成人快手

The latest in our series where Sounds of the Sixties presenter Brian Matthew chats about his career to writer and musician Bob Stanley.

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in 1964

Mick never really took a shine to me, and would always try to send me up before we got anywhere with an interview...

Brian Matthew

Though Brian became close to the Beatles, even being invited to join them on their 1965 US tour, he "probably had to less to do with the Stones than most groups in the sixties. It's not that I didn't interview Mick, Keith and Brian, and put bits and pieces together. But Mick never really took a shine to me, and would always try to send me up before we got anywhere with an interview. I found Keith the most difficult to deal with. He's wonderful now, when he's talking about his painting and his adult life, he's a different person. He could be quite obstreperous and difficult in his younger days."

Brian saw a fair bit of the Stones' manager Andrew Loog Oldham. "I knew him before he became their manager, because he'd been connected with Brian Epstein. He brought me what was either the Beatles' first or second record and said 'what do you think of this?' He played it, and I said 'Well, it can only be number one.' Which he thought was a magnificent phrase, so he used it... I mean, I don't think it was, but nevertheless. He was frequently in touch with me after that. I've had one or two letters from him in recent years."

The Stones themselves were a different matter. "They did a number of sessions for Saturday Club, and the statutory interview fill-in bits that we had to have for the programme. But I never really got to be as intimate with them as a group as I would have liked, and as I now wish that I had, because I do think their material's just about as important as anybody's. I missed out on that one, I have to confess."

The one Stone who seemed to admire Brian was his namesake, guitarist Brian Jones, though he never found out until it was too late. "It was strange, that. After he died I had a letter from his family saying how much he'd admired me. Which always takes me aback a bit, because I wasn't aware of that kind of feeling on anybody's part. But I assume they were telling the truth about Brian."

Presumably it would have gone against the group's bad boy image for any of them to even admit they listened to Saturday Club. "I realise all that now, but when it's happening to you, as a relatively young person, you're not so... at least I wasn't so aware of it! I thought 'what's this all about?' I didn't get it. Because most of the other groups were only too delighted to be on the programmes I was doing, and always willing to chat about this, that and everything. But never the Stones. They got this image in their own heads, and they projected it, come what may."