The Rolling Stones at corner of Rossmore Road

Leaving the fan club

By Marilyn Hill

The Rolling Stones were regular visitors to the Church Street area.

I don’t really have so many pictures now from being involved in the music business. I remember people developed their own pictures then. A friend’s father did some of mine. People would not only exchange pictures but negatives too. I remember on more than one occasion cutting negatives off the strip and sending them in the post! The same railings can be seen outside Ivor Court, Gloucester Place in the Mick pictures and along the side entrance in the Keith pictures the railings still along Rossmore Road.

Therefore, these pictures are the only ones I have as far as I know of The Rolling Stones close to Church Street. 189 Gloucester Place was where the band’s manager Andrew Loog-Oldham lived and as I was reminded by The Stones magazine, the fan-club was moved to another flat in the same building  in 1966. My friends and I helped out during holidays when the girls in the office were busy. I wonder if they arranged it so we could do this? Well I know my teachers came to gigs with us,  and family members, especially to The Beatles, that would have been mums, dads, grannies, aunties and uncles! In those days, school children tended to be chaperoned by someone older, maybe a brother, even in to their early teens. Not as we became older.  (I later worked for Andrew Loog-Oldham at his record label Immediate.) At times there were quite a few of us school children helping in the music business, hardly slave labour. A labour of love more like!  It was relatively early days in pop and record companies with classical and jazz artistes were woken up by the pandemonium that swept the nation when beat groups became the latest thing was history in the making. Starting with crooners, skiffle and rock ‘n’ roll, then beat and at times these genres all together on the same bill! Fans went absolutely potty about everyone, boys screamed and yelled at girl and boy artistes and girls screamed and yelled at boy and girl artistes. Not being able to hear the music just hearing yelling is an emotion I still hold. One of the reasons The Beatles called it a day, and one of things said was that they couldn’t hear the music they were playing.

So The Stones office moved from Regent Street, to Little Argyll Street then to Gloucester Place. The Rolling Stones Magazine, (published for 30 issues) was where The Beatles Magazine was also published at 244 Edgware Road. Then there was/ is Lord’s Cricket Ground which will have tempted Michael Jagger, and Abbey Road Recording Studios (then EMI) was a hive of activity.  This means Church Street market would have been used by both The Beatles and The Stones going to the market to buy records, food and of course antiques as they became more and more wealthy. Fabric for a student Stella? One fabric shop has the Queen’s Award (not a lot of people know that!)

Mick Jager lived with Marianne near Harley Street off Marylebone Road and before then in a mews flat off Gloucester Place with Chrissie Shrimpton, who also modelled for awhile like her sister Jean. Paul McCartney is known to have lived in St John’s Wood years before he married Linda and to this day has a family house there. Ringo and Maureen lived in the garden square off Gloucester Place towards Marble Arch which backed onto backed onto Mick and Chriissie’s.  John and Cynthia’s flat was doors along the same side of the road, with the entrance in the next street. Once John and Cynthia had split, there was a different London flat  for John and Yoko. Their first floor flat overlooked the garden square.  To think, Church Street Market was their local market!