I wanna be your man
The Rolling Stones' 1st #1 hit, & the 1st performance on the very 1st edition of TOTP.
Andrew Loog Oldham, the Stones' manager, had left them in Ken Collyers' Jazz Club, Gt Newport St. one afternoon, where they were getting their numbers together for their first album. In 1963, they were still simply a blues' covers band, and they'd run out of material to cover. What to do?
Wandering down Jermyn St, not far away, there's a toot on a horn. He looks round to see the Beatles returning from the Savoy, where they'd just been hosted by the Variety Club of GB at yet another award ceremony.
Loog Oldham had previously been Brian Epstein's press officer, so was well known to the Fab Four. In the chinwag that followed, John & Paul volunteered to come down to Gt Newport St to lend a hand.
Arriving in the basement club, they sat down in a side table and set to work. Within 20 minutes, they presented the wide-eyed and taken-aback Stones with the final number for their album (& of course their 1st #1).
Andrew Loog Oldham in particular was so taken aback, that he decided there and then that the Stones had to begin writing their own material. He was sharing a flat with Mick & Keith at the time, and basically locked them into their kitchen until they'd come up with a number. Ironically, it was 'As Tears Go By'. It took them another year to come up with a number the Stones could use themselves. In yet another ironic twist, the number was "(This could be) The Last Time"!
Although no-one was to know it at the time, the encounter in Gt Newport St marked the beginning of the end of Brian Jones as the band's leader. It was Jones who'd put the band together, and who'd originally auditioned Mick'n'Keef for his band. Don't forget that 1963 was still an era where you had (big) band-leaders and and then you had the bands' vocalists. Indeed, the British 'blues revival' that spawned the famous 'British Invasion' had arisen out of the British post-war trad-jazz movement (epitomised by Ken Collyer himself). It was Lennon & McCartney who made songwriting, 'doing it yourself' (the more so if you also did the singing) the criterion of authority in a band; and as Mick'n'Keef started writing more and more of the Stone's material, Jones got pushed more and more to the side, a journey that finally ended in the swimming pool of his country home.
The final irony was that Lennon & McCartney, "refreshed" from the hospitality they'd enjoyed at their Variety Club lunch, had played a trick on the Stones. The song was already almost complete: they'd been writing it as a vehicle for Ringo (featured on their 2nd album With The Beatles). The 20 minutes they spent 'writing' the song was basically setting it down from memory!
I remember those early versions of TOTP. It was hosted by (the now-notorious) Jimmy Saville, who had come from the Manchester club scene (early TOTP was produced in Manchester, to give it a different vibe from ITV's well-established - and much trendier - London-based Ready, Steady, Go!), and at the time was renowned as the DJ who created the twin-deck DJ booth. While the crew were setting up between the live acts, Saville would be literally playing discs, waving them to camera as he introduced them, before then setting them on the turntables and dropping the needle.
p.s.You may notice at 1m20s, the recording skips for a second or so, but it comes back in almost perfectly on the beat, so it looks like I forgot a line. No. I had the cricket and the cycling on in the background, and my CPU clearly couldn't quite cope :-(