Not Fade Away

35 years ago, legendary Rolling Stones' manager Andrew Loog Oldham presided over what is arguably the first rockumentary. Rebecca Kemp talks to him about this rarely-seen cult film of the Stones' Irish tour.

'We make our own luck,' says Andrew Loog Oldham of his unprecedented rise to fame as maverick Rolling Stones manager. He did just that in the summer of '63 when he took a train out of London to see a band playing at Richmond's Station Hotel. Side-stepping a young dude whose lips looked at him as if to say: 'What are you doing with the rest of my life?', Andrew Loog Oldham breezed by his first encounter with a Rolling Stone. Soon he would help the Stones make the Beatles look like choir boys, and establish himself as one of the most influential men in rock music. He would also be responsible for using the Stones' 1965 tour of Ireland to produce arguably the first rockumentary.

Variously described as vain, invincible, outrageous, unconventional, revolutionary, camp and inexperienced; as the English Phil Spector, a gangster, a genius, a hustler, a Svengali and as God, Andrew Loog Oldham was born in London in 1944. He gets his name from his father, Andrew Loog, who served in the US Air Corp, and was killed when his plane was shot down seven months before his son was born. Mother Celia Oldham put her son through various prestigious English boarding schools before the young Loog Oldham let himself loose on an unsuspecting swinging London. He worked for Mary Quant, did PR for the Beatles, set up his own record company, discovered Marianne Faithful, and established the Rolling Stones as one of the greatest rock bands in the world – all before his 20th birthday.

What Andrew Loog Oldham (who nowadays goes by the acronym ALO) is probably most remembered for the way he revolutionised the music industry. He took the nice middle-class boys that were the Stones, roughed them up a bit and made them into the kind of dirty menace parents didn't want their daughters to bring home. ALO had a reputation for an alternative management style; he was into the image and look of the band, an independent promoter who hustled to achieve results and gave British pop its first rough, sexually desirable icons. In what was then an industry chiefly run by the middle-aged, ALO was the same age as the pop stars he worked with and the people buying their records. He refused to play by the existing rules and made up a few of his own. His critics called him arrogant and naïve, but ALO was the master of publicity and knew how to play the press. At one point he put word out that the Stones were going to star in Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, though there was no truth to this it helped generate the kind of reputation that he was after: anarchic, threatening and strangely beautiful.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 102