crawdaddy, The Beatles came back here with them. Once famous, they renewed the Chelsea connection. Mick and Keith bought houses just round the corner in Cheyne Walk at No 48 and No 3 respectively. Brian had a flat in Royal Avenue House, a Kings Road mansion block.

In Edith Grove they shared two rooms half-way up a house that is still grubby today, covered in grime from the traffic that thunders through from Fulham Road and Kings Road to the Embankment. Each Monday and Wednesday the Stones rehearsed in an upstairs room at the Wetherby Arms, just round the corner at 500 Kings Road. Today it has been yuppified and is called Muswell's Bar. As the group began to take off, Mick Jagger was still a student at the London School of Economics. An LSE spokesman said: "Mick Jagger completed the 1961-62 academic year, his first, and registered for the second year which New guide WE HAVE begun work on the new edition of the The Independent Guide to Real Holidays Abroad 1991 which is due to be published at the end of November.

The new guide should be bigger and better than ever for the first time listing information on tour operators' attitude towards "green" matters. There will also be extended chapters on travel to Eastern Europe as well as detailed listings on nel ferries. If you have used a small independent holiday operator for a foreign holiday which you would like to recommend, please let us know. We are also pleased to hear from tour operators and other travel-related companies: bookshops and so on who wish to nominate themselves. Please write, as soon as possible, to Frank Barrett, Travel Correspondent, The Independent, 40 City Road, London EC1Y 2DB.

Frank Barrett would indicate that he completed the first-year examinations satisfactorily but he did not resume his studies." Brian worked at Whiteleys department store, in Queensway, was sacked for pilfering. Keith fed them with food parcels sent by his mother. They spent most of the time in bed, listening to records. Mick bought his Cheyne Walk house for £40,000 in 1967. In a contemporary magazine profile it is described as elegant, filled with antiques and shut in at midday with heavy drapes.

Mick and Marianne Faithful, his girlfriend at the time, had "the air of children left in charge while grown-ups are Keith joined Mick in those elegant surroundings to work on songs including "Street Fighting Later, No 48 was home to Mick, his wife Bianca, whom he married in 1971, and their daughter Jade. Massimo Bonanno was fond of hanging around outside. He discovered that by sitting on a bench on the narrow strip of Chelsea Embankment Gardens he could see the front door of No 48. "One day," he recalls, limo pulled up and Bianca and Jade came out of the house and got in. Mick stood in the doorway.

His hair was wet and he was wearing a Japanese kimono. He looked annoyed when he saw me, and soon after he went indoors a heavy came out and asked me if I was the Press. When I assured him that I wasn't he apologised and said they had been suffering a lot of harassment. A couple of days later I saw Mick cycling in the Kings Road and he stopped and talked. I asked him what he was doing and he said getting fit for a tour." After Mick's and Bianca's divorce in 1978, the Cheyne Walk connection was ended.

Today Mick's London home, Mr Bonanno has discovered, is in Upper Phillimore Gardens. He is likely to be based there for the Wembley concerts. Keith's six-storey house at the other end of Cheyne Walk, on the corner with Flood Street where Margaret Thatcher used to live, was abandoned at about the same time as Mick's. Today it is being renovated, the front garden littered with builders' rubble. In Keith's time it was a somewhat bizarre place.

Supposedly haunted, it contained a purple room, a shrine to Jimi Hendrix, and the second-floor drawingroom was a tripping room. With the addition of two giant candlesticks the fireplace had been turned into an altar. From the ceiling hung a mirror-glass ball from which light was reflected in psychedelic patterns. Keith and his girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg, pursued an interest in the occult through their friendship with Kenneth Anger, the filmmaker and author of Hollywood Babylon. Mr Bonanno tells this story: "Keith and Anita were thinking of marrying, and Anger suggested he arrange a blackmagic wedding.

To do so he would have to paint the whole of the interior of their house gold. Keith said he would think about it and let him know, but when he came downstairs the next day the inside of the front door and hall were already painted Walking down Cheyne Walk I was struck by the number of blue plaques recording famous residents. There was one to a painter I had never heard of, and another to a sculptor whose name was equally foreign to me. There is also a statue of Thomas More it is inscribed helpfully) and, next door to Keith's old house, a blue plaque to George Eliot, the novelist. But nowhere connected with the Stones was there anything to record the fact.

Do not those sublimely posturing suburban boys deserve a spot of recognition in their middle age? Additional research by Lyn Russell. 'The Rolling Stones Chronicle' by Massimo Bonanno (Plexus 'The Stones' by Phillip Norman (Elm Tree Books fits of buying a holiday from an Abta member have helped convince many travellers that all arrangements covered by the scheme carry a copper-bottomed money-back guarantee. Some have discovered to their cost that things are not quite like that. While Abta agencies themselves may be bonded, this does not mean that the travel they sell is always And even if the holiday you buy is covered by a bond, this does not always mean a full refund. Abta's seal of good housekeeping has taken a severe dent this year with the debacle of British Iberian.

As we reported at the beginning of May, new operator British Iberian Line planned to operate a ferry service from Poole to Bilbao without first taking the trouble to charter a ship for the job. Its brochure, promising a service from 28 April, was distributed through Abta travel agencies who began to take bookings it is believed that altogether of bookings were taken. British Iberian did not get a ship and this week the company is not answering its telephone. Anyone who has sent a any money to the company seems unlikely to get a refund. And anyone who wants to switch a booking to Brittany Ferries on the Plymouth to Santander route is likely to find that all sailings are already full.

Abta may like to ponder on whether its members should sell tickets for unbonded and unproven companies like British Iberian. But even if the company is bonded, it is not all hearts and flowers. RJ Cooper, of Milton Keynes, bought a package with Island Sun, an operator which recently collapsed with its parent firm, British Island Airways. He claimed his £100 deposit from Abta to be told that only £40 was a holiday deposit, the other £60 being a payment for insurance which is not refundable un- "OLE" (THE THINGS PEOPLE SAY WHEN THEY DISCOVER BUDGET'S CAR RENTAL RATES IN THE MED.) If you're going to the Med this year, you'll find nothing as hot as our car rental rates. (We can't print the things people say when they find that out too late.) To find out more about Holiday Drive, contact your travel agent or call Worldwide Reservations on 0800 181 181.

The lines are open from Monday to Friday 8am-6pm, Saturday 8.30am-4pm, Sunday 9am-1pm. 1.