Instant Karma!
Unseen photos of one of The Rolling Stones’ earliest studio sessions on display in London
The Rolling Stones, Miles Davis, Bonny Light Horseman, Kevin Ayers, W H Lung
WHEN The Rolling Stones entered Holborn's Kingsway Sound studios on October 7, 1963, to record what would become their first Top 20 single – the Lennon-mccartney number “I Wanna Be Your Man” – photographer Gus Coral was on hand to take what he believes to be the earliest photos of the band in a studio. Coral had been invited to
Kingsway, having first photographed the band the previous evening on tour in Cardiff.
Coral, who went on to make documentaries and work closely with Goldie, had first seen the band play in Richmond and was quickly impressed. “I responded to the blues and when I heard the Stones I could hear they responded to it, too,” he says. “They had something – they understood the spirit of the blues, and they were good musicians. We didn’t know how big they’d become. We didn’t even know how big The Beatles would become.”
Coral had a connection to the band – his cousin owned Mick, Keith and Brian’s famously squalid Edith
Grove flat – but the Cardiff shoot came about as Coral was friends with Dick Fontaine, a TV producer who had filmed The Beatles early on and was now looking for the next big thing. “I wasn’t commissioned by anybody,” says Coral. “Dick had a notion he’d persuade someone to do a programme on the Stones and wanted some photos to show them. We knew they were on tour and saw they were playing in Cardiff so we thought we could catch them there. There was no press office to get through, we just turned up.”
The 1963 tour saw the Stones play two daily 10-minute sets on a 30-date package tour alongside Bo Diddley, Little Richard and the
Everly Brothers, promoted by Don Arden and managed by Peter Grant. The Stones were thrilled to be performing alongside their heroes and Coral admits he was more interested in Bo Diddley then the Stones; a picture he took of Diddley still hangs in his hallway. That said, he admired the Stones’ attitude, having met them before the show in a café where they were discussing whether they should wear uniforms onstage. “They were photogenic,” he says. “I was more interested in photographing them then I was The Beatles for instance. They had that edgier attitude. I’ve always liked that, and music is all about attitude. It wasn’t image, it was what they were like.”